Snared (Elemental Assassin #16)(48)

“Does anyone have anything useful?” Finn growled, throwing down a stack of papers on top of his desk. “Because I have fuck-all nothing. No fingerprints, no DNA, nothing that could lead us back to the killer. This guy is a ghost. He’s a sick fucking ghost, and I have no idea how we’re going to find him.”

Owen shook his head. “I don’t have anything either. Nothing that would tell us who or where this guy is.”

Silvio shook his head too. “Nor do I.”

Ryan sighed. “Nothing here that I haven’t seen a dozen times before.”

Bria also tossed her papers down, as disgusted and frustrated as everyone else. “How do you think Ryan, Xavier, and I feel? We’ve been looking into this guy for months now, and he’s killed several more women in that time span. Soon he’ll have another murder on his résumé, and we’ll be getting a call about Elissa’s body being found somewhere.”

A tense, heavy silence dropped over the office. Bria winced, knowing that she’d said the wrong thing. Jade slowly pushed back from her desk and got to her feet, a sick, stricken look on her face. Bria opened her mouth to apologize, but Jade held out her hand and shook her head. She left the office and went into the back of the house. A second later, a door banged shut, making all of us flinch.

“Dammit,” Bria snarled, massaging her temples. “I wasn’t thinking.”

To my surprise, Ryan got to his feet. “It’s okay. Jade knows that. We all know that. I’ll go talk to her.” A grim smile twisted his lips. “I’m good at dealing with grieving folks.”

He too disappeared into the back of the house. A soft knock sounded, and a few seconds later, a door creaked open. A short, muffled conversation took place, and the door shut much more quietly than it had before.

That left Bria, Finn, Owen, Silvio, and me in the office. That tense, heavy silence fell over us for a second time, but Bria sighed and picked up her files again. So did Finn, Owen, and Silvio, and we all went back to work.

Since I hadn’t found anything in the first box of information, I grabbed a second one from the stacks in the corner, took it over to my desk, and cracked it open. The very first thing that caught my eye was the victim’s name: Joanna Mosley.

Mosley? As in Stuart Mosley, the president of First Trust bank? The man who’d hired Elissa to be his date the night she disappeared? No, no way. It couldn’t be.

But it was.

Sure enough, Stuart Mosley was listed as Joanna’s great-grandfather, and he’d leaned on the police hard, demanding that they find out who’d murdered her, according to the detectives’ notes. But those detectives hadn’t had any more luck than Bria and Xavier, and the case had gone unsolved, much to Mosley’s frustration and disappointment.

Even though I knew exactly what I would find, I still flipped through the file until I came to some photos of Joanna, both before and after her murder. Young, blond, pretty—at least until she’d been beaten and strangled. No wonder Mosley had told Elissa that she reminded him of his granddaughter. Joanna could have been Elissa’s sister, along with the rest of the Dollmaker’s victims.

“Finn,” I said. “Come take a look at this.”

He and the others gathered around my desk, and I showed them the file.

Owen let out a low whistle. “It really is a small world, isn’t it?”

“When it comes to crime in Ashland?” Silvio sighed. “Unfortunately so.”

Finn picked up a headshot of Joanna that showed her before she’d been murdered. “I remember when Mosley’s granddaughter died, since he took a leave of absence, but he kept it quiet, and I never heard exactly what happened to her. His wife passed away just a few months later, and he took another leave of absence then.”

“You don’t really think that Mosley knows anything about Elissa, do you?” Bria asked. “Xavier and I have looked into him and all the other victims’ families. We didn’t find anything suspicious.”

“No. He’s not the killer. His alibi checks out, and he was nowhere near Northern Aggression when Elissa was taken.” I looked at Finn. “But I still want to talk to him.”

“What do you think Mosley will tell you that this file doesn’t?” Finn asked.

“I don’t know. Mosley probably doesn’t know any more than any of the other victims’ families do, but it’s worth a shot,” I said. “It’s not even a real lead—it’s a coincidence, perhaps—but it’s all we have right now. And like Bria said, Elissa is running out of time.”

For the third time, that somber silence swept over us.

Finn nodded. “I’ll make the call.”





16


Finn called Mosley and asked if we could come over. Mosley agreed, even though Finn didn’t tell him exactly what we wanted. Bria got a text from Xavier, saying that he’d found Lacey Lawrence’s parents and asking her to come help him do the death notification and follow-up interviews. So we all decided to take a break for a couple of hours, attend to our business, and come back and look at the files with fresh eyes.

To my surprise, Ryan agreed to stay with Jade until I returned. Apparently, the two of them had bonded while the rest of us were going through the files. While the -others grabbed their coats and left, I pulled Ryan aside and gave him my cell phone number.