Dana shook her head in confusion, hoping she wasn’t wasting her time with this line of thinking. Still, even though she didn’t know why the watch bothered her, she just knew that it did. Bothered her in a big way, as a matter of fact. A cop’s instinct, she supposed – a sixth sense. Call it whatever you wanted, but she’d followed far too many of her gut feelings directly to a murderer’s doorstep to simply ignore it altogether.
Besides, flimsy lead or not, at least it was some sort of lead. She’d gone on much less during the Cleveland Slasher investigation, not to mention a lot of other cases she’d investigated in the past. So it was important that she didn’t ignore any possible roads here, no matter how unpromising those roads might seem. Sometimes it was the seemingly innocuous details that cracked a case wide open.
Dana stretched her neck again and punched in Gary Templeton’s number on her cellphone. As big of a deal as a bank robbery might be, this was even bigger. A possible killer who’d been caught on video was on the loose out there somewhere in Cleveland and Dana needed Templeton’s help to track that person down. Now. And if they split up the responsibilities, they could probably get twice the amount of work done in the same length of time. Dana also wanted to hear Templeton’s thoughts on why he might think the woman in the video had called her out by name. Maybe he could make sense out of this mess. Lord knew she couldn’t.
Dana gritted her teeth when Templeton didn’t answer his phone. No doubt he was up to his elbows in crime already working the bank robbery. Dana sympathised with him, but sympathy didn’t catch killers. Still, a cop’s life never seemed to get any easier, whether you were FBI or Cleveland PD. No matter how many cases you solved, no matter how many bad guys you put away, for each case you put to bed there were always twenty more unsolved cases staring you dead in the face at the end of each exhausting workday. Mocking you. Daring you to try to solve them.
Dana closed her eyes and flipped shut her cellphone, wishing like hell Jeremy Brown were around for her to bounce some ideas off. Jeremy had been a damn fine investigator, one of the finest Dana had ever known in her entire career. He’d have had plenty of ideas concerning the mystery woman in the video. But Jeremy wasn’t around any more. Not now and not ever again. He was dead and rotting six feet beneath the ground in a cemetery out in Los Angeles. All thanks to Dana and her supposedly sterling work in the FBI.
Dana shook her head. You reaped what you sowed.
With Templeton already busy with his own problems, Dana realised she’d be puzzling out this one on her own until further notice. No big surprise there, though. She’d jumped into this case willy-nilly from the start, hadn’t stopped to think things through properly or ask for backup, which protocol clearly dictated. So alone was exactly the way she deserved to be working.
Dana let out a slow breath. There’d been a time in her career not too long ago when she’d actually preferred alone, but those days were long gone now. In the past, she’d often found that doing most of the work for herself actually made it easier for her to get the job done when the pressure was on. When you worked alone, there was nobody else was around to get in your way, nobody else around to slow you down, nobody else around to send you off on wild-goose chases that rarely – if ever – panned out.
Dana went to the sink and twisted on the warm-water tap before pumping some fruity-smelling hand soap into her palm from the plastic dispenser positioned above the sink. She felt dirty, like she just couldn’t get clean for the life of her. But where lay the big surprise in that? When you’d spent as much time as Dana had chasing the lowest common denominators of humanity through the gutters of life, some of that filth was bound to rub off on you.
As Dana dried off her hands with a wad of industrial-strength paper towels, her heart nearly exploded inside her chest when door to the bathroom suddenly flew open with a violent bang.
Dana whirled around. Her gaze went automatically to Nancy Lawson’s