Strings of Fate (Mistresses of Fate) (20 page)

“Fuck this,” she muttered, setting her laptop on the table and opening the lid, letting it power on while she locked the door.

She made another cup of tea and grabbed some peanut butter crackers from her cabinet, arming herself for the battle ahead.

Settling herself on the couch, her tea and crackers next to her on the end table, she pulled the computer into her lap, logging in with the password she’d changed just the day before.

Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn were first on her list to check; she never underestimated what people would post on social media, nor did she underestimate the power of her contacts. She made a habit of friending people, not just people she met in person, but people in online groups, people who liked the same books she did on Goodreads, people who liked the same Facebook pages she did. She hunted for friends like an insecure teenager, not because she wanted them, but because the more lines of connection she had, the more she could search for the missing. And then there were the connections of her creations. Even though the people she made weren’t real, people still friended them, either not realizing that they’d never met or not caring.

It bothered her suddenly, that her creations were given the same weight in the virtual world as real people. When had it become so easy to take a human life and mimic it to the point where an actual person was no longer necessary? Did people friend her and really not know who she was or how they knew her?
She had more
friends
than any one person needed, but only Tavey and Raquel were links to the tangible world. Only they knew the real Christina. She was afraid, in time, that her weekly meetings with them would no longer be enough, and she would begin to fade away, like an old forgotten Polaroid.

The image made her cringe. She would do better, she vowed, make more of an effort to get involved with other people, make real connections
.
But even as she thought it, her fingers were flying over the keys, her eyes hunting the screens for news in any of her searches.

As soon as she had her websites up and rolling, she felt better, and the house no longer seemed so empty and purposeless.

“Okay,” she murmured. “Task one.” She quickly checked all her “active” cases: Martin Hays, Lobelia Curso, and Martha. So far there were no updates from the Atlanta PD on the Hays case, so she sent a quick email to Raquel to remind her to follow up. As far as Lobelia, Chris had sent messages to her friends on Facebook, but so far none of them had responded, either. Once that was done, she started looking into Martha Cooper.

She found Martha’s Facebook page and searched her friend list. They had one mutual friend, a woman named Cora Scott, one of Raquel’s cousins. She sent a message over to Cora, introducing herself again, and asking her what she knew about Martha. Once that was complete, she pulled an image of Martha from her public Facebook page and sent out an email blast to all her contacts who worked to find the missing, letting them know that any information would be useful. As far as she could tell, the focus of Martha’s life was her dog, Badger, so maybe she had left and had taken the dog with her. Her car was gone as well, so it was possible she’d taken a trip somewhere.

Chris got up twice, once to set one of her desktops to search for Martha’s face throughout social media and her friend pages on Facebook, and once to use the bathroom. When she came back into her living room, she realized two things: that her green tea was cold and that, even though it was approaching nine-thirty, there was no sign of Raquel.

Picking up her phone, she discovered she had two messages, one from someone who had seen Martha two weeks ago at a gas station in Canton and one from Raquel.

Be there in ten.

That was ten minutes ago. She looked at the front door, only to jump when a knock suddenly sounded and she heard Raquel’s voice through the door.

“Chris, it’s me.”

Chris set her tea down on the table and hurried to open it.

Raquel was standing on her doorstep, dripping wet, her black hair plastered to her head.

She was tiny, but she was fierce, which showed in her bag, a waterproof black backpack with reflective strips, and her choice of vehicle, which was what Chris affectionately called a crotch rocket, a shiny black Ducati.

“Light showers, my ass,” Raquel muttered, stepping inside and tossing her helmet and bag just inside Chris’s door. “I could kill that Channel Thirteen weatherman.”

Chris closed and locked the apartment door behind her. “Bet you wish you’d taken your car this morning.”

“Girl, you know it.” She shrugged out of her wet motorcycle jacket and unzipped the legs of the leather pants she was wearing, stripping them off to reveal clothing more suitable to a teenage girl—jeans, a funky boat-neck sweater a la 1986, and a cheap costume necklace. Well, everything except the shoulder holster and the Glock she wore in it. She’d been acting as bait tonight for predators, which wasn’t unusual, but for some reason tonight it gave Chris a twinge of uneasiness.

“How’re you tonight?” Raquel took off her weapon and badge, setting them on the end table next to Chris’s tea, and took off her holster, setting it on the chair. She wiped some rain off her skin and shook out her long hair. Raquel’s mother had been half black, half Cherokee, her father a white man she’d never met, so of course she had perfect skin and hair that looked like it belonged in a shampoo commercial.

Chris shook her head. “Boy, do I have news for you, but let’s get you some wine.”

“Actually, you better make it coffee unless I’m spending the night.”

“Could you?” The words left Chris’s mouth before she even realized she intended to ask.

Raquel gave her a curious look and came over to enfold her in a hug. “You have had a day, haven’t you?”

Chris hugged her back, ignoring the wet hair and the faint smell of exhaust. “It’s been different.”

“Come on, then, pour me some wine and we’ll talk about it. Lemme just grab a towel to dry my hair.”

Chris ventured into her kitchen, pulling a clean wineglass down and rinsing out the one she’d been using the night before. She only had two; she wasn’t a big believer in multiple dishes. Having two meant she had to wash them regularly; otherwise they piled up in the sink.

“So tell me,” Raquel demanded as she walked into the kitchen. “What man have you had over here tonight, and does he look as good as he smells?”

Chris smiled and handed her the glass of wine. She clinked glasses with Raquel. “Raquel, darling, I have a crush on my FBI agent.”

Raquel’s gracefully arching eyebrows rose. “Well, my my my, it looks like Old Ninny was right. I do believe the ever-single Miss Pascal has found herself a man.”

Chris wrinkled her nose. “Don’t say that, you’ll jinx it. Besides, I get the feeling that he was burned by an ex. He made a few comments about her, and he’s sensitive to what he sees as deception. Probably he’s only hanging around because some serial killer has a thing for me anyway.”

Raquel sighed. “And now you’ve killed any possible excitement. How bad is it?”

“Pretty bad.” Chris didn’t want to think about it. “Just for the record”—she swirled her wine in her glass, breathed in deep, and took a long sip—“he looks even better than he smells.”

Raquel fanned herself and headed into the living room. “Girl, you are in trouble . . .”

23

RYAN RUBBED HIS
eyes beneath his glasses, tired of being in front of his computer screen.

“What do we know?” he asked the room. It wasn’t a rhetorical question.

The body they’d recovered from the river earlier was a kid named Jason Kirkpatrick of Cave Springs, Georgia. He’d been seventeen years old and in love with a woman named Liz Darcy—only Liz Darcy didn’t exist. Liz Darcy was one of Chris’s creations, created for a gay man in San Pedro, California, who’d wanted everyone to think he was straight.

According to her notes, she hadn’t accessed the Liz Darcy profile in several years. Cyber Crimes had also had little luck in pinning down a specific IP address to track the interactions. The killer not only seemed to know a great deal about technology, but also seemed to move around quite a bit within five counties in northwest Georgia.

Ryan looked at the board and shook his head. Too many people had already died. This man had to be stopped.

“We know he has to see his victims before he decides to kill them,” one of the analysts threw out.

Ryan nodded. “We know he only kills with each identity once. He’s gone through almost twenty of the identities created by Ms. Pascal. This latest kill was one of her earliest, created nearly ten years ago when she started her online business.”

“We’re tracking all the IDs she has left, following his interactions,” Sandeep added. “He’s been contacted by two women on a dating site and has reached out to one woman directly, Miss Coffee, using the Dylan Fennick identity. We have deputies and local PD assigned to all three women as well as everyone else who’s been in contact with the identities that he hasn’t yet used to kill.”

“And where are these women?”

Midaugh gestured to the map, where pushpins had been used to mark locations. Black pins identified the locations where bodies had been found, while green ones indicated the last-known location of the victims—those pins connected with a piece of yarn. They had software that did something similar; it was even now running algorithms, searching for connections, patterns, similarities, but Ryan was a tactile person. He liked the board.

“The yellow pins are everyone he’s contacted but hasn’t set up a meeting with,” Midaugh said. “The white ones are pins of people he contacted but chose not to kill.”

“And the red one here?” Ryan knew, but he wanted to hear it, wanted to say it so that it might jar something loose, might start to make some sense. “Martha Cooper”—he answered his own question. “Who is missing, and her car is gone. There has been no activity on her credit cards and she hasn’t posted any messages on Facebook. Ms. Pascal reported that someone claims to have seen her at a gas station in Canton. We’re working on verifying that. There’s also the mention of a ‘rainbow-haired’ girl on the Fate blog. Anyone have any leads on that?”

“We think we might have a match to a missing persons report, but without a body . . .” Midaugh shrugged. “Her name’s Belinda James. Went missing on Sunday. Rainbow-dyed hair. Works at a tattoo parlor in Canton. She’s the purple pin—placed at her last known location.”

There was no discernible pattern to the killings; the black, green, and yellow dots seemed scattered about randomly throughout Floyd, Gordon, Cherokee, Bartow, and Polk Counties as if the killer just set up a net and waited to see who bit, just as Chris had suggested. Ryan paused, thinking about something Chris had mentioned.

“Put the word out that we’re looking for her, make sure they call us first if someone meeting her description turns up. I have another idea, though. Let’s get some orange pins for the four other people Ms. Pascal identified as being specifically targeted by the unsub.”

Ryan waited while one of the analysts grabbed the pins to mark the locations of the four special victims.

All four victims lived within fifty miles of Fate, Georgia. Together, the red pin for Martha Cooper and the orange pins representing the potential victims made a rough circle around the town, as if the killer were spiraling closer and closer to his goal.

“He’s in Fate.” Ryan was damn near certain of it.

“Where does this new body fit, then?” Midaugh was holding a black pin.

The reason they’d called Ryan in was that they’d found a new body, this one bearing the same wounds as the rest. It had been found, still clothed, on a park bench in Rome, definitely outside the circle created by the other victims. There were other dissimilarities as well—the body had been clothed and the man killed had been homeless. Every other victim, with the exception of Martha Cooper, had had strong connections to family, friends, lovers, and even Martha had been on Facebook. This man, nothing. No Facebook profile, nothing.

He’d been on his usual bench, drinking, when a man had walked up with a knife. A surveillance camera on a nearby building had caught the slaughter. The unsub had attacked swiftly, viciously, slicing the victim’s throat first. The unsub had been wearing a hoodie and jeans, so they hadn’t gotten a good look at his face, and no other distinguishing marks could be identified.

“What did the coroner’s report say about the wounds on the rest of the victims?”

The GBI analyst who’d been coordinating between the coroner’s office and the task force looked up from his monitor.

“The unsub took his time on every previous victim. Cuts were made on the wrists and ankles first, then the knees, elbows, and finally the throat. Several of the victims died before their throats were cut.”

“He had to have somewhere private to commit that kind of crime. Odds are he has a van or a motor home, something that allows him to move easily and in private.” Midaugh was pacing now. “How’re we doing with the canvas and the roadblocks?”

An officer from the Rome PD spoke up. “So far nothing. They’re searching all vans and motor homes leaving Rome and the surrounding areas, but nothing so far.”