Strings of Fate (Mistresses of Fate) (5 page)

“She’s been dead all these years. Mark my words. Dead and gone.”

Chris felt tears sting and began breathing, slowly and deeply, in through her nose and out of her nose like an excellent. Fucking. Yoga. Instructor. Calm. Calm. Calm. Damn it.

6

RYAN HELMER GLANCED
up at the board where the faces of several women were pinned, along with their vital details, connections, the dates they’d been missing, and any other pertinent information. His ex-fiancée had never understood why he hated her scrapbooking hobby; the tiny cut-out pictures, neat hand-typed data—the organized cataloguing that went into the process of creating a scrapbook creeped him out. To be fair, he’d never told her that—he’d rarely told her anything about his work as an FBI agent—but as far as he was concerned, scrapbooking was a gentle cousin of the avocation performed by serial killers, stalkers, and homicide investigators.

Though he’d never shared his feelings with anyone in the department, the truth was that Ryan would have been content never to work another serial murder case. He’d been in the FBI for two years when his first serial murder case landed on his desk; a woman from Texas had kidnapped and murdered young girls after spending years pretending they were her daughters. When that case was finished, he’d moved to Georgia, partly because he wanted some distance from his family, and partly because he never quite got over the horror of seeing those little girls’ bodies. He’d avoided anything even related to serial murders until two weeks ago, when he’d received a call from an acquaintance of his in the Cherokee County Sheriff’s Office, Investigator Tyler Downs.

Downs had made the connection between a young woman named Amanda Hutchins, who was found naked in a ditch in a small town just outside of Rome, a town that didn’t have its own police force, and several other murders that had occurred in north Georgia over the past two years. Downs—no stranger to murder—had thought the precision of the cuts that had drained the blood from Amanda’s body bespoke practice, and he was right.

Further investigation revealed several other women killed in precisely the same way, with the same pattern of cuts, though there appeared to be no pattern to the killer’s selection of women, which ranged in age, but most of the victims were in their twenties or thirties, of all races. At least, the murders they’d discovered so far.

As soon as the task force was created, the media got wind of the case. When it was revealed that in several of the cases the man they suspected of murdering the women had been in communication with them through Facebook or online dating sites, the media had started calling him “the Boyfriend.” However, in each case the man had used a false identity to talk to the women. One profiler indicated that the language the man used ranged from awkward to charming, almost as if two different people had written it—which had led several members of the team to conclude that they might have two perpetrators.

Yesterday, subpoenas to get the financial records from Facebook, Twitter, and over four different dating sites had just landed on Ryan Helmer’s desk when a call came in from a woman named Jane Arrowdale of Fate, Georgia, a small town in Cherokee County with a reputation for oddballs.

She turned out to be one of the crazies, calling herself a member of a witch clan, but she did share one piece of information that Helmer felt was worth checking out, the name of a local woman, Christina Pascal, and her online “business.” For a fee, Ms. Pascal would create a fake persona and send emails, tweets, and posts according to her client’s specifications. This woman Jane claimed that Ms. Pascal was creating the personas that were being used to kill the victims.

Ryan had spent the entire previous day and now this morning trying to find out more about Ms. Pascal and any connections she may have to the killer.

“That Ms. Pascal?” The agent in charge of the task force, Scott Midaugh, dropped a packet of documents on Ryan’s desk and bent over to look at Ryan’s screen, where an image of Ms. Pascal’s driver’s license was on display. He whistled through his front teeth. “Pretty girl.”

Ryan grunted. He supposed she was pretty. She had broad cheekbones and catlike yellow-gold eyes, with thick brown hair that tended to curl. She was slender according to her weight and fairly tall, at five-foot-eight. Pretty, however, didn’t make up for strange and obsessive. In Ryan’s admittedly conservative mind, this girl was a lunatic. She had several online businesses, including the one she used to invent people, and was on the board of directors of a nonprofit named Once Was Lost, which dedicated itself to finding the missing. The president was a local woman named Tavey Collins, whose family had long owned a great deal of land around Fate and the rest of north Georgia, and whose hounds were used to track the missing all over the country.

Which meant, of course, that Collins had connections, and if Ms. Pascal was her friend, the FBI couldn’t just go beating down her door demanding answers.

“What have you found out about her so far?” Midaugh pulled up a chair.

Ryan rolled his shoulders; he felt like he’d been sitting at his desk for days; he’d done nothing but work and sleep. Broad-shouldered and tall, he generally worked standing up, as none of the desks felt big enough for him. But for this case he’d spent most of the time on the damn computer. He needed a run, but he didn’t want to let up now that he was on to something.

“I’m still waiting for the results of the subpoena of her Internet activity to come back, but I think this girl is the key to finding this unsub. If she’s not directly involved, then she definitely has information that could be helpful.”

“So what’s the problem?” Midaugh wanted to know. “We can head over to Fate today and have a conversation.”

“She has connections.”

“Ah.” Midaugh leaned back in his chair and waited expectantly for Ryan to elaborate.

Ryan pushed his chair back far enough that he could stretch out his legs, tapping his pencil restlessly on his thigh. “Tyler Downs, the investigator who called the case in to us, knows her. He called me this morning when he found out I was looking into her as a connection to the killer. He went to high school with her.”

“What did he say?”

“He said there is no way on God’s green earth she’s deliberately helping a serial killer.”

“No way?”

Ryan knew why Midaugh asked the question. Cops were hesitant to make blanket statements about what a person would and wouldn’t do—they just heard the same stories too many times, had seen too many people lose it and commit acts that their friends, families, acquaintances just couldn’t believe they’d done. Tyler Downs was a seasoned officer with an excellent reputation, even with the FBI. Ryan himself had worked with him on several cases; the guy’s opinion was worth taking into consideration.

“That’s what the man said. He told me to look into her work for the missing. She’s on the board of directors for the nonprofit that finds missing and exploited children, but she also actively works to find missing children by trolling social media. She’s apparently helped find missing children throughout the U.S.”

Midaugh eyed him. “You’re not buying it.”

Ryan ran a hand through his sandy red hair. It wasn’t that he didn’t buy it; he just thought that the woman was strange. At nearly thirty-five, she was unmarried. She lived alone in an apartment above her yoga studio, and apparently spent all her time obsessed with finding the missing. According to the nonprofit website, she and her two friends had started the nonprofit on behalf of their friend Summer Haven, who had gone missing in the fall of 1986 from the woods near Ms. Collins’s home.

“It’s not that—this girl just isn’t normal. I’d bet my truck this girl is our connection to the killer.”

“Any communication with this unsub since the media started in?”

“Nothing overt, but I sent what I knew about Ms. Pascal over to the analysts at the Behavior Analysis Unit. They think they’ve found a connection between posts on a local blog and Ms. Pascal. They’re supposed to be sending me an email this afternoon.”

“So we’re just waiting?”

Ryan nodded. “As fucking usual.”

7

“ARE YOU FINISHED?”
Joe asked the woman.

The application she was struggling to fill out wasn’t long or difficult, but her hands shook. He thought he should punish her, but he wasn’t sure. This was delicate work, much more difficult than simply taking her strings. He’d thought that this experiment would be life-changing, that he would somehow feel more, but now he wasn’t certain. Her strings were nearly gone. Only one remained, and that one faded and flickered the more he hurt her.

He turned away from her and went back to his conversation with a man who interested his Creator. Like all the others on the Undernet, the man hadn’t trusted him until he’d proven he belonged, so Joe had sent him the video he’d made of taking the strings from the rainbow-haired girl. He hadn’t sent a clear picture of his face—he was more careful than that—but simply having such a film, a film that so clearly showed the beauty of his work, was enough to earn him the trust of most citizens in the dark underworld of the Internet.

He didn’t trust them, not really, but they helped him on occasion, for a price. Before he’d found his Creator, the Undernet would help him find people with pretty strings, strings that he collected, hoping that just one more would soothe the biting emptiness that gnawed at him. But all that changed when he found his Creator.

She’d been fishing in a chatroom under the guise of a vague user profile, looking for predators trying to sell little girls, but that was years ago, before she’d learned what to write, what words to use. Her prey had slid away like a catfish into a mud hole.

Something about this new user, such an obvious misfit in that particular group, had struck Joe as curious. He’d traced her, found out her real name, and discovered, to his delight, that she could help him get what he wanted—more strings, beautiful strings, strings that would make him feel as he hadn’t felt for a long time.

Thinking of her prompted him to pull up another screen, one that showed a video feed into her bedroom. “What are you working on now?” he asked her quietly, though she couldn’t hear, wasn’t even there. She was teaching yoga class; he’d seen the students walk across the grassy circle in the center of town to the building where she lived. Old women parked in front of the building and walked inside, but there were three teenagers who walked across the circle from the library. He couldn’t always see their strings—they flickered in and out. He thought that was strange, but they didn’t hold his interest for long, not when his Creator was so close.

He talked to her sometimes, even though she couldn’t hear him. He scanned through her recent search history and pages. Most of them were connected to her search for the missing, but she’d also taken on more clients.

One woman wanted to seem like she had a boyfriend for her twenty-year high school reunion, so she had asked his Creator to forge a man who was tall, wealthy, and loved dogs.

Joe found it interesting that so many people wanted to pretend to be different than who they were, better in some way, even the people who seemed normal. He had tried to talk to people on his own, convince them to share their strings, but they wouldn’t—they thought he was strange, ran away from him. But his Creator helped him. She made people who seemed real. She gave them words, interests, and hobbies. It was so easy to just take those empty vessels for himself.

He glanced at the woman again. She’d finished her application and was sitting with her head bowed. If this experiment worked, he would try it again with his Creator. He would have her power, if nothing else, the power to create new lives, to cast out honeyed lies like a web, and wait for the flies to come.

8