CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO
Miles walked into the conference room at the FBI field office to find Vic already there, studying a map spread across the table.
Sarah Kim looked as if she had just arrived, setting her laptop bag down and shrugging out of her jacket.
The morning sun streamed through the windows, highlighting the exhaustion on everyone's faces.
It reminded Miles of just how tired he truly was.
Miles walked to the back and poured a cup of coffee, wondering when the adrenaline and coffee were going to finally wear off…wondering how much longer he could push along at this pace. "I just finished with Terry Sullivan,” he said. “He’s not our guy.”
"You're sure?" Vic glanced up at him.
"Completely sure. Sullivan operates a hot air balloon tour company, but he doesn't actually fly anymore. That accident completely screwed him up. He can't even go ten feet off the ground without having a full panic attack. Not to mention, we may have made a blunder; we’re looking for someone using helium as their element of choice for their murders. And hot-air balloons don’t operate on helium. So…yeah, I feel sort of like an idiot.”
Vic straightened up. "So the profile needs to narrow even further. We're not just looking for someone who works with balloons or at heights. We need someone who specifically works with helium."
"Which is a much smaller pool,” Kim said. “Helium suppliers, research facilities, anyone who handles compressed gas systems on a regular basis."
Miles walked over to the map Vic had been studying. "What did you find with Lisa Anderson?"
Vic pointed to a spot on the map marked with a red circle.
"I was able to work backwards from where Lisa landed in the reservoir using wind patterns and her description of what she saw before she fell.
She remembered a radio tower and some other landmarks.
I'm fairly certain she was launched from a parking lot in an industrial area northwest of the reservoir.
" She then showed Miles the map on her phone where she had pinned the locations where the bodies had been discovered.
"But none of it lines up. The bodies were so far apart that it would be impossible to tell for certain if he always uses the same launching point.
I mean, the victims could have drifted for miles before falling.
Depending on wind conditions and how high they were when they woke up or jumped.
He could be launching from anywhere within a fifty-mile radius of the city for all we know.
"Yeah, but checking a lot that Lisa Anderson specifically identified is a good place to start,” Miles said. He turned away from the map and looked to Kim. "And we also need to get that still image you found to the right department and—”
“As usual, I’m already ahead of you,” Kim said.
“I sent it to the tech team here at the LA field office. They’re running facial recognition software on it as we speak.
The guy I spoke with said not to expect too much, though.
That angle—which was the best I could get from the footage by the way—isn’t the best.”
“You sent him the video footage as well?” Vic asked.
“Sure did. You guys want to look through it to see if there’s anything there? Or should you head to that lot where Anderson was launched from first?”
Miles weighed the option, again rather surprised that they had so many different approaches to choose from. “How long is the footage?” Miles asked.
“Thirty-two minutes,” Kim said, opening up her laptop. “But I have all of the important bits flagged. We can—”
She was interrupted by the ringing of Vic’s phone. She grabbed it and looked to the caller display. “It’s Detective Morales,” she said.
As she answered it and placed the call on speaker mode, Miles struggled to recall Morales at all. He was that tired; the past two days were just a blur of faces, conversations, and smashed bodies.
“This is Agent Stone,” Vic said.
"Agent Stone, it’s Detective Morales. I think I've got something here you need to know about.
" Morales's voice carried a tense urgency but there was doubt there, too.
She was afraid of building up their hope only for it to turn out to be nothing.
“About ten minutes ago, dispatch took a call from a man named Donald Lawson.
He reported that his girlfriend didn't come home last night, and he's worried something happened to her. "
"Okay…and why are you calling us about a missing person?" Vic asked.
"Because the girlfriend is a trapeze artist with Cirque du Soleil, name of Vivian Bennett. I thought being a trapeze artist might lump her in with folks involved with heights. I thought it was a fit for your case."
Miles agreed and had no issue assuming it was connected. "When did she go missing?" he asked.
"Lawson says she was at the Cirque training facility last night for a late practice session. She usually gets home around one in the morning or so, but she never showed up. He tried calling her multiple times with no answer."
"That doesn't necessarily mean she was taken by our killer," Vic said, though her expression suggested she did not believe that.
"There's more,” Morales said. “At some point in the early morning hours, Lawson used the Find my Phone feature to see if he could find out where she was. He tracked her phone to the desert outside Los Angeles, roughly fifteen miles away where Michael Thompson's body was found."
Miles and Vic exchanged a look. The connection was too obvious to ignore…and all of a sudden, this call from Morales seemed more important than anything else.
"And listen,” Morales said. “Lawson made it very clear that he's not waiting for us to investigate. He's driving out to that location right now to look for her himself.”
“That means we need to do everything we can to get there before he does." Miles was already standing up, grabbing his jacket from the back of the chair. " If our killer is involved in this, there’s no way to know what sort of danger Lawson could be walking into. What's the exact location?"
"I'll shoot Agent Stone the link. You're looking at about a forty-minute drive, from what I can tell."
"We're leaving now," Vic said into the phone. "Detective Morales, can you try to reach Lawson and tell him to stay away from that location? If his girlfriend is there and she's still alive, we don't want him making things worse or putting himself in danger.”
"I'll try, but he was pretty adamant about going out there immediately. The guy was borderline hysterical when he called it in."
"Do your best. We'll call you when we get there." Vic ended the call and looked at Miles. "If this is our killer's work, Bennett might not even be in the air. We could get there in time to save her. It may not hurt to have some units head out to the location right away. Can you make that call?"
“Yeah, I’ll get it done.”
Miles headed for the door, his thoughts already running through scenarios.
If Bennett had been taken last night around midnight or one, that gave the killer roughly eight hours to transport her to a launch site, sedate her, and send her into the air.
Depending on when the sedative wore off and how high she was when she woke up, she might have already fallen.
He thought this was a promising lead, but he wasn’t expecting to be able to save Bennett.
Kim spoke up almost obediently from her chair.
"I'll stay here and coordinate from this end.
If you need me to run searches or pull up any data, I can do that faster from the office than from the field.
I'll also help with the tech team just in case we still need to rely on a backup… like the facial recognition."
"Thanks,” Miles said. “We’ll keep you posted.”
Miles and Vic moved quickly through the office corridors toward the parking garage. Miles could feel the familiar adrenaline building in his system, the heightened awareness that came with knowing a victim's life might very well depend on how fast they moved.
"If Bennett is actively in the air, we'll need to spot her somehow," Miles said as they reached the car. "The desert is huge. She could be drifting anywhere depending on wind patterns."
"You drive, and I’ll coordinate with local police and search and rescue when we get closer,” Vic said. "Maybe we'll get lucky and Lawson will have found her by the time we arrive. I hate that he’s rushing in like he is, but it could actually buy us some time in a perfect world."
"And if she's already gone?" Miles asked quietly.
"Then we work the scene and find evidence that leads us to the killer." Vic started the engine and pulled out of the parking space. "Either way, we're not stopping until we catch this bastard."
They exited the parking garage into the bright Los Angeles morning, the sun already hot despite the early hour.
Miles watched the city pass by outside the window as Vic navigated through traffic toward the highway that would take them east. Somewhere out in that desert, Vivian Bennett was either fighting for her life or already dead.
And if they could not save her, he hoped the scene would give them enough evidence to finally identify yet another of the Elementalist’s disciples.