Stolen Daughters (Detective Amanda Steele)

There was a person in the front window looking out, but they were far enough back that a glare across the glass obscured them. He couldn’t make out if they were male or female, but he had a bad feeling they’d seen something.

He clenched his hands into fists at his sides. Had these do-gooders not learned anything from what had happened to Fox?

The detectives were crossing the street now, right toward him. His heart hammered. Maybe they hadn’t been pointing to the house, but rather at him. But he couldn’t let his paranoia trap him. He had to wait it out, if not just a little longer, to see where they were truly headed.

They stepped up the curb, Detective Steele’s eyes skimming the crowd, though not in an obvious way. She seemed to look right over him—or through him—and kept going.

He took a deeper breath and caught a whiff of her perfume—floral and subtle—even over the pungent odors caused from the fire. But he couldn’t let the detective’s pleasant aroma influence him. He had to remain objective. She’d worked the other cases, and now she was back, obviously following some sort of lead.

Again, he looked at the house behind him. The figure in the window was gone, but the front door was cracking open, and the detectives were going inside.

His entire body thrummed with a vibrating energy, and his breathing became ragged. His nostrils flared as he drew in more oxygen, but a lungful of smoky air had him coughing. He started down the sidewalk toward the van, hands in pockets to hide the fact they were formed into fists. He tried to talk himself into staying calm, but it wasn’t working. With each step, he fantasized about killing the detective and how wonderful it would feel. Maybe he should take her out. But killing a cop… Was he ready to go there, and wouldn’t that be far too risky? After all, he still had work to do, and he didn’t want anything standing in his way. They’d just intensify their efforts to find and stop him.

He may just have to figure something else out to send a message to the detective. He wanted it to sting and be incredibly personal. He also wanted it to be ingenious, something she’d never see coming.

Thirty-Eight

Officer Wyatt introduced Amanda and Trent to the eyewitness, a man by the name of Justin Cooper, and left. Justin took them to his front sitting room, where he sat on a couch, and she and Trent on club chairs.

“It was absolutely terrifying.” Justin said, rocking back and forth and rubbing his arms. He hadn’t stopped doing that since letting them inside. “How it just went up like that… I’ve never seen anything like it.”

“You were obviously already awake when it happened?” Amanda asked.

“Yeah, I was sitting where he is.” He gestured at Trent sitting next to the window. “I was having a coffee and looking outside.”

Justin had probably assumed it was going to be like every other lazy Sunday morning—until it literally went up in flames. “Tell us what you saw.”

“I had just glanced away for a second. Then there was this loud boom and a blast of light. I could feel the heat inside my house.” Tears filled his eyes. “I didn’t know what I’d just seen. It’s like my mind couldn’t make sense of it.”

“Understandable,” she empathized.

“I kept thinking people are hurt, and I jumped to my feet.” His eyes widened at the recollection. “Then I remembered the place wasn’t lived in anymore. But there were those people I saw.” He rocked more fervently, the couch moaning some in protest.

“Yes. Can you tell us about them? Also, when you saw them?” she asked.

“Well, I saw them on the sidewalk going toward the house, then into the yard. I thought it was the real estate agent at first, but it didn’t make sense it would be him because of the hour, and the girls looked young.”

“You mentioned the hour?” she pressed. “What time was it?”

“It was around midnight.”

Mia said the explosion had happened at eight that morning. If the victims were the girls that Justin saw, again the question came up: what had their killer been doing with the girls all that time? Or maybe he’d killed them rather quickly and then hung out with their bodies. Amanda really didn’t want to give any of it too much thought. “You’re sure?”

“Yeah.”

“You described them just now as girls,” Amanda said. “How old do you think they were?”

“Teenagers, maybe early twenties.”

“Anything else you can tell us about them?” Trent asked.

“They were both blond. I could tell that when they went under the streetlights. Oh, their clothes were, uh, pretty tight and revealing.”

> Yet still, Justin hadn’t seen anything suspicious about the fact a man was with them and headed toward an empty house.

“The girls were stumbling like they were drunk. The man took turns righting each of them,” Justin volunteered. “They were laughing, though, like they were happy.”

They were probably drugged. Just enough to make them compliant, but not incapacitated. A different dose of the same drug used on Fox? Or was the killer pulling from a medicine bag full of options? She hoped Jeffery could shed some light on that later today. She asked Justin, “Did you happen to notice if either of the girls had any tattoos?”