The Last Straw (The Jigsaw Files #4) - Sharon Sala Page 0,85
for him, or lock in on a vision. Except for a slight nausea just being in the energy, she got nothing, but she knew it was because the girls had never been here.
“We’re not going to find souvenirs or trophies of his conquests,” Wyrick said. “He’s too careful...and patient.”
“That’s for darn sure,” Mills said as he searched through the drawers of a dresser. “I’ve never worked a case where a killer waited so long between kills. And if you hadn’t caught on to those other women being missing, we would never have known Rachel was one of four.”
“He’s right,” Floyd said as he walked out of the bathroom. “But once we pulled those case files, little things began to add up.”
“How so?” Charlie asked.
“Oh. Right! We never did share what we learned as to why the cases on the other missing women were closed.”
Then Floyd began to explain about the carefully crafted letters that led each manager at Detter House to assume the missing woman had simply moved on to greener pastures.
“But when we compared the letters from each file, the writing on all three letters was the same,” Mills added.
Floyd nodded. “Right! And then, as we began backtracking, we also found out there was a different manager in charge at each time, so that when another woman went missing, there was no one to raise concerns about this happening before—no continuity to be tracked. And there were so many years between abductions, that the officers in Missing Persons never caught the location as being a hot spot for missing women...until Wyrick saw it,” Floyd said.
“Serial killers are often particular about attention to details. We need to look for some of Sonny’s handwriting,” Charlie said. “If it’s the same as what’s in the other files, that will be one more fact to add to your case against him.”
“He doesn’t have a study,” Wyrick said. “But there’s a small desk in the living room. We can look there. And if we don’t find anything here, we can always go to his office.”
They left the detectives in the bedroom and headed back to the front of the apartment.
“I’m going to check the kitchen first for handwriting...to see if he wrote a grocery list rather than putting it on his phone,” Charlie said, but there were no signs of lists.
Afterward, they went to the living room. Charlie headed straight to the desk, but Wyrick kept looking at the shelves of books. The titles told her nothing. They were a random assortment of fiction and nonfiction self-help books, and some on realty and flipping houses. There were no classics. No literature. And none of the books were in any kind of organization. They were just poked in the shelves without thought, almost as if they were there to fill up shelves...and hide something in plain sight.
The thought had come out of nowhere, and it startled her.
“Hey, Charlie...”
He paused, then looked up.
“Yeah?”
“We need to go through these books.”
“Really?”
She nodded and went to the bottom shelf on one side of the fireplace, started with the book at the end, pulled it out, leafed through it, then held it by the covers and shook it upside down.
Charlie followed her lead and started on the shelves on the other side of the fireplace. They were still going through books, and then tossing them on the floor, when Floyd and Mills walked in.
“What’s going on?” Floyd asked.
Wyrick shrugged. “Just following a gut feeling.”
“We’ll help,” they said, and soon all four of them were pulling books from the shelves and shaking them out before tossing them aside.
When they got to the top shelves, nobody could reach them but Charlie. So he began pulling down books and handing them to the trio below to search. He had just grabbed a handful and as he was pulling them down, a book that had been hidden behind them fell flat onto the shelf.
“Uh-oh,” Charlie said and handed Floyd the books.
“What?” Wyrick asked.
“There was a book behind those. It just fell.”
“What is it?” Wyrick asked.
Charlie felt along the shelf until it was beneath his fingers, then pulled it out and frowned.
“Weird. The Velveteen Rabbit is a kid’s book.”
“Is it? I’ve never heard of that,” Wyrick said and held out her hand. “May I?”
Charlie hid his shock as he handed it to her. Wyrick had never heard of The Velveteen Rabbit? And then he watched as she opened the cover and touched the inscription inside with a kind of reverence.