Pretty Girls Dancing(76)
“Do you think she’s still alive?”
He was getting used to the way Sloane could fix onto his thoughts. “Yeah. He keeps them for a while, according to Sims.” That had also been documented in the infinite TMK files. “No evidence of sexual assault, but plenty of signs of physical abuse. Some torture.” Had that come from Sims or the files? Mark couldn’t recall. All the details of the past serial cases were starting to run together. “But we’re at the two-week point since the girl was taken. She’s almost definitely still alive.”
What she’d endured to this point, Mark thought grimly, was another matter.
“So.” The topic seemed to have refueled Sloane’s energy. She inched her chair up to the table again. “There’s been nothing new from cyber forensics?”
“No.” And there wouldn’t be, Mark knew. The offender was too wily for that. Patrick Allen’s hacked Facebook persona had been used only long enough to get Whitney to give the man her phone number, when their communications had switched to text messages at his suggestion. “You can bet he’s destroyed the burner phone.” This offender was too smart not to do that. If indeed they were dealing with the TMK, he’d evaded capture precisely because he didn’t make rookie mistakes.
“One thing Sims mentioned during our conversation has stuck with me.” He swiveled his chair to face her as he spoke. “Something about a victim they were able to prove was the work of a copycat. With no body for Willard, and DeVries taken so recently—”
“There’s no way to be certain if either of them were indeed TMK victims, or the work of someone wanting us to think so.” Sloane tapped a finger on the table before her. “Which is why I think it’s a mistake to get too tied up in what the profilers say about the Ten Mile Killer. We have no way of knowing if that’s who we’re dealing with.”
That was only one of the sources of the frustration that was starting to eat at him a little more each day. “And no way to know if we’re not.” He used his phone to check the time and stood up abruptly. “I’ve got to go. I’m meeting Brian DeVries. I’m going to hit him with everything we’ve discovered on this Starkey thing.”
“He’s had plenty of time to get his story straight,” she observed, rising as he did and grabbing her coat. “Want me to go at him? Maybe he’ll respond better to a softer approach.” She buttoned her coat.
Mark shrugged into his coat. “We’ll play it by ear.” On the way out the door, his cell rang.
“Agent Foster, this is Sergeant Rossi of the Allama County Sheriff’s Office. I’ve been meaning to give you a call to apprise you of a situation that occurred this evening. Just now got the chance.”
They reached Mark’s car, Sloane meeting him at the driver’s side, her hand out, waggling her fingers for the keys. He moved the phone away from his mouth. “You drive when we take your car.” She rolled her eyes but rounded the hood and got in on the other side. He settled himself behind the wheel, buckling himself in one-handedly while he hung on to the cell. “What do you have, Sergeant?” Mark started the car and nosed it out of the motel parking lot, heading south for the address DeVries had given them.
With each passing mile, Mark focused less on his upcoming meeting and more on the information being relayed. When the officer had finished, he said, “Thanks for the call, and I’d appreciate being kept apprised of your progress.”
“You got it.”
Disconnecting, he slipped the phone back in his pocket and slowed to a stop at a red light as his mind flipped through a mental Rolodex of names. Came up with the one he was searching for.
“Well?” Sloane drawled. “That was the locals, I gather. My mind reading’s a little rusty. You’re going to have to share what that was about.”
“Do you recognize the name Herb Newman?”
After a pause, she answered. “He was on the list Mikkelsen gave us, right? The janitor shared by some of the churches in the area.”
“He’s also the daytime janitor at West Bend High School. He must juggle the church jobs on nights and weekends. He was picked up tonight for trespassing.”
The other agent turned more fully in her seat to face him. “And we need to know this because . . . ?”
“He was with Janie Willard and another girl. Janie is Kelsey Willard’s sister. The guy claims to be some sort of photographer with contacts at a modeling agency. They provided a recording they’d made of the man admitting he’d taken pictures of Kelsey Willard before her death.”
The light turned green. Mark pulled out into the intersection. There was remarkably little traffic for a Friday evening. “A link to Willard through the school,” Sloane mused. “Possibly to Willard and DeVries through the church. We need to talk to him.”
“We will. I want to double-check whether he was ever interviewed seven years ago.” If Mark had read a transcript of the interview, he had no recollection of it. “They released the teenagers but have Newman in custody. He had what they believe are Oxy and K2 on him, and he offered it to the girls. Apparently, the county has had a problem with an unknown local dealing drugs, and they started wondering if it were Newman. Deputies went back to the house to look around a bit more, and their search turned up traces of cocaine in one of the bedrooms. They have enough to hold him while they tear the place apart looking for more drugs. The kids indicated he had a key to the place, and the empty property has been a magnet for teenagers and parties for years.” Mark was less interested in the man’s other pastimes than he was in the link between Newman and Willard. “They’ve brought in a drug dog for the search. But we can probably wait and talk to him tomorrow.”