begin to agree.”
I wasn’t sure she was wrong.
I grabbed a cup of barely passable coffee from the breakroom before I headed for my office. I ran down my mental to-do list as I walked, organizing my thoughts. The impending hurricane meant it was going to be a very short workday, and I had a lot I wanted to accomplish.
First on the agenda was to research the bejesus out of Delilah Rose. While it was easier back in the eighties to just disappear without a trace, I had a hard time believing she’d managed to stay off the radar for this long. Eventually, people let down their guard and made mistakes. Maybe they contacted family members, or risked crossing a well-guarded border… even lingering in one place too long could be a colossal error. Delilah couldn’t have just dropped off the face of the earth.
If Kane was telling the truth—and that was a big fucking if—then he hadn’t gotten a chance to finish his work. Delilah was probably supposed to be number twelve, the crowning achievement of his garden, but she’d flown the coop first. Maybe she’d gotten wind of what he was doing in their basement. Perhaps she’d already known and found out he was saving the best for last.
Of course, all my theorizing could be moot, and she could be buried with the rest of his macabre collection.
I opened my office door and stopped short, wholly unprepared to find the room occupied. For the first time in recent memory, I wished it was a fucking ghost. Instead, Lieutenant Tate had her back to me, arms crossed as she stared at my whiteboard. It was a timeline of Kane’s crimes over thirty years, complete with photos of his victims.
She didn’t turn around, so I directed my look of disbelief at her back. “I just started.”
“And you’re already in trouble.” She shook her head. “I know. I’m a little shocked myself. It’s like you’re predestined to be on my shit list.”
I hung my attaché case on a hook on the back of the door and then sank onto my chair. I took three more long sips of coffee before I was ready to face what she might have to say. “All right,” I finally said. “What’s the problem?”
“Where do I start? The problem is you putting a spotlight on this department. The problem is you doing more favors for the fucking FBI. The problem is you digging up three murders—solved murders, mind you—and a missing person case on the ruminations of a goddamned serial killer.”
Goody-goody gumdrops, she had a list all cued up. “That’s a lot of problems,” I murmured.
“So it is.”
She turned to stare at me. Her dark hair, formerly in a signature pixie cut, was now a riot of microbraids that she’d pulled up in a neat bun. The hairstyle suited her face, as did the thin, filigree hoops that dangled from her ears. She looked quite fetching. I didn’t dare mention it, though, because I had no desire to be kneed in the groin.
I didn’t know which issue she wanted me to address first, so I went with the most obvious. “Kane claims he didn’t kill his wife. He also said he didn’t kill three of the women on that board, and I think I believe him.”
She glanced at the whiteboard and then back at me. “Well?”
“Well, what?”
“Do you know who the three are yet? Or are you just going to keep sitting here with your thumb up your ass?”
I gritted my teeth as I pointed to the left side of the board. “I circled them in red. Lana, Ivy, and Rosy.”
“Why did you mark their pictures before you even talked to him?”
“They broke his pattern,” I said with a shrug. “There was a thirteen-year gap between these three murders and the others. That’s almost unheard of as a cooling period. Ivy, Lana, and Rosy were also his youngest victims by far, in the twenty to thirty age range.”
“And if you take them out of the mix?”
“Then the range of his other victims was between forty and fifty, possibly surrogates for the rage he had against his mother. The three later killings polluted the victimology. The FBI considered them as just crimes of opportunity, but it makes much more sense that they weren’t actually his victims.”
“But he was the last person to see his wife.” It wasn’t a question.
“That we know of.”
“And the families of the copycat victims received a dozen roses, seven days after the abduction.”
I answered