Ashes, Ashes, They All Fall Dead (27 page)

“No one knows his whereabouts since he left Priceville, but his name and social security number popped up in Alabama three years ago.”

“Three years? When the letters started.”

“Right. They’re staking out an apartment in Alabama. Casey’s hopeful he’ll show up soon, with Tonya.”

Her eyes narrowed. “I know you, Matt. I’ve learned your gestures, the tone of your voice, the way you choose your words. Everything you’ve been telling me is what
Casey
believes, what the task force believes.
You
don’t think Hoffman is the killer, do you?”

“I didn’t say that.”

“But you aren’t correcting me. You think the killer is still out there.”

“Do I think Hoffman is the killer? Yes, probably. Do I think Casey’s going to find him in Alabama? I honestly have no idea. But I have a hard time believing he was clever enough to disappear for so many years and then suddenly pop up three years ago using his real name and social security number. Something’s wrong.”

“You think he’s here, don’t you? In Kentucky.” She didn’t wait for his answer. “Why? Why do you think he’s here?”

He studied her closely. “Are you sure you don’t want to go back to the hotel and wait this out?”

“I refuse to cower while a young girl dies.”

He looked around, but there wasn’t anywhere to work in the tiny room. “Let’s get out of here. We’ll find a table on the back patio if we have to. I need that map of yours, and I need to spread it out.”

Five minutes later they were behind the motel by the pool, which was deserted, probably because the pool looked like a dark-green swamp. Matt used some napkins from the gift shop to wipe pollen off a table and two plastic chairs. He spread Tessa’s map out, the one Stephens had drawn circles on back at the pancake house.

“Okay, what do we know about our killer geographically? We know he has killed people all over the South, but he hasn’t killed anyone here in Kentucky. What does that tell you?”

“He doesn’t want to kill close to home, so he doesn’t kill where he lives. Unless he killed Sissie . . . Becca.”

“I consider that an anomaly, not like his typical arsonist kills. It’s an outlier that skews the data. For now, let’s focus on the other cases.”

“Okay.”

“We already know that only Kentucky and South Carolina have the exact same kind of coal that was found on the letters. My lab confirmed that. The car accident was in Kentucky. The home you were taken to was here, in Kentucky. Latham said they put the story on TV about the crash, trying to find someone who knew your sister and you—the survivor. There was a picture of you standing in front of the home in the newspaper. It makes sense the killer would have been looking for something like that. It probably wasn’t hard to find out where the survivor was sent after the crash. It might have even been mentioned in the news reports. The killer tracked you to the Murray State Girls’ Home and tried to kill you by torching the place. But when he failed, and you were sent to South Carolina, he didn’t have any way of tracking you there. He didn’t know where you went.”

“Okay, makes sense. So you’re thinking he eventually figured out I was in the FBI, in Savannah. How? How did he find me again after all these years? How did he know to send the letters to Savannah?”

He smiled. “Now you’re thinking like me.” He pulled his computer out and set it on the table. “The letters started coming three years ago. What happened in your life three years ago?” He punched some buttons on his computer and turned it around.

Her eyes widened as she looked at the screen. “The Simon Says Die serial killer case. Every time the team successfully wraps up a major investigation, Casey throws a party for us, a big shindig with family and everything. And he always brings a professional photographer to take a picture of the agents who worked the case.”

“This picture of you and your team,” he said, tapping his screen, “wasn’t just local to Savannah. It was picked up nationally. This ran in
USA Today
.”

“Meaning the killer could have seen it. Matt, he must not realize I’d lost my memory. He must think I remember him, and where I . . . where we used to live. He sent those letters with the ‘Ashes, ashes’ line because of Becca. He thought I would remember her singing me to sleep at night.” Her brow wrinkled. “But what about the names of the victims? Are those supposed to mean something to me too?”

“You tell me. Do they?”

“Maybe. Maybe they do. Some of them have always seemed familiar, but not all of them. Sharon Johnson’s name never seemed familiar. John Crawford’s name wasn’t familiar.”

“The names weren’t the only thing he put on those letters,” he reminded her.

“Right. He always put that curlicue on them. Do you think that was something I used to put on my drawings, when I was coloring or something?”

“It’s possible. It’s a workable theory, at least.”

She rubbed her temples as if a headache was starting up. “Let’s play this all the way out. He wants to find me, but we don’t know why. And he thinks if he sends those letters I’ll realize who sent them. All this time he’s been giving me clues, thinking I would remember.” Her gaze shot to his. “He took Tonya as bait. He wanted to make sure I would come . . . home.” She shook her head. “But I don’t know where ‘home’ is. How are we supposed to find her?”

“That’s where the map comes into play.” He took out a pen and drew lines across the map. Some of them intersected, some didn’t.

Tessa scooted her chair beside his. “What are you doing?”

“I’m using my own crude form of geographical profiling.” He drew a large circle that encompassed Murray on one side and Madisonville and all of Hopkins County on the other. “I’m breaking my own rule and making some major assumptions, but it feels right. Everything in Kentucky that involves our killer, that we’re aware of, happened either near the town of Murray or here in Hopkins County. I’m assuming the killer is somewhere in this big circle that encompasses both areas.”

“That’s still a lot of territory, three counties besides Hopkins and Calloway, where Murray is.”

“Yes, but we don’t have any clues relating to those other counties, and I’m betting on Hopkins, since that’s where your car accident was. Plus, there aren’t any matching coal mines in Murray.”

“All right. Seems reasonable. We focus on Hopkins County. Why did you draw those lines on the map?”

“Those are the major highways. The killer’s profile says he’ll avoid living near major population centers. I think that naturally extends to major highways. He doesn’t want to draw any attention. And you mentioned that you were always afraid of the woods. I think he lives in a heavily wooded area, near an old, closed-down mine, several miles away from the nearest town and nowhere near a major highway. The closest town would be small, without a lot of contact with people from other areas who might have heard of any of his kills.”

Tessa picked up his pen and bent over the map. “Did you verify whether Stephens was accurate when he circled the closed-down mines?”

“I did. And he was right. There are only the three.”

She studied them for a moment, studied the areas around each mine, the highways nearby, then drew a big circle around one small town, Stoneyville. “That’s where he is.”

Matt grinned. “You’d make an excellent private investigator, Special Agent James.”

She cocked a brow and smiled right back. “And you’d make an excellent special agent, Mr. Buchanan.” Her smile faded. “If he’s here, I’m not allowed to go near any of the evidence. Casey’s worried that would taint the case against the killer.”

“Then we call Casey and tell him our theory. Have him get some agents up here to see if Hoffman is anywhere around here.”

“Agreed. But . . .”

“But what?”

“It’ll take half a day to get a group of agents up here. If Hoffman has Tonya, she may not have half a day.”

“Then what do you want to do?”

She studied the map, her brow furrowing as she considered everything. When she looked back up, her face was a mask of determination. “I’ll call Casey and tell him to get some agents here as quickly as possible. But I’m not waiting for them. You and I can do the initial legwork to narrow down the area where Hoffman might be holding Tonya. We’re not breaking any of Casey’s rules by doing that. As soon as we think we know where Hoffman is, we back off and let Casey do the rest.”

He nodded his approval. “Looks like we’re going to Stoneyville.”

S
HERIFF
L
ATHAM SQUINTED
up at the less-than-adequate lighting above his dining-room table for perhaps the third time that morning. Should have changed the damn fixture out years ago, but Betsy had loved the frilly, useless light and, as always, he’d been helpless to say no whenever she asked him for anything. As usual, when he thought of her, his gaze strayed to the last photograph they’d had taken together, hanging in its place of honor over the fancy table she’d loved so much.

The cuckoo clock chirped from the kitchen, reminding him he didn’t have time to moon over his late wife’s picture. If she was here she’d slap him silly for wasting even a minute when a seventeen-year-old girl’s life was at stake.

He picked up the picture Special Agent Tessa James had given him, memorizing the curve of the girl’s face, the exact shade of her hair, but mostly the eyes. The eyes were what made a person. The old adage that the eyes were the window to a person’s soul rang true with him. He’d always made a point of studying people’s eyes to get the measure of their character.

Or to identify their body.

He hoped that wouldn’t be necessary in this case. He set the picture back on the table, out of the way, and pulled the profile toward him, the profile of the man believed to have taken that young girl. The profile of the same man who’d eluded him all these years, the man who’d killed the only Jane Doe he’d never been able to identify in his entire career.

As he read the profile again, it struck him just the same as it had when he’d read it on the side of the highway this morning. He ticked off the points in the profile against the image in his head of the killer.

• Organized
  
• Controlling
  
• Socially competent but angers easily
  
• Normal to high intelligence
  
• Problems with authority
  
• Keeps to himself, probably lives alone
  
• Unhealthy fascination with fire
  

He picked up his pen and added one more bullet, based on his conversation with the FBI agent and her PI consultant.

• Familiar with coal mines, possibly worked in one in the past
  

He reached across the stacks of papers strewn across the table and picked up the thick manila folder he’d snuck out of the sheriff’s office underneath his jacket the day he’d retired. He’d known no one would ever look at the folder. No one else had cared about finding out who Jane Doe was, not like him. This case was the one failure of his career. But now, now he had a chance to rectify that. Thanks to the conversation he’d had this morning, and the profile, things were snapping into place.

It took several minutes to flip through the months of reports and research he’d collected in the case folder, but toward the end he found what he was looking for—his short list of suspects. None of them had ever seemed quite right. But now he was ready to add a new name to the list, as soon as he made a phone call. He didn’t want to accuse someone of something as heinous of murder unless he was sure, especially if that same person was holding the life of a seventeen-year-old kid in his hands.

He pushed himself up from the chair, grunting as he made his way to the wall phone. He didn’t trust those damn cell phones people were so fond of us these days. There was nothing wrong with a landline. And what he had to say didn’t need to be out there on the airwaves for just anyone to hear.

Five minutes later he ended the call. He stared down at the sheet of paper in front of him and picked up his pen. One by one, he crossed each of the three names off his list.

Then he wrote a new name down. And circled it.

W
HAT THE HELL
was Latham up to?

Detective Stephens hung up his cell phone and pulled his car off to the side of the road, next to a field of soybeans. Why had Latham called? He’d asked half a dozen bizarre, seemingly unrelated questions about things that had happened years ago, about that old fire up at the mine in Stoneyville and the investigation of which law enforcement had come from miles around to help—including both Latham and Stephens. And he’d asked other questions too, questions that had the fine hairs on the back of Stephens’s neck standing at attention. But as soon as he’d asked Latham to explain why he was dredging up the past, the old coot had hung up.

Stephens didn’t believe in coincidences. He and Latham had been forced to work with each other several times over the years on cases that crossed jurisdictional boundaries. They’d even been over to each other’s houses to brainstorm about those shared cases. But they’d never been friends, not even a little bit. Latham was too judgmental, too quick to criticize, and too damn nosy. Until that FBI agent had come snooping around, Stephens hadn’t spoken to Latham since his retirement. Then, suddenly, Latham calls? Something was up. He must know something about the accident, and the missing girl.

Stephens drummed his fingers on the steering wheel. He was just a few miles west of the Hopkins County line, where he’d just finished interviewing a witness to a crime in his jurisdiction. Which meant he was just a few minutes from Roy Latham’s house. He looked over his shoulder to make sure the way was clear, and barreled onto the highway.

Chapter Thirteen

A
S
M
ATT FILLED
up the rental car at the only gas station in the tiny, unincorporated town of Stoneyville, Kentucky, Tessa leaned back against the trunk, calmly answering Casey’s questions over the phone. Matt thought she was holding up remarkably well for a woman who’d just found out her sister was really her mother and the man who’d abducted and raped her mother—the same man who was also a serial arsonist—was her father. Hell, if Matt had found all that out today, he knew he’d be unable to function. Tessa continually amazed him with her strength.