A Killer's Mind (Zoe Bentley Mystery #1)(45)

CHAPTER 31

Zoe was almost finished prioritizing the list when Mel suddenly hissed, “Shit.”

Zoe raised her eyes to the detective. She gripped the phone hard, her eyes scanning the room and its three other inhabitants.

“Lieutenant,” Mel said sharply, “get over here.”

The tense tone got Martinez moving, and he stood up quickly and began crossing the room. Mel hit the speaker button on her phone.

Zoe frowned. All she could hear was the muffled sound of two people talking in the background. She couldn’t figure out what had prompted Mel’s reaction.

Mel hit the volume button, several times, increasing it to its maximum, and then said, “Hello?”

Nothing. Just the faded background noise of a faraway conversation.

“Hello? Lily? This is Detective Mel Parks with the Chicago PD. I just wanted to make sure that—”

Another sound. High pitched, tense, and unclear. A car wheel squealing? No, it kept going, rising and falling. And then, her heart sinking like a stone, Zoe understood what she was listening to.

Muffled screams.

Martinez reached the desk and listened. After a second, Mel said, “Lily? I need you to calm down and try to answer me. Is your mouth gagged?”

A moment of silence. Then a muffled response. It sounded like a woman trying to say, “Uh-huh.”

“Is there some way you can remove the gag from your mouth?”

“Uh-uh.” An almost imperceptible shift in tone, but clearly the answer was no.

“Do you know where you are?” Mel asked.

“Uh-huh.”

Zoe glanced at the list. Lily Ramos. Aged twenty, working as a prostitute, reported missing by her friend, who was supposed to meet her when the night ended. She’d been missing for a day, last seen trying to pick up a customer in the evening. She had been described as Caucasian, with almost no makeup, wearing a skirt and a long-sleeved blouse—relatively modest for her profession. She had only one tattoo, not visible when she was clothed—a black cat on her lower back. Zoe had marked her as number three on the list.

“Can you describe the man who took you?”

A muffled, frustrated grunt.

Martinez took control. Picking up the phone, he said loudly, “Lily, this is Lieutenant Martinez. Do you know the address you’re at?”

Since he had picked up the phone, the woman’s voice could no longer be heard, but after a second he nodded. “Okay. We’ll do this letter by letter. When I get to the right letter, I want you to stop me, okay? We’ll get you out of there. Here we go. A . . . B . . . C . . .”

In the background, Tatum was talking rapidly on the phone. He was trying to get someone in the FBI to trace the call. He turned to Zoe and mouthed, Phone number.

Martinez’s voice droned on. “D . . . E . . . F . . .”

Zoe grabbed the list and rushed to Tatum, handing it to him, pointing emphatically at Lily’s phone number. Tatum gave her a curt nod, his face grave. He began reading the phone number to the man on the other side of the line.

Her fists were clenched. Her heart pounded, its rhythm aligning with the letters as Martinez spoke them.

“G . . . H . . . I . . . is it I? Is it H? Okay, good. Again. A . . . B . . .”

Zoe turned to Martinez and waved her hand at him frantically. He glanced at her, frowning.

“Vowels,” she said. If the first letter was H, the next one would be a vowel.

He paused, then nodded. He cleared his throat. “E . . . I . . .”

Mel was tapping on her keyboard furiously, the sounds merging with the voices of Martinez and Tatum.

“O . . . U . . .”

Zoe glanced over Mel’s shoulder on the screen. There was a list of names there. Street names. All starting with H.

“Is it U? Okay, good. Okay. Third letter. A . . . B . . . C . . .”

Mel hit the letter U, and the list shifted, displaying only the street names starting with HU. She frantically sent it to the printer, then dashed across the room to where the printer was located. Zoe clenched her fists, focused and alert as she listened to the one-sided conversation, a macabre version of the ABCs.

Mel grabbed two pages as they slid out, then jostled past Zoe and slapped the pages in front of Martinez. He stared at them, then nodded.

“Okay, Lily? Are you there? Good. Listen, I have a list of Chicago streets here starting with HU. I am going to read you their names, and you stop me once I get to the right one, okay?”

Zoe could imagine the woman grunting as she understood what Martinez said.

“Hubbard . . . Hubbs . . . Huber . . .”

Tatum stopped talking, and Zoe turned to him as he slammed the phone in its cradle. He strode to his own computer, tapping. A map of Chicago appeared on the screen. Did he have a location? She walked over to him, wiping a bead of sweat from her brow. He was looking at a Chicago neighborhood, but the scale was small. The location was far from accurate. She felt sick. She couldn’t imagine what Lily was going through right now.





CHAPTER 32

Lily listened to the man drone the street names. Too slow. Much too slow. Her eyes didn’t budge from the battery indicator. Two percent.

“Huck . . . Hudson . . . Huguelet . . .”

She wanted to shout at him to hurry up; the call would be disconnected any second. But she couldn’t stop him. Could only grunt.