and disappeared. Should he go after her?
No one appeared to be following her. The way she boogied across the yard and over the fence, he doubted she was hurt, at least not seriously enough to slow her process. She disappeared quickly. Perry weighed his options and turned toward the side garage door. He would inspect the Suburban. If he found anything suspicious around it, he would seek out a warrant. Possibly inspecting the inside of Franco’s home was in order, too.
Once again Perry put his hand on the doorknob to the side door of the garage. He stared at his reflection in the clear, dark glass but didn’t focus on it for long. This time, pushing his face up to the glass, he shaded it with his hand and stared inside the garage.
There was no vehicle in the garage. It was empty.
Too much time had passed to chase down the girl. Nonetheless, Perry drove around the neighborhood after returning to his Jeep, searching yards and looking for any sign of anyone. There wasn’t as much as a single soul walking along the sidewalks.
The clock on his dash told him it was almost one o’clock in the morning. He turned at the next intersection, realizing he headed toward Kylie’s home instead of his own. His cell phone rang and he jumped, grateful it hadn’t rung while he’d been alongside the garage. He’d forgotten to put it on vibrate.
“This is Flynn,” he said, his voice sounding scratchy when he answered the call from Dispatch. He was off duty and it was the middle of the night; there couldn’t be anything good coming from this phone call.
“Flynn, Lieutenant Goddard asked me to call you.” Cliff Miller, the dispatcher, spoke quickly and sounded out of breath, which he often did when he was upset. The guy never moved out of his chair at the station, but when an urgent matter came through the man would sound as if he’d just run a mile. “They found another teenager over on Antioch, near the mall.”
“Fucking hell,” Perry growled, understanding now why the Suburban wasn’t in the garage. Peter had been busy. “What is the exact location?”
Miller gave him the address. “Flynn, there is a situation, which is why Goddard wanted me to contact you personally.”
“What’s that?”
“He asked you to get there ASAP. He said it’s personal.”
Perry didn’t have a hard time finding the crime scene. After he turned onto Antioch, flashing lights from several police cars and an ambulance grabbed his attention. He pulled up and parked not too far from the crime scene tape and hopped out of his car. No one said anything when he climbed over the tape and walked over to Pete Goddard.
“What do we have here?” he asked Goddard, a decent cop who’d been on the force about as long as Perry had been.
Pete Goddard was fair complected, with strawberry blonde hair that was closely shaved to his head. He was tall and lanky and his uniform always looked as though it was half a size too big.
“It’s pretty ugly.” Goddard shifted his attention to a body, which lay crumpled up against the side of the building. “She had ID on her.”
“Oh, yeah?” Perry walked up to the girl, who didn’t look a day older than Dani, and stared at her half-nude and bloody body. “Who reported her?”
“Anonymous nine-one-one call.” Goddard moved in next to Perry, holding a clipboard and staring grimly at the dead girl. “We’ve cataloged all the personals found on her, which were basically a purse, a wallet with seventeen dollars on her, and makeup, along with a cell phone.”
“She wasn’t robbed.” Perry followed Goddard over to the back of Goddard’s squad car where Baggies were spread out in an open briefcase, already tagged and numbered and ready to be taken to the station. “What was her name?”
“Elaine Swanson.” Goddard sifted through the evidence Baggies and picked one of them out, then held it at eye level. “This letter indicates she went by ‘Lanie.’ ”
Perry glanced past the hood at the crumpled body, another teenager robbed of life before given the opportunity to really start living.
“And look at this—grades.” Goddard sounded disgusted, but it wasn’t from the report card he held up in another bag. Elaine, or Lanie, made all A’s and B’s. “She was a sophomore. My son is a junior, still a virgin, hasn’t been out on a real date yet. That girl was a child. To kill someone like her.”
His tone registered the anger radiating