The Silent Wife (Will Trent #10) - Karin Slaughter Page 0,146

the hair stuff? And the stalking?”

“Yes.”

“Which cases did he show you?”

Will hedged, “Which cases do you think he showed us?”

“I need to start from the beginning.” Miranda turned the phone sideways and angled it so that both Will and Faith could see the screen. “Okay, so here’s the original Excel spreadsheet showing all the raw data I sent to Gerald. My search criteria was women missing in Georgia over the last eight years. It took days, sometimes weeks and months, even a year, to track down what happened after they were reported missing. We are talking thousands of hours of my time to gather this into a searchable database.”

Will said, “Keep going.”

“This cell tells you what happened to them.” She flicked her finger across the screen to a new column. “The majority of the women showed back up, which is common. Women just need a break sometimes. The rest of them ended up getting arrested for drugs or whatever, a few of them were in women’s shelters because their husbands were abusive. Some never came back, but maybe they left the state or ran off with a boyfriend. But a small number of them turned up dead. Look at this column.”

Faith read, “Joan Feeney. Pia Danske. Shay Van Dorne. Alexandra McAllister.”

The same names that Faith had weeded out from Gerald’s list.

Will said, “According to Gerald Caterino, there were more victims than what you have in the columns.”

“He was wrong. I swear, he was just seeing what he wanted to see. I bet he never showed you my total list here.” She swiped the screen again. “This cell has the October abductions over the last eight years. This has the March ones. Gerald dismissed a lot of the names I gave him because he either couldn’t get in touch with the family, or they didn’t report hearing about a missing hair item, or the victims never reported that they felt like they were being stalked. But I thought a few of the women belonged on the list because they fit the other criteria.”

Will saw an imperceptible shift in Faith’s features. She was reading ahead. She knew Miranda was onto something.

Will asked, “What about the other criteria?”

“Like I said, they all disappeared in the morning, sometime in the last week of March or the last week of October. Except for Caterino and Truong, they were going about a fairly predictable routine—on a run, heading to work, hitting the supermarket or drugstore—when they were abducted. Then, however long later, they were all found in the woods, off the official path, with their bodies mutilated in what the coroners chalked up to animal activity.”

“Chalked up?” Will asked.

“We’ll never know, because no autopsies were ever performed.” Miranda said, “This serial killer is clever and he knows the system. He’s spreading the victims across jurisdictions the same way Bundy did. He’s torturing them like Dennis Rader. He’s extremely methodical, the same as Kemper. He’s smart enough to leave them out where animals will get to them. I don’t know, maybe he’s got some kind of twisted idea of Wiccan or Druid religion? This smacks of animal sacrifice, but where the animals get to eat the humans.”

Will thought she had gone off the rails, but he wasn’t going to correct her.

“Give me that.” Faith grabbed Miranda’s phone away. She started typing. “I’m emailing this spreadsheet to myself.”

“Good,” Miranda said. “Because I need help. I can’t get the information I need to make the final connection.”

“What information?”

Miranda held out her hand for the phone.

Faith made sure the email had gone through before she turned it over.

Miranda tapped to a different tab on the spreadsheet. “Beckey was the first victim eight years ago in March. But she lived, so he took another victim, Leslie Truong, and murdered her. Then in November of that year, another victim showed up in the woods surrounding Lake Lanier in Forsyth County.”

Will recognized the details. “Pia Danske.”

“Right. Danske was reported missing the morning of October twenty-fourth. She was found dead two weeks later. Her body showed signs of animal mutilation.”

Will knew all of this was already public record. “What else?”

“Okay, so, Beckey was his first victim. We can all agree that the killer started eight years ago, right?”

Will nodded, because she didn’t know about Tommi Humphrey and if it was up to him, she never would.

Miranda continued, “Since then, we have two victims a year. Multiply that times eight and a half years. Add in Beckey and Leslie and that equals nineteen victims total.