Killing Me Softly (17 page)

Olivia sighed. “I waited six months, then finally boxed it all up and took it to the Salvation Army drop box. I didn't know what else to do.”

“You didn't save any of it? Not one single thing?”

She shrugged. “There may have been a handful of things I didn't pack up, but if there were, I left them behind when I moved out of the apartment six months later.” She shifted her eyes to Bryan. “I just couldn't stay there.”

“I understand,” Bryan said.

Dawn turned her focus to the food. “The meal is delicious,” she said.

“Thanks. Dawn, are the police going to start digging into Sara's past all over again now?”

Dawn watched her face, not answering. Bryan, though, did. “I don't think so. Nick pretty much told me it was a waste of time. I just had to know a little bit more before I could let it go.”

“And now?” she asked. “Do you know enough now to let it go, Bryan?”

He held her gaze for a long moment, took a drink and set the glass down. “I don't know any more than I did before, so I guess not.”

“Bryan,” Dawn said, sliding a hand over his on the table. “Let's drop this topic, okay? It can't be a pleasant subject for Olivia, and I know I'd relish a break from it for a while.”

He nodded. “For what it's worth, Olivia, I don't think he's going to come after you. And if he did…” He glanced down at the dog. “Well, if he did, I have a feeling you'd be all right.”

“Freddy seems docile and friendly,” she said with a nod. “But if anyone were trying to hurt me, he'd tear them limb from limb.”

“Good.”

“Does he have a brother?” Dawn asked.

They shared an uncomfortable laugh, and Dawn got to her feet. “Olivia, I need to use your bathroom, if it's okay.”

“Straight in through the kitchen, down the hallway, second door on the right.”

“Thanks.” She got up and headed in through the French doors, sending a meaningful look at Bryan that she hoped to God he would get.

Just before the doors closed behind her, she heard Bryan say, “Does he know any tricks?”

Good, Bry. Keep her distracted.

Dawn didn't go to the bathroom. She walked fast,
opening doors, entering Olivia's bedroom. She hurried, knowing there wouldn't be much time, racing to the bed, dropping to her knees and looking underneath. Nothing there. The closet next. She opened the large sliding mirrored doors and scanned the racks, then yanked a chair from the vanity and stood on it to examine the topmost shelf.

If Olivia had keepsakes she didn't want anyone to see, the bedroom closet, top shelf, was where they would be, Dawn thought. In a box, probably pushed to the back.

She found a shoebox back there and felt sure it was what she wanted. Almost as if she
knew.
Just the same way she knew she was about out of time. Yanking it down, she didn't take time to go through it. Instead, she tucked it under her arm, then quickly closed the closet, replaced the chair and left the room looking exactly the way she'd found it. Then she dashed back through the house, pausing at the kitchen, to look to the left, toward the French doors and the deck beyond them.

Bryan and Olivia were not at the table. Which meant they wouldn't see her slip through the kitchen, but also meant she didn't know where the hell they were.

No time for cowardice. She ducked through the kitchen and found her way to the front door. She opened it, looking both ways and seeing no one, before dashing to the car. Quick as she could, she opened the passenger door and crammed the shoebox onto the floor, shoving car rubbish on top to conceal it. She closed the car door
gently and ran back to the house, in through the front door, through the living room and into the kitchen.

Again she glanced toward the French doors. This time she could see Bryan and Olivia walking toward the deck across the grassy lawn, the dog lumbering close behind them with a Frisbee in his mouth.

She quickened her pace to cross the kitchen and quickly emerged onto the deck, trying to look entirely innocent.

“You oughtta see this guy at work!” Bryan exclaimed as he sank into his chair. “He didn't miss the Frisbee once! He can jump higher than my head for it.”

Olivia was smiling, rubbing her dog's giant head as she reclaimed her own seat, and then looking up at Dawn as if she had forgotten her presence. “Oh, did you find your way all right?”

“Yeah, thanks.” She sat down, avoiding Bryan's eyes. If she looked at him she would give herself away, and Olivia might see. The woman already looked nervous, glancing quickly toward the doors and back again.

“The meal was great, Olivia. Thank you,” Bryan said. “And I'm glad I got to meet your, uh, dog.”

Olivia's nervous expression eased. Like any red-blooded woman would, she was falling for Bryan. At least, falling under his spell. It wasn't his fault, Dawn reasoned. He didn't know he was doing it. But all his hometown, good-guy charm had been supercharged by this new wrongly accused hero ingredient. He was a whole different dish now, and a hard one to resist.

Olivia was a woman. Sixteen years older, maybe?
Sure, but still a knockout. Dawn felt a little twist of jealousy and tried to contain it. She didn't have any right to feel that way over Bryan. He's wasn't hers anymore.

“Thanks for the company,” Olivia said. “I have to admit, I'm…I'm scared. I know, everyone keeps reassuring me that this guy isn't after me, but how can I be sure? How can anyone predict what a man capable of all this might do?”

“I thought Nick was going to send an officer by,” Bryan asked. “In fact, I was surprised not to see one here when we arrived.”

“Surprised and relieved, I'll bet,” Olivia said. “Nick sent someone, but just to check in. They'll be back later on.” She looked at her watch. “Pretty soon, as a matter of fact. You should probably go.”

Frowning, Bryan looked around the table, snatched up a napkin, then turned to Dawn. “Got a pen?”

“Uh, yeah, in my bag.” She scooped her purse up from where she'd hung it on the back of her chair, dug around and pulled out a pen.

“Thanks,” Bryan said, taking it and bending to scribble on the napkin. “Olivia, I don't blame you for being afraid, and I agree there's no way to be sure he won't try for you. Just because he didn't before, that won't mean much if this isn't even the same guy.”

“You're not exactly reassuring me here,” she said with a weak smile.

“I want you to call this guy. His name is Rico, he was my partner on the force—will be again, I hope. He's beyond reproach. You tell him I said to call him.
He works days, same as you, so he can come around at night and keep an extra eye on you until this is over.”

“You really think that's necessary?”

“I think it's better to be safe than sorry.”

She nodded, taking the napkin, tucking it into a pocket. “Thanks. I wish I could have been more help to you.”

“You might still be. Something could come to you later on.”

“How will I let you know if it does?” she asked.

Dawn tipped her head to one side, thinking this professor was as clever as her title would suggest. “We'll call you in a day or two, just to check in.”

Olivia nodded. “And to let me know if you've learned anything else…about Sara? Or…her baby?” she asked.

“Of course.”

“Bye, Olivia.” Bryan extended a hand, and she clasped it. “Thanks again,” he said.

“You're welcome.”

He smiled and then started around the house, even as Olivia sank back into her chair and reached for her glass.

“Flirt much?” Dawn asked, as they rounded the house and approached the car.

“Flirt? I wasn't—”

“You had her eating out of your hand. God, I thought you were going to propose there, once or twice.”

“Oh, come on!”

She yanked open the car door and slid in, keeping
her feet off the box on the floor. Bryan got behind the wheel and started the engine. As he backed the car out onto the road, he said, “You don't really think I was flirting, do you?”

“I most certainly do.”

“Well, I wasn't.”

“You think she's hot?”

“Yes, I do. But I wasn't flirting. I was trying to be friendly and make sure she knew I wasn't the bad guy.”

“You were flirting.”

She bent and picked up the box now that they were a couple of blocks away. “Fortunately,
I
was working.”

“What did you do, Dawnie?”

“I looked in the two places I would put something that I wanted to hide but didn't expect anyone to come looking for. Casual hiding places. Under the bed, and on the closet shelf, in the back. And I found this shoebox.”

“What do you think it is?”

“I'm about to find out.” She started digging.

B
ryan kept his attention divided between driving the car back to their motel and watching Dawn dig through Olivia Dupree's shoebox. He wasn't expecting much. And he wasn't surprised.

“It's just keepsakes,” she said. “Ticket stubs. A couple of group photos.” She flipped over a snapshot of several young people. “No names or dates on them anywhere. They must be old friends.”

“How old?”

“High school, maybe? Could be college age. Might even be former students.”

“Former students who are dead, or former students who are alive?”

She looked up fast. “I hadn't thought of that. Don't we have a…a contact sheet somewhere with photos of all the original victims?”

“All we know about, yeah. It's in the file back at the motel.”

“Okay, so we'll set the photos aside and move on.”
She pulled out a dried rosebud, brown at the edges, its leaves ready to crumble to dust, and laid it on the seat beside her with care. She thinned her lips. “I feel bad about taking this stuff. I hope we can get it back to her before she knows it's gone.”

“If we find something that can help solve this thing, or find Sara's missing baby—or both—then hurting Olivia's feelings is a small price to pay.”

She nodded in agreement. “We've got to stop thinking of it as Sara's
baby,
though. The kid would be sixteen by now.”

“I know.” He glanced her way. “So what else is in there?”

She shrugged. “Some cards—tiny ones, like the ones you get with flowers.” She frowned. “Wait a minute. Wait just a minute.”

“What?” Bryan looked at her as she frowned down at the tiny card in her hand. “What is it, Dawn?”

“‘To Sara—Congrats, Shelly.'”

“Sara?”

“Yeah. Why would Olivia have Sara's keepsakes?”

He shrugged. “Maybe she just didn't know what to do with them after she died. Maybe she wanted to keep something to remember her by.”

“But then why lie about it?” She put the card back into the box and picked up one of the ticket stubs again. “This is from Wrigley Field. That's in Chicago, where Sara's from.” Then she dropped the stub and grabbed the photo again. “And one of the kids in this shot is wearing an Illinois State sweatshirt. Bryan, I think this
whole box belonged to Sara. These are Sara's keepsakes, not Olivia's.”

He nodded slowly.

“Why would she keep this stuff? And then lie to us and say she hadn't? I don't get it.”

“I don't know if we need to get it,” Bryan said. “We might never know why, unless she decides to tell us. I'm not sure it matters.”

“It means something. It has to.”

He shrugged. “I'm not going to question your instincts, that's for sure.” He looked at her, shook his head.

“What?”

“Well, you knew right where to find that box.”

“I told you, I just looked in the most likely places.”

“I think it might be a little more than that. You've done that a few times since you've been back. It's almost like you're…a little more tuned in than I am. Than…most people are.”

She frowned at him, gave her head a quick shake and looked down at the box in her lap again.

“I'm serious, Dawn. Maybe your…gift…hasn't vanished. Maybe it's just changed a little.”

“You think the dead are still talking to me, just very softly?” She rolled her eyes at the notion. “Or do you think I'm just coming down with a bad case of ESP?”

He shrugged. “Is it really so far-fetched? You've had far more unusual experiences in the past.”

“Key phrase, there, Bry. ‘In the past.' That's where it's staying. I promise you, I'd know if my hunches
were coming from anywhere besides my own head. And they're not.”

“Okay.”

She looked at him. “They're
not,
Bryan.”

“I said okay.”

She nodded. “So what's the plan for the night, then?”

“I was thinking, head back to the motel, gather up our stuff and head over to Nick's cabin, start settling in.”

“Let's not get too comfortable, though. We won't be there long.”

“You're right. I sure don't want to risk Nick being brought up on accessory charges.” He nodded in resolution. “So we give it a week. No more. After that, I'll just have to decide whether to turn myself in or head for points south.”

“Points south?”

“Brazil. Argentina. Whoever has the toughest extradition restrictions. I'll get myself a fake ID and passport and— Hell, those things will take some time. Maybe I should start on that now, while—”

“Jeez, Bryan. Could you
be
any more negative?”

He shot her a quick look, surprised by her out burst.

“I meant,” she went on, “that we won't be there long because we'll find what we need to nail this guy and clear your name, and we can go back to our everyday lives. God, try to have a little hope, would you?”

He smiled just slightly. “Sorry. You're right, I'll try.”

“You do that.” She put the rosebud back inside the shoebox, then put the lid on. “Do we tell Nick about this?”

He glanced at the box, shook his head. “Not yet. He and Olivia are friends. I don't want to go revealing that we snooped around her place, took things without per mission, much less a warrant or even much of a reason. He'd be pissed.”

“But if we find anything—”

“If it's pertinent, of course we'll tell him. While being careful not to screw up a friendship.” He sighed. “I always wondered if the two of them would ever hook up.”

She waggled her eyebrows. “Maybe they already have, even though she says not. She's gorgeous. And he's no slouch, except for that belly he's got going on.”

“He'd tell you he's earned that belly.”

She laughed a little. “I guess he has at that. Here's the motel.”

Bryan nodded and pulled into the parking lot. Dawn opened the box one more time, retrieved the photos and took them with her into the room, going straight to the closet where they'd tucked the cooler with the file folders out of sight. He glanced at the unmade bed, the towels slung over the shower rod beyond the open bathroom door.

“Guess the maid honored our ‘do not disturb' re
quest,” he said, dropping the little doorknob hanger onto the inside of the doorknob.

“Looks like.” But she was only half listening. He could tell. She'd pulled out the contact sheet and was scanning the faces in the photographs for comparison. Then, shaking her head, she said, “No victims in this shot. Including Sara. But look, Bryan. Now that I have decent light, I can see there was something written on the back. It's so old it's faded.”

“Lemme see that.” He crossed the room and took the photo from her, holding it under the nearest lamp. “I don't think it's faded. It looks like it's been erased. Rubbed out. See those marks?”

She leaned in closer. “Yeah, like scuff marks. And only where there were words, nowhere else, so it's not normal wear.”

“Got a pencil?” he asked.

She went to the bedside stand, rummaged around for a pencil, found one and handed it to him.

Bryan laid the photo on the nightstand, sat on the edge of the bed and, holding the pencil so its tip was nearly sideways, began rubbing it over the back of the photo. He took his time about it.

“Now she's sure to know we took this stuff,” Dawn said.

He glanced up at her. “You kind of like Olivia, don't you?”

“Yeah. Yeah, I guess I do.” Then she shrugged. “You almost have to like anyone with a dog like Freddy, right?”

He shrugged and went back to rubbing. “Okay, here we go. As good as new.”

“What's it say?”

She sat beside him on the bed and leaned over him to see. Her side pressed against his, and her scent wrapped around his brain and squeezed. Damn, it was hard being this close to her and not—

“‘Joey, Laura, Becky, Sara, Glenn.' There's a date, too. Seventeen years ago.”

Their eyes met. “Then she
is
in this shot,” Dawn said, even as Bryan was flipping it back over. He put his finger on the male face on the left, then touched each face, naming them as he went. “Joey, Laura, Becky… Sara?”

“Holy hell, Bryan. That's not Sara. That's…I think that's Olivia!”

“It's probably just a different Sara.”

“Uh-uh. Look at her, Bryan.”

Bryan did, pulling the photo closer, narrowing his eyes, recalling Olivia Dupree's face to mind. Her dark hair. Her brown eyes. The tiny mole on her cheekbone, the type glamour queens used to draw on with makeup and refer to as a beauty mark.

“What the hell?”

“Okay, okay, let's just take a step back. What does this mean?” Dawn asked. “At it's most basic, without speculation, what does this tell us?”

“That seventeen years ago, Olivia Dupree was calling herself Sara,” Bryan said.

“Then why on earth is she calling herself Olivia now? Bryan, you don't think—”

“Boot up that laptop. We need to find a photo of Sara Quinlan taken sixteen years ago, or more, to be sure about this. Let's see if we can download that yearbook I ordered yet.”

Nodding hard, Dawn returned to the closet, pulled down the notebook computer and waited for it to find the motel's wireless connection. “Okay, I'm on. Where'd you have the e-mail sent?”

He rattled off the info on the temporary account he'd set up, and she typed as quickly as he spoke.

“Yes, we got the e-mail with the password.” She copied the nonsensical alpha-numeric code, returned to the University of Illinois Web site, found the pertinent page and pasted it in. Then she waited while the document downloaded.

“It's a PDF,” she said at length.

While the machine worked, she drummed her fingers on the machine. Finally the pages finished loading, and she typed rapidly. “I'll just do a search under her name and…hello.”

“What?”

She clicked on the thumbnail that had come up, a portrait taken at graduation. It enlarged to fill the screen. It was clearly the face of a much younger Olivia Dupree. But the name underneath it was Sara Quinlan.

Bryan looked up from the screen, his eyes locking with Dawn's. “Olivia Dupree is really Sara Quinlan.”

“So then who did Nightcap murder sixteen years ago?” Dawn whispered.

“She was in Olivia's bed, with Olivia's memorabilia on her wall. It had to be the real Olivia Dupree.”

“You think…Olivia—I mean, Sara—just switched identities with her?”

“It would have been hard,” Bryan said, rising and pacing the room as he processed his thoughts out loud. “But not impossible. She was the roommate. How easy would it have been to identify the body as her own?”

“But someone would have known. Family or—”

“Olivia said she knew Sara when they shared a foster home. Maybe there wasn't any family to notice on either side,” Bryan said. “And maybe the professor knew that. So she must have been the one who claimed the body, claiming to be a cousin. She had it cremated to end any chance of further investigation.”

“Wouldn't there be records?” Dawn asked. “A driver's license, student ID?”

“No driver's license was ever issued for Sara Quinlan,” Bryan said. “There should have been a student ID, though.”

“Those have a photo on them. Wouldn't someone have asked for that?”

He nodded, thinking. “The murder was in July. Classes didn't start up until August. Maybe she didn't have it yet. Or maybe she did and the real Sara hid it, then said it was lost and got another one, with a new picture.”

“Still, the police could have gotten a copy of the old
one from the school before she had a chance. It would have been on the computer.”

“Yeah, but there was no need. Two people identified her, even if they were both one and the same. No reason to check. And you can bet if there ever was a copy of that ID on the college computers, the professor has found a way to delete it by now.” Bryan shook his head. “Even then, I'm not sure she could have pulled it off alone. If she managed this, she almost had to have help. Powerful help, I think.”

“What are you thinking?” Dawn asked softly.

He shrugged. “Nothing…nothing.”

“What in the name of God could she have to hide, Bryan? Do you think—” She sucked in a breath and widened her eyes. “My God, do you think she really is the killer, after all? Do you think she's Nightcap?”

“So…she killed her roommate first, took her identity and then proceeded to keep on killing. Seventeen girls in a row. Then she just stopped for sixteen years before suddenly starting up again?”

Dawn looked up at him, and her stomach clenched. “We need to call the forensics team—well, have Nick do it. Have them review the trace evidence gathered from the most recent crime scenes. See if there were any dog hairs found at any of them.”

“I just don't know what good it would do her to change her name. If she were wanted for anything, it would have come up. They searched far and wide for relatives, for history, for anyone with a motive to kill her—because no one knew it was a serial case at that
point.” He shook his head. “They found next to nothing. A small-time dope-dealer ex-boyfriend. But he was doing time—perfect alibi. I just don't get it.”

“I don't either. Unless—”

“What?” Bryan asked. Dawn bit her lip, and he pressed her. “Come on, hon, you haven't been wrong so far. What?”

“Well, what if Sara Quinlan wasn't her real name, either? What if she killed the real Sara and took her name, just like she did with the real Olivia?”

“So maybe Sara—I mean, Olivia—
wasn't
the first victim?” Bryan thought on that. “Okay, okay, we can follow this string a little. So why kill all the others, since they were all local and she couldn't take their names without being caught?”