The Killing Hour by Lisa Gardner Page A

together and voices low. “Next year, nineteen ninety-nine. First heat wave of the year doesn’t hit until July. Two high school girls in Macon, Georgia, sneak into a local bar on July tenth. Never seen alive again. First girl’s body is found two days later, this time next to U.S. four forty-one, which happens to be near the Tallulah Gorge State Park. Second girl is found . . .”
    “Inside the gorge?” Kimberly tried gamely.
    “Nope. Burke County cotton field. One hundred and fifty miles away from the gorge. It’s the gorge that we searched, however, so nobody discovered her body until the cotton harvest in November.”
    “Wait a minute.” Kimberly held up a hand. “It takes all the way until November to find a girl’s body in a field?”
    “You’ve never been to Burke County. We’re talking eight hundred square miles of cotton. The kind of place where you can drive all day without ever hitting a paved road. There ain’t
nothing
out in Burke County.”
    “Except a dead body.” Kimberly leaned forward intently. “Both girls fully clothed again? No sign of sexual assault?”
    “The best we can tell,” Mac said. “It’s difficult with the second girl of each pair, given the condition of their bodies. But for the most part, yes, all four girls are found wearing their party clothes and looking relatively . . . peaceful.”
    “Cause of death?”
    “It varies. For the girls left next to roadways, an overdose of benzodiazepine, the prescription drug Ativan. He injects the lethal dose into their left shoulders.”
    “And the second girls?”
    “We don’t know. It looks like a fall may have been what killed Deanna Wilson. For Kasey Cooper, exposure, maybe, or dehydration.”
    “They were abandoned alive?”
    “It’s a theory.”
    She wasn’t sure she liked how he said that. “You said you found their purses. What about ID?”
    Mac’s turn to frown. He was obviously thinking of the girl they’d found that day, and the lack of ID in her wallet. “They did have their driver’s licenses,” he admitted. “IDing the bodies was never an issue. No keys, though. For that matter, no cars. We’ve never recovered a single vehicle.”
    “Really?” Kimberly’s scowl deepened. She was fascinated in spite of herself. “Okay, continue.”
    “Two thousand,” Mac said crisply, then promptly rolled his eyes. “Bad year, two thousand. Brutally hot summer, no rain. May twenty-ninth, we’re already in the mid-nineties. Two students from Augusta State University head to Savannah for a girls’ weekend. They never come home. Tuesday morning, a motorist finds the first girl’s body next to U.S. twenty-five in Waynesboro. Can you guess where Waynesboro is?”
    Kimberly thought about it a minute. “The cotton field place. Burke County?”
    He smiled, a flash of white against his dark skin. “You catch on quick. That’s one of the rules of the game, you see: the first body of the new pair is always left near the second girl of the last pair. Maybe he likes the continuity, or maybe he’s giving us a fighting chance at finding the second body in case we missed it the previous year.” He paused for a second and eyed her appraisingly. “So for this new pair, where’s the second girl?”
    “Not in Burke County?”
    “You’re cheatin’.”
    “Well, he hasn’t repeated an area. So you can assume not the gorge and not a cotton field. Process of elimination.”
    “Georgia has nearly sixty thousand square miles of mountains, forests, coastline, swamplands, peach orchards, tobacco fields, and cities. You’re gonna need to eliminate more than that.”
    Kimberly acknowledged the point with a slight shrug. Unconsciously she worried her lower lip. “Well, you said it was a game. Does he leave you clues?”
    His answering smile was dazzling. “Yes, ma’am. Second rule of the game—for it to be competitive, you gotta leave clues. Let’s go back to the very first girl, found outside of Atlanta. Girl’s laid out