CHAPTER TWELVE
“I’m sorry, Special Agent,” Meyers said. “There just isn’t anything there.”
“The notes?” Faith asked. “The documentation? He was clearly hunting the two of them.”
“That gives us enough to justify this search,” Meyers replied. “It gives us enough to look further, and probably enough to assign a couple of officers to watch him, at least for a few days. It doesn’t give us enough to arrest him.”
Faith sighed and put her hands on her hips. “Yeah. Damn it.”
The two of them were talking on Brian Meadows's back porch.
It was late afternoon now. Faith, Jessica, Turk, Meyers, and a dozen Quantico Police officers had spent the entire day scouring every inch of Meadows's home.
They had found files not just on Iris Caldwell and Mark Patterson but on a half-dozen other individuals who Meadows deemed nuisances.
“He could be planning to kill them next,” Faith suggested.
“He could,” Meyers replied. “Or he could just be a nosy asshole. We don’t have a weapon, and he has files on more people than just our victims. Some of those files are old, years old.
Faith looked past him into the house where Jessica was once more talking to Meadows. Now that he knew he wasn’t going to be carted off to jail just for spying on his neighbors, he was livid. From outside, Faith could hear him shouting demands that the investigators pay to have his house “repaired.”
Turk trotted past Jessica and Meadows, still sniffing for clues. He lifted his head up at the irate man, dipped his snout, and kept looking.
“The files he has on Iris Caldwell and Mark Patterson place him at the scenes of the crimes on different days than the murders,” Meyers said.
“We don’t even have proof that he visited the parks on the days of the murders.
If you’re really convinced that this guy is our killer, we can lean on him a little, but we’re running out of legally justifiable reasons to be here right now. ”
Faith frowned. The problem was that she wasn’t convinced. Not anymore. She was hopeful at first, and then she was desperate. Now she was afraid that she had just wasted her time going after an innocent man. Not a good man, but not a murderer.
She sighed heavily. “All right. Fair enough. Do put a watch on him, though. I’m not one hundred percent convinced he’s our guy anymore, but I’m not convinced that he’s not our guy.”
“You got it,” Meyers said. “I’ll make sure—”
He was interrupted by a call on his radio. “All available units, we have a ten-sixty-seven at Veterans Memorial Park in Woodbridge. Prince William County thinks it’s related to our ten-sixty-four at Rooster Memorial Dog Park.”
Meyers sighed heavily. “God damn it.” He pressed the talk button and replied, “Ten-four. Five-oh-two is ten-seventeen.”
He released the radio and rubbed his temples. Ten codes differed from agency to agency, so Faith wasn’t sure what information had just been exchanged. “If you need to get out of here, that’s fine. We’ll wrap up here, and Torres and I can handle the stakeout if you need us to.”
“We all need to get out of here, and there’s not going to be a stakeout,” Meyers replied. “That was a report of a dead body in Woodbridge that matches our two victims.”
Faith’s shoulders slumped. “Well, shit.”
“Yeah. You’re telling me.”
Meyers walked into the house and barked commands to the officers. Muttered curses filled the air as the officers realized that they had just wasted an entire day turning an innocent man’s house inside out meanwhile their killer was taking another life.
Faith’s cheeks burned with frustration and embarrassment as she followed Meyers inside.
More than a little guilt too. She had fixated on Meadows because she was desperate to find the killer.
She should have ended the search hours ago and moved on.
Maybe they wouldn’t have found anything that would have saved this innocent person’s life, but maybe they would have.
Meadows lifted his chin haughtily. “Who’s going to pay for my house? Your officers trashed the place.”
Faith didn’t answer. The house was far from trashed. In fact, the officers had been careful to put things back where they found them. It was dirty from fourteen pairs of boots and two pairs of German shepherd paws prancing over everything, but nothing was damaged.
She wasn’t going to argue with him right now, though. If he wanted to make an issue of it, and he probably would, then she would address it at another time.
“Jessica, Turk, we have to go.”
“Yeah, I picked up on that,” Jessica said curtly, just as upset as Faith.
She sighed again and gave Faith an exasperated look. It wasn’t meant to be an attack on Faith, but it stung anyway.
The three agents left the still complaining Meadows and followed Meyers’s cruiser north to Woodbridge.
They stayed quiet for the twenty-minute drive toward Veterans Memorial Park.
It wasn’t until Faith pulled behind Meyers’s cruiser that Jessica broke the silence.
“I really thought we had something there.”
"So did I," Faith replied.
She said nothing else as she stepped out of the vehicle.
Turk trotted just ahead of her, tail switching with excitement.
Faith couldn’t muster the same excitement.
There were a dozen other police vehicles here, and she already knew that the victim was dead.
Whatever happened here had already happened.
The body was about a half mile into the park in a shallow ditch to the left of a wide concrete walking path.
Turk was sniffing at the body, an attractive woman in her mid-twenties with dark hair pulled back into a ponytail and a deep red entrance wound directly in between her eyes.
There was no dog in sight other than Faith’s venerable K9.
And this young woman appeared in none of Brian Meadows’s pictures or files. So there was that.
Nine sheriff’s deputies stood in three separate clusters near the ditch. Three of them formed a loose blockade redirecting passersby away from the scene. There were only a few looky-loos since it was now past sunset.
The other six alternated between talking in quiet voices amongst themselves and glancing in mild shock at the body. Meyers approached the highest-ranking deputy in evidence, a sergeant, and introduced himself. The sergeant shook his hand professionally, then gestured to the body.
“Rebecca Hartley, age twenty-six. Shot at close range by a small-caliber handgun. We think about two hours ago. Initial examination revealed a fine ceramic dust around the wound. It sounds a lot like the two cases you guys are dealing with in Stafford County.”
“Yep,” Meyers agreed. “Same shit.”
“Not exactly the same,” Jessica said. “Our other two victims were killed at dog parks in front of their dogs. I don’t see a dog here, and this isn’t a dog park. Also, this girl’s young enough to be our victims’ daughter. Hell, granddaughter.”
“There’s a dog park a half mile that way,” the Prince William Country Sergeant—Jasper, according to his nametag—replied. “But no, Miss Hartley didn’t own a dog.”
Faith stepped close to the body. Rebecca had a permanent look of shock on her face, disbelief in the process of becoming terror.
That was her last moment. Probably seeing the killer with the gun, then realizing she was going to die.
It looked like she had been shot while drawing her breath to scream.
She was also covered in dirt and leaves. Unlike the previous two victims who had been lured away and left where they fell, Rebecca had been killed out in the open, then quickly rolled into the ditch.
Faith pointed that out to Jessica and asked, “Why do you think that is?”
Jessica crossed her arms. “We suspect that the victims were lured away because of a scent their dogs picked up.”
“Just Iris, but yes.”
Jessica frowned. “Well, if it’s just Iris we think was lured away, then I guess that means the killer changed his MO for each of them.
Or the location is only tangential to the MO rather than a part of it.
We have Iris lured to a secluded area, Mark Patterson caught behind the shed he used every day for work, and Rebecca shot on the path where anyone could see it happen. ”
“But no one did,” Faith said. “The killer made sure they were alone before he shot her.”
“Then he moved her out of the way,” Jessica pointed out. “That’s new.”
“He sort of moved her out of the way,” Faith said.
“He just kicked her into a ditch. He was buying himself enough time to not be close when she was discovered, but he wasn’t trying to hide the body.
In fact, he hasn’t tried to hide any of the bodies.
He knew they were going to be discovered, he just needed time to get away from the scene. ”
“It’s smart,” Jessica remarked. “In a really messed-up way. A lot of killers give themselves away by details in how they manipulate the scenes. Like Jacob Moss with his dog callers or Victoria Lang using allergens to kill her victims. This guy’s got a signature too—the ceramic bullets—but that’s the only thing that’s staying consistent between the victims. And we can’t trace ceramic bullets. ”
Turk snorted irritably when his examination of Rebecca’s body didn’t yield a clue.
He trotted a few yards away, sniffing for anything that might help him discover something useful.
Faith watched him and frowned. “She didn’t have a dog either.
The location is half-consistent, same with the victim profile.
A park and someone alone. But you’re right.
It’s not really consistent. An old woman who owns a dog, an old man who owns a dog, and a young woman who doesn’t own a dog. ”
She rubbed her face. “Crap. If he’s not going after dog owners, then why is he targeting these specific victims?”
“I guess that’s what we have to find out,” Jessica said.
“Yeah.”
Meyers finished talking with the Prince William County sheriff and stomped over to them. His eyes were narrowed, and his jaw jutted. His hands were clenched into fists, and when he spoke to Faith, he sounded far different from the tired, apathetic sergeant she had interacted with previously.
“Prince William’s giving us jurisdiction,” he told Faith. “They’re lending us resources, but we’re in charge.”
Jessica raised an eyebrow. “I guess you want this case now.”
“I want this asshole brought to justice,” Meyers said.
“I’d rather he shot his own nuts off than shot innocent people just trying to stay healthy and enjoy an hour of peace on a beautiful day, but if he’s not going to keep it in his pants, then yeah.
I want this case. I want him found, and I want him—” He stopped himself and took a deep breath.
“I get it,” Faith said. “Trust me, I understand. Do you guys have a twenty-four-hour pizza joint you prefer?”
Meyers blinked. “Pizza?”
“Maybe Chinese?”
Meyers smiled slightly. “Is this your way of saying you two are going to be up all night helping us find this guy?”
“Sleep is for the weak, but food is fuel,” Faith replied. “I’m a fan of Rigoberto’s myself. They have excellent baked ziti if you want to stray from the typical pepperoni pie and breadsticks.”
Meyers chuckled. “I could go for some Ziti. Tell you what. We’ll let Prince William County handle the CSI stuff, and we’ll get back to the station and start brainstorming.”
“Sounds like a plan,” Faith replied.
The team started back for their cars. Meyers had renewed life in his step. Faith was grateful to have helped direct his frustration down a productive path, but despite the swagger she affected, she was far from confident.
The major connection between Iris and Mark were their dogs.
The fact that Rebecca didn’t have a dog and had only been killed semi-adjacent to a dog park meant they had no connection other than that their lives had ended to a ceramic bullet fired from a gun carried by someone who used as little effort as possible to kill.
Whoever their killer was, he was as close to a perfect killer as Faith had ever encountered.
That made him one of the most terrifying killers she had ever faced.