to Hartsman and not the police. An oddity, though the IP address turned out to be untraceable. Same with the phone, which was apparently a throwaway.”
“And of course, no way of knowing if Hartsman saw this.”
“No, though that was the first and last message.”
“Meaning?”
“Meaning if Hartsman did see it and contacted that person before we did, the message writer could have given him a different contact number and ditched the original. But again, that could be nothing more than some attention-seeking kid whose mom subsequently took away his Internet access. I have a hundred similar loose ends in that folder.”
Reed frowned. “Huh,” he murmured. Still . . . weird.
“Like I said, Reed, I have no evidence he’s been in the country in years. And no reason for you to worry.”
Unless he’s gotten better at hiding, Reed thought. But he pushed the idea aside. He refused to live his life in fear of the man. Even now.
**********
It was raining by the time he made it back to the office. He’d started heading home after leaving Josie and Zach’s, but couldn’t stand the thought of returning to his dark, empty apartment when he still felt wired. Troubled. So instead, he’d turned toward the building where he worked with the other Cincinnati police detectives. He needed a distraction. And there was still Lakeside Hospital footage to go through.
He hadn’t brought up the case after he and Zach had discussed Charles Hartsman. Reed had been distracted and frankly, he’d wanted to leave and chew privately on the information Zach had revealed. He still wasn’t entirely sure how he felt.
So yeah, he’d let this new information simmer and in the meantime, he’d turn his attention to checking through those tapes. He had a feeling they wouldn’t find anything—a gut instinct that whoever had committed the crime knew exactly how to sidestep being caught on camera—but the victim deserved due diligence, even if finding anything was a long shot.
Reed spent the next hour watching empty hallways, and confirming what he’d suspected—they had a cleverly orchestrated, not random, murder on their hands.
He rubbed at his eye, thinking about Liza Nolan and that seven-minute stairwell trek. He tapped his fingers mindlessly on his desk for a minute before clicking on the camera that faced the door that she’d exited that morning. He also pulled up the camera that faced the exterior door where she’d entered the building.
He watched it again, her entering the exterior door, and then seven minutes later, exiting the door in the hallway where, if he’d let it play a few more seconds, she’d turn and see Steven Sadowski’s mutilated body. Instead, he paused on her, staring at her frozen face, considering her expression, the way she held her body.
“You’re terrified,” he whispered. “Of what?”
He stared at her still image a moment longer and then rewound the video again, this time pulling both images up side by side and watching them play simultaneously. He watched Liza enter the building, and something caught his attention on the closed door of the upper floor. He rewound it, watched it again. “What in the world?” he muttered. A chill traveled down his spine. What did that mean?
“What were you doing, Liza?” he asked the mostly empty room.
His phone rang, startling him.
“Hello?” he snapped.
“Yo,” Ransom said. “Are you at home?”
“No, I’m at the office. Going through video.”
“Oh.” He sighed. “Welp. Put that aside and get down to McMicken and Nagel. I’m on my way now. A DOA just got called in. The eyes are missing. They appear to be filled with a black substance.”
Shit.
CHAPTER TWELVE
The entire block was lit up. Police lights rotated like strobes, causing the fog to pulse an eerie muted red.
A crowd of civilians had already gathered, a motley looking crew of those who conducted their business in the hours between dusk and dawn and not the other way around. There was a whole segment of society that woke up once most folks had long gone to bed for the night. Some were good, some were not. Most were just trying to survive.
“Hey, Ransom! Ransom!” a skinny girl with tall boots and a short skirt called. “Ransom, I know that guy,” she said. “The one in the alley.”
Reed walked behind Ransom as he approached the girl. “Yeah? Who is he?” he asked, gesturing for her to step aside.
She did, walking unsteadily on her high heels. She glanced around her but everyone’s focus seemed to be on the crime scene crew working around a prone figure down