The Devil's Daughter (Hidden Sins #1)(27)

He rubbed the bridge of his nose, suddenly looking exhausted. “I might not have much experience with murder like this, but forgive the fuck out of me if I don’t go spilling every little detail to a woman who magically showed up—as the result of a goddamn leak.”

A valid point. The truth was that she was reacting with emotion as much as he was. If they had any chance of making this work, they had to cooperate. Someone had to reach out the friendly hand first, and Zach had made it painfully clear that it wouldn’t be him. “Why do you think that her disappearance is connected? And please save us both the time wasted while you pretend that you don’t. You wouldn’t have brought it up otherwise.”

Instead of looking away, he met her gaze directly, no shame or regret to be found. “Neveah might be wild, but if you take that away, there’s a girl missing who is a year younger than Elouise and fits the same basic description—petite build, dark hair, and dark eyes. Call me crazy, but every instinct I have says that girl is going to be next. And that’s if she isn’t already dead in a ditch somewhere.”

She appreciated that he wasn’t hiding under the illusion of coincidence. She just wished she had something more comforting to tell him. “If she was already dead, we’d have found her body.”

He looked up. “What makes you say that?”

Being pinned in place by those blue eyes was disconcerting, to say the least. When he narrowed his focus to just her, it was hard to keep him in the neat little mental box she’d created. The man had too much presence by half. Eden set her soda down, covering up her discomfort by slipping back into work mode. “I don’t have enough information to do an official profile, but the fact that Elouise was found the way she was and that she hadn’t been dead more than a few hours indicates that this killer is looking for attention.”

Another hesitation, but this one barely lasted a breath. She’d been trained by Britton, which meant giving her working profiles under uncomfortable circumstances was the name of the game. Years of working under him and he still intimidated the hell out of her. “She’d been running. There were cuts and bruises on the bottoms of her feet and little slices on her legs from the weeds. So either this sick fuck was hunting her, or—”

“Or she escaped.”

Eden considered that, rolling it over and over in her mind. She didn’t know much about Elouise Perkins and wouldn’t until she got her hands on the coroner’s report and sat in on the parents being interviewed, but a girl who had survived God alone knew how many years of abuse and done her damnedest to escape and start a new life in college . . . that took guts.

It still didn’t jibe for her.

She tapped her fingers on the table. “Do you know when she was seen last?”

“We have it narrowed down to a window. She went through orientation at Montana State and checked into her dorm. She was in class September seventeenth—her last one ends at two—but she was marked absent the next morning. She could have skipped, but it doesn’t read right. That girl did everything she could to get into that college and get the grants to pay for it. I don’t see her playing hooky.”

Eden nodded. She knew what it was like to throw everything into a future that wasn’t certain. “She wouldn’t have. When you fight so hard for something, you appreciate it more.” She knew all about that. When she’d gone through training to be an FBI agent, some of her peers had thought she was over-the-top intense—and they were right. But she’d wanted it so bad, she could taste it. She wasn’t going to let anything or anyone get in her way. “So it’s likely she was taken that day.” A little more than a week before she was killed, which meant she was kept somewhere. If the unsub had the ability to hold a captive for more than a week, what were the chances she’d found a way to escape after eight days?

Not much of a chance at all, unless he or she had made a mistake.

It was possible. If there had been murders that had these particular tattoos involved before now, Eden most likely would have heard about it. Admittedly, there were more murders in the country than a single person could keep track of, but she kept an eye out for tags that fit Elysia. There was no damn reason to think that her mother would start picking off people and endanger her power base, but once cults got to a certain point, a percentage of them fell into violence against others and even against themselves. Suicide cults weren’t as common as the media would have people believe, but they did exist.

She tapped her finger faster. Coming back here was a mistake. It didn’t matter. She was here now, and she’d see it through. “How familiar are you with the Persephone myth?”

“Not very. I know the basics with Martha living in my backyard, but it seemed pretty nonthreatening.”

Eden almost hated to burst his bubble. “It’s a Greek myth that explains the turning of the seasons—half the year when the crops are plentiful and half when they aren’t, which corresponds to the time Persephone is in Hades versus aboveground.”

“I read the myth. I don’t see what the big deal is about bringing spring back around.”

She pushed her food to the side, no longer hungry. “Variations of that myth show up across multiple cultures, and Elysia cherry-picks the pieces they want.” It was hard to keep talking, hard not to fall into the past and what she’d gone through before she escaped. But he had to know. “The prevailing theme that underlies the recurrence of spring is sacrifice.”