The Devil's Daughter (Hidden Sins #1)(69)
“How the hell do you know? Those girls are being killed as some sick kind of bait to get me back to Clear Springs and keep me here until the unsub has accomplished whatever their purpose is—which evidence is piling up to be killing me.” How would he do it? Chase me down across the fields? Or bury me in the ground like they do their special little Persephone sacrifice? Her chest tried to close at the thought, and she had to inhale slowly through her nose and out again several times before the screaming inside her head stopped. “You don’t know what I’m going through. I can’t even put it into words.”
“I’d say you just did a damn good job of it.”
She glared. “Stop profiling me. This entire situation is a fucking nightmare, and you know it. And, yes, I know that I’m not actually to blame for these girls’ deaths, but that doesn’t make the guilt magically disappear. Now there’s another girl missing, and—” Her breath hitched and she forced steel into her tone. “Three is an important number for Elysians. Seven, too, but I doubt this unsub is going to stretch this out any longer than necessary. Even if he—or she—was willing, there just aren’t that many teenagers that fit the profile without expanding their hunting grounds, and I get the feeling he doesn’t want to do that.”
The numbers were ones Martha had flat out stolen from other religions. Christianity valued seven as the ideal number or, rather, 777. Three showed up in everything from fairy tales to various world myths as a lucky number, a significant number. Eden had once asked her mother what those numbers meant to Persephone and Demeter, and she’d been forced to hold her wrist over that damn candle for seven minutes, and then for three more as punishment.
She refocused and kept speaking. “It’s all about Elysia and that goddamn cult. Everything centers around that, including the location of the abductions and killings. He didn’t use the same spot as a dumping ground, but that could be because he—and I’m aware that it could be a woman, because penetration doesn’t always equal penis—ran Elouise into the ground. He’s escalating, and escalating quickly. Either he already had Rachel before he dropped Neveah, or he took her directly after dumping the body. There’s no cooldown period, and the methods are evolving all the same. Neveah was different.”
“Why was she different?”
She almost snarled at him, her frustration choking her. “You tell me.”
Vic shook his head. “You’re right—I only know the facts as they’re written on paper. You know this place and you know this cult. Your problem is that you’re letting the guilt cloud your reasoning. So stop thinking like the daughter of Martha Collins, and start thinking like an agent.”
“I am thinking like an agent.” When he didn’t say anything, she cursed some more. “I hate you a little bit right now.”
“I’m strangely okay with that.”
“You would be.” Eden took a deep breath and tried to let go of all the shit clouding her head. “From all accounts, Neveah wasn’t much like Elouise. The first victim flew under the radar. She might have turned Lee Whitby’s head, but she was riding out the horror show of her life until she could get out of Clear Springs.” Something Eden knew all about, though she’d never been as good at keeping her head down as Elouise had.
“Neveah Smith was . . . God, she was a hell-raiser. Her parents are church folk, but she liked to make waves. She had the boys following her around, and I get the feeling she really liked the attention. She was just in love with life and the high she got from defying small-town moral boundaries.” If someone was taking notes, she had more in common with Neveah than Elouise, though it wasn’t a perfect match by any means—Eden had been skittish about anything that could potentially tie her to Elysia or Clear Springs, and that included boys and sex. There were no foolproof types of birth control, and the thought of being a teen mom and having her mother potentially sweep in, of potentially repeating the history of raising a child on her own without the father around . . . She shuddered. Yeah, it hadn’t been worth the risk.
Or maybe she just hadn’t met a guy who’d turned her head enough to risk it.
Zach would have.
She pushed the thought away. “It’s possible Neveah gave him more of a fight than he was expecting. Or maybe she ran in the wrong direction and he wanted her dumped in a specific spot. It could be anything.” But she didn’t think so. There was none of the frenzy that came when a serial killer started to flame out. This unsub had been a full three steps ahead of them the entire time, and she didn’t see him making such a blatant mistake. “I think it was intentional, though I couldn’t begin to tell you why he chose there and that time.”
Vic nodded. “I agree. We haven’t seen anything quite like this, but all signs point to this guy having a plan from the very beginning.”
A plan they were all dancing to the tune of. She thought hard. “It could be that there are two of them—don’t look at me like that, I know how rare serial-killing partners are. But if there were two of them, it could be that the body was dumped at that specific time to provide Lee with an alibi.” Another option occurred, making her sick to her stomach. “Or it could be to create more tension in Clear Springs. It’s a bomb waiting for the right spark to set the whole thing off. It’s only a matter of time, probably sooner rather than later, especially with Rachel Carpenter missing.”