housekeeper. Fiona never made her bed, ever. So I knew.”
Police interviewed the family, her classmates and boyfriend, and came up with nothing. As the investigation progressed, it was deemed that Fiona had left on her own. Run away. Her parents were outraged though a few friends thought it was possible.
Fiona was unlike Sally and Rebecca. Her family was wealthy, her father a successful intellectual-property attorney who had done smashingly well during the dot-com boom and cashed out just before the bubble burst.
A girlfriend stated that Fiona had called her father a tyrant, with his rules and curfew, and Fiona had wanted to run away. But the friend had not thought she was serious. “Who doesn’t bitch about their parents? Dream about getting out of this town? Nothing happens here. I hope she left. I hope she went to try out for American Idol, like we kept telling her to do, though the thought of doing that made her puke.”
Her boyfriend, Hank Sewal, who played guitar in F U, seemed more angry than upset. “We were going to lay down new tracks on her iMac. Then she skips out? So not cool.”
Fiona’s bank account had seen no recent withdrawals, all of her clothes, except the black sweatshirt, Diesel jeans, and army boots she’d worn that day, still hung in her closet. All the toiletries a girl might take with her remained on her bathroom sink. Unless she’d wanted it to look like an abduction, or had left on an utter whim, it did not exactly seem like a girl who planned to leave.
They were all young girls similar in age, all girls everybody knows. But their family, school lives, and interests were not at all alike. Most markedly, they looked nothing like one another, and there was no evidence that they were anything more than missing. Perhaps they had all run off. For Fiona, it wasn’t a huge stretch. But for none of them to ever contact a friend again? Not a single cell-phone call made since they’d disappeared. No ATM withdrawals. And they’d all had a lot to look forward to. They had nothing to run from. Nothing in the files, anyway.
If someone had done something to them, odds were it was the same perpetrator. The probability that five girls had each been taken by five different people was as likely as snow in July. But it confused Rath. Usually, there was a physical resemblance among victims. With rape, that wasn’t the case. But with murder and torture itself as the intent, which is what the dead girl’s corpse found in Victory suggested, more often than not there was a common look among victims, surrogates who represented a woman who had betrayed the murderer in his past. Here, the girls had nothing in common: obese, prepubescently petite, athletic. And if Mandy had been taken by the same person, her looks further made the physical link improbable. She was leagues beyond the others. A genetic specimen, if ever there was one.
Still, there had to be something between them, a single trait that made them stand out to whoever had taken them. They had been taken. Rath felt it. But he needed motive. Find the why, and you’ll find the who, he thought. But he could not see a why.
It was six o’clock. Time to shut down and throw darts.
Chapter 16
R ATH UNDID THE brass latch and opened the cover on the lacquered walnut box he’d built himself, complete with a purple velvet lining that looked refined but was cut from a Crown Royal sack. He hated Crown Royal. But the velvet looked good.
A set of three darts lay on the velvet. He picked up a dart, rolled it in his fingers, a solid, balanced heft. He’d made the darts, too. Tungsten tips, barrels of solid lead, the long, trim fletching made from the primary wing feathers of a mallard drake he’d shot on Ice Pond. The guys had given him shit about his “special” darts; but the guys knew he could throw a crushing game of Super Cricket or 21 with plastic Kmart darts better than any of their sorry asses could with these beauties. He’d made the darts
Police interviewed the family, her classmates and boyfriend, and came up with nothing. As the investigation progressed, it was deemed that Fiona had left on her own. Run away. Her parents were outraged though a few friends thought it was possible.
Fiona was unlike Sally and Rebecca. Her family was wealthy, her father a successful intellectual-property attorney who had done smashingly well during the dot-com boom and cashed out just before the bubble burst.
A girlfriend stated that Fiona had called her father a tyrant, with his rules and curfew, and Fiona had wanted to run away. But the friend had not thought she was serious. “Who doesn’t bitch about their parents? Dream about getting out of this town? Nothing happens here. I hope she left. I hope she went to try out for American Idol, like we kept telling her to do, though the thought of doing that made her puke.”
Her boyfriend, Hank Sewal, who played guitar in F U, seemed more angry than upset. “We were going to lay down new tracks on her iMac. Then she skips out? So not cool.”
Fiona’s bank account had seen no recent withdrawals, all of her clothes, except the black sweatshirt, Diesel jeans, and army boots she’d worn that day, still hung in her closet. All the toiletries a girl might take with her remained on her bathroom sink. Unless she’d wanted it to look like an abduction, or had left on an utter whim, it did not exactly seem like a girl who planned to leave.
They were all young girls similar in age, all girls everybody knows. But their family, school lives, and interests were not at all alike. Most markedly, they looked nothing like one another, and there was no evidence that they were anything more than missing. Perhaps they had all run off. For Fiona, it wasn’t a huge stretch. But for none of them to ever contact a friend again? Not a single cell-phone call made since they’d disappeared. No ATM withdrawals. And they’d all had a lot to look forward to. They had nothing to run from. Nothing in the files, anyway.
If someone had done something to them, odds were it was the same perpetrator. The probability that five girls had each been taken by five different people was as likely as snow in July. But it confused Rath. Usually, there was a physical resemblance among victims. With rape, that wasn’t the case. But with murder and torture itself as the intent, which is what the dead girl’s corpse found in Victory suggested, more often than not there was a common look among victims, surrogates who represented a woman who had betrayed the murderer in his past. Here, the girls had nothing in common: obese, prepubescently petite, athletic. And if Mandy had been taken by the same person, her looks further made the physical link improbable. She was leagues beyond the others. A genetic specimen, if ever there was one.
Still, there had to be something between them, a single trait that made them stand out to whoever had taken them. They had been taken. Rath felt it. But he needed motive. Find the why, and you’ll find the who, he thought. But he could not see a why.
It was six o’clock. Time to shut down and throw darts.
Chapter 16
R ATH UNDID THE brass latch and opened the cover on the lacquered walnut box he’d built himself, complete with a purple velvet lining that looked refined but was cut from a Crown Royal sack. He hated Crown Royal. But the velvet looked good.
A set of three darts lay on the velvet. He picked up a dart, rolled it in his fingers, a solid, balanced heft. He’d made the darts, too. Tungsten tips, barrels of solid lead, the long, trim fletching made from the primary wing feathers of a mallard drake he’d shot on Ice Pond. The guys had given him shit about his “special” darts; but the guys knew he could throw a crushing game of Super Cricket or 21 with plastic Kmart darts better than any of their sorry asses could with these beauties. He’d made the darts
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