Snared (Elemental Assassin #16)(47)

“I’m sorry to just barge in like this, but Bria told me what you were doing.” He looked over at Jade, who was staring at the boxes of information again. Sympathy and understanding filled his face. “I’d like to help, if you’ll let me.”

“Of course, Ryan. Come on in.”

He stepped inside, took off his jacket, and hung it up on a rack in the corner.

“Any news on the dead woman?” I asked.

“We got an ID on her—Lacey Lawrence,” he said. “Missing since last week. Vanished after working her shift at a clothing store in Northtown. Xavier’s tracking down her family so they can be notified.”

“What about your autopsy? Any new clues there?”

He shook his head. “Nothing that I haven’t seen before with the other victims. She had been dead at least twenty-four hours before you found her, just like I thought. I also sent off a sample of the lipstick to a lab guy who owes me a favor. I’m hoping that he gets back to me today with the color and brand. Maybe I’ll know more then.”

“Thanks, Ryan.”

He nodded at me and looked at Jade again. He hesitated, then went over and said something to her that I couldn’t hear. She nodded back at him before her gaze locked onto the boxes again.

“Now that we’re all here,” Silvio said, rubbing his hands together in anticipation, “let’s get cracking.”

There were few things that my assistant loved more than organizing, whether it was people, information, or both, as in this case. Silvio made us each take a separate desk, and he assigned each of us a single box to start with. We all settled down and got to work, cracking open our boxes, digging into the files inside, and reading through the information, trying to find some clue that would lead us to the Dollmaker and where he might be holding Elissa.

My box was about Sandra Reeves, the killer’s very first victim, two years ago. At least, she was the first victim Ryan knew of so far. Twenty-three, blond, pretty. Sandra had worked as a waitress at the Cake Walk, another downtown Ashland restaurant, before she’d disappeared one night after her shift. Her body had been found two weeks later dumped in a park that fronted the Aneirin River, not too far away from Lorelei Parker’s shipping yard. Beaten and strangled, with traces of makeup and blood-red lipstick all over her bruised, battered face.

And that was it. That was all the pertinent information in the file. The police had interviewed Sandra’s friends and family and had taken a long, hard look at her boyfriend, but none of them seemed likely to have killed her, and the cops didn’t have any other leads. No one with a grudge against Sandra, no one she owed money to, no one with any reason to hurt her.

I flipped back to the beginning of the file and read through all the info again, but nothing changed, and I didn’t get any brilliant new insights.

I examined a photo of Sandra’s swollen face that was included in the file. Young, blond, pretty. At least before the Dollmaker had gotten his hands on her. I knew rage when I saw it, and this bastard was chock-full of it. Once he’d started beating Sandra, he hadn’t stopped until she was dead, and he hadn’t been too particular about where or how hard he hit her. He’d broken her nose, her ribs, and both of her collarbones.

But there was no real clue in anything that the killer had done to Sandra. In fact, the only real, tangible clue we had was the spider runes that had been drawn on the palms of Lacey Lawrence, the latest victim.

Silvio had given me photos of the marks, and I picked them up and studied them. But in each one, I saw the exact same thing as before: a circle with eight thin rays radiating out of it, all done in blood-red lipstick.

Disgusted, I threw down the photos, and they both glided to a stop right next to that photo of Sandra Reeves’s beaten face. I glared at all three pictures, but then I noticed the one, single, striking difference between them.

How battered and broken the girl was compared with how very neat and precise the spider runes were.

At some point during his sadistic ritual, the Dollmaker had flown into a deadly rage and killed the poor girl he’d abducted. Girl after girl beaten and strangled, with no change in the pattern at all.

But the spider runes were different. These marks had been drawn with a cold, steady, dispassionate hand. No smudges, no hesitation lines, no places where he’d stopped and started or traced over the runes. It was almost as if . . . maybe . . . possibly . . . the symbols had been drawn by someone other than the Dollmaker.

I frowned and rocked back in my chair, mulling over that disturbing new possibility. But how could that have even happened? The Dollmaker had dumped Lacey Lawrence at Northern Aggression and had kidnapped Elissa to take her place. So if a second person was involved, he would have had to come across Lacey’s body at Northern Aggression sometime after the killer had left it there, pulled out a tube of lipstick, and drawn the marks on her palms. What kind of person would do that? And who went around carrying blood-red lipstick in their pocket?

But if there was a second person involved and he knew who the Dollmaker was and had maybe even followed the killer to Northern Aggression, then why didn’t he call in an anonymous tip to the police? Why not try to save Elissa himself? Why draw my runes on the dead girl instead?

My head pounded with all the questions, speculations, and what-ifs. I felt like I was snared in someone else’s spiderweb, and everything I did only made the sticky threads twist and tangle tighter and tighter around me. Nothing about this made any sense, and Elissa was running out of time for me to figure it out.