The Killing Hour by Lisa Gardner Page B

next to a major interstate, remember? We have no signs of violence, no sexual assault, so that means no blood, no semen, none of the normal trace evidence you might expect to collect in a homicide case. But here’s something interesting. The body’s clean. Very clean. Almost as if someone has washed the victim’s legs, arms, and shoes. We not only lack hair and fiber, we can’t even find traces of spilled beer on her shoes or a stray peanut in her hair. It’s like the girl’s been . . . sanitized.”
    “All of her?” Kimberly asked sharply. “Then you can no longer be sure of lack of sexual assault.”
    Mac shook his head. “Not all of her. Just the parts . . . exposed. Hair, face, limbs. My best guess? He wipes them down with a sponge. It’s like . . . he’s wiping a slate clean. And then he starts his work.”
    “Oh my God,” Kimberly breathed. She was no longer sure she wanted to know what had happened next.
    “They’re a map,” Mac said quietly. “That’s why the first girl exists. That’s why she’s left next to a major road and easily found. Maybe why she gets a quick and relatively painless death. Because she doesn’t matter to him. She’s just a tool, a guide to where the real game is being played out.”
    Kimberly was leaning forward again. Her heart had started pounding, neurons firing to life in her brain. She could feel where this was headed now. Almost see the dark, twisted road open up before her. “What are the clues?”
    “From the first girl, we found a feather in her hair, a crushed flower beneath her body, traces of rock on her shoe, and a business card in her purse. The crime lab followed protocol and took samples of everything. And then . . . nothin’.”
    “Nothing?”
    “Nothin’. You ever been to a real crime lab, Kimberly? And by that, I don’t mean the FBI lab. The Feds have money, no doubt about it. I mean what the rest of us working stiffs get to use.”
    Kimberly shook her head.
    “We have equipment. Lots of equipment. But unless it’s fingerprints or DNA—God’s honest truth—it’s as worthless as an unmatched sock. We don’t have databases. So sure, we collect soil samples, but it’s not like we can scan them into some giant computer and have a matching location magically blip across the screen the way they do in some of those crime shows. Frankly, we operate on tight budgets and tight budgets mean forensics is mostly reactionary. You take samples and someday, if you have a suspect, then you have a reference sample to work with. You take your dirt from the crime scene and hope it matches dirt from the bad guy’s yard. That’s as good as it gets.
    “In other words, we collected the rock sample, the feather, the flower and we knew they were worthless to us. So we sent them out to real experts who might be able to make something of them. And then we waited nine months.”
    Kimberly closed her eyes. “Oh no,” she said.
    “Nobody knew,” he said quietly. “You have to understand, nobody ever expected the likes of this man.”
    “He abandoned the second girl in the gorge, didn’t he?”
    “With a gallon jug of water. Wearing high heels. In nearly a hundred-degree heat.”
    “But if you had interpreted the clues in time . . .”
    “You mean, if we’d identified the white flower as persistent trillium, a rare herb found growing only in a five-point-three-square-mile area in all of Georgia—an area inside the Tallulah Gorge? Or if we’d realized the feather belonged to the peregrine falcon, which also makes its home in the gorge? Or if we’d understood that the granite in the rocks found ground into her shoes matched samples taken from the cliffs, or that the business card found in her purse belonged to a customer service representative from Georgia Power, the company that just so happens to own and manage the gorge? Sure, if we’d known that stuff, then maybe we could’ve found her. But most of those reports didn’t come in for months, and poor