Page 12 of The Killer She Knew

SEVEN

Durham, New Hampshire

Wednesday, October 9

1:50 p.m.

He’d been real.

As real as the marshal on her left.

“Campus police doesn’t have any reports of vehicles coming onto or leaving campus in the past hour other than the two officers the chief of police dispatched.” Ford aimed his flashlight beneath the third row of stadium seat desks and moved down the aisle. “And they’ve searched the building. Twice. There’s no sign of Dean Groves.”

“He knows this campus as well as they do.” There were any number of places he could’ve taken to hiding in. The university had an entire network of basements Dean had most likely taken advantage of. Leigh scrubbed at her face as thepit pit pitof rain continued against the window. There was no pattern in the rhythm, and it messed with her head. Her fingertips itched for something—anything—to pull her back into that calm spaceshe needed to think through a case. To help her put the pieces together. They’d started searching classrooms twenty minutes ago, but they wouldn’t find anything. Dean was too smart to hang around. “Maybe even better.”

He’d been here. Something had drawn him back to this campus, and there were too many parallels between Teshia Elborne’s death eighteen years ago and Alice Dietz’s last night to be a coincidence. The location of the body, the scent of bleach on the victims’ skin, the connection to this university, the similarity between the women’s appearances—it was all right there. Waiting for her to pin him as their primary suspect.

She closed the door to the closet she’d been searching in one of the amphitheater classrooms. Nothing but a broken overhead projector, a fire extinguisher long past its last inspection date, and four stacks of textbooks which had gone out of print before she’d graduated. She’d taken introductory psychology in this very room. If she thought hard enough about it, she’d admit it’d been the class that had changed her life. Compelled her to understand human behavior and why some people wanted others to hurt. Why an entire town of people she’d once loved and trusted had turned on her family. Turned out, the answer was pretty simple. Fear.

“We can have university police do another sweep.” Ford finished his search.

She turned to face him. At a loss. Everything that could’ve gone wrong in this investigation already had. How much worse would it get when storm winds peaked? Irritation spread fast and thoroughly, burning everything in its path. “It won’t do any good. He’s gone.”

“I read through the investigation report we got from Durham PD while waiting for maintenance to assess the generator. That murder that took place here eighteen years ago. Teshia Elbornehad been a student here,” Ford said. “You were a freshman, right?”

Something heavy and acidic settled in her throat. Leigh tried to focus on any other potential hiding spots in this room, but they both knew they were killing time until the storm let up. “I was.”

“I can see it now.” He cracked a smile, and she couldn’t help but pay closer attention to the effect it had on his face. The escape it provided from the reality of their situation. “Fresh-faced and eager criminology student Leigh Brody with the whole country waiting for her to come solve their most heinous cases.”

“Actually, I started out as a psych student. Ended up switching majors a few weeks into my first semester after one of my professors convinced me I had a talent for understanding the criminal side of human behavior.” She pictured that same professor sitting in the corner of the president’s office this morning, waiting for her to give him the attention he’d craved from her all these years. She climbed the stairs toward the classroom door at the top. While nearly two decades had passed, it felt like mere minutes since she’d been in this room. Ready to fix all the world’s problems. Starting with her brother’s. Then she’d realized no one would be coming to prove her father’s innocence. That she and her brother had to be the ones to advocate for him.

Hell, she hadn’t even thought about the fact her dad had probably tried to get a hold of her in the past few hours and couldn’t. Knowing Joel Brody, he’d already called the director demanding to know where she was. She could imagine the conversation all too easily. Mainly because it’d already happened several times in the seven months he’d been released from prison. “For a long time, I was determined to become a therapist.”

“I bet you would’ve been good at carving decorative wood bowls, if you’d put your mind to it.” Ford followed her into the hallway as they moved on to the next classroom, this one smaller than the last. “You seem like the overachiever type. Good at everything you do. Making the rest of us look like losers.”

She couldn’t argue. Despite the inefficacy of birth order theory and characteristics assigned each child in a family, she was the oldest child, and she’d taken the role seriously in any capacity she could. High academic achievement, parental responsibility, and perfectionism to the extreme. It was one of the reasons she latched on to patterns so easily. Patterns didn’t lie. They couldn’t be manipulated. Not like people. “My fifteen-year-old might disagree with you. Seems nothing I do is good enough.”

It’d been a slip. One she was regretting now. Letting Ford—a man she didn’t even know—have a glimpse into her personal life. But if there was one thing she’d learned over the months since joining the BAU team, it was she couldn’t do any of this alone. She was still standing here because she’d allowed people in. Her brother. Her father. Her best friend. Though, she wasn’t sure that last one counted anymore. Murder charges tended to change relationships.

Ford let her little revelation sit between them for a beat. Almost taken aback. “I didn’t realize you were a mother. Figured you were just kidnapping the teenager glowering behind you when you came out of the hotel.”

“If you ask her, I’m sure she’d agree,” Leigh said.

Ford’s laugh tightened something in her chest. “In all the media coverage of you over the past few years, there wasn’t any mention of kids. You would’ve been, what? Twenty, or twenty-one when you had her?”

He’d researched her?

“Something like that.” She forced herself to clear the next classroom. Leigh couldn’t put her finger on why she’d lied. Why she suddenly wanted to keep the specifics of her relationship with Ava to herself. It wasn’t that she didn’t trust Ford. But what she and Ava had was… hers. Forget the constant worrying, the attempted run-aways, the feeling she was doing everything wrong. Ava was… a bone-deep wish come true. The beginnings of the family she’d craved since she’d been seventeen years old and had lost everything and everyone she’d loved. She wanted the after-school snacks and shared secrets over popcorn her mom used to arrange for her and her brother. The family vacations that always ended up with someone having to pee by the side of the car with her mom holding up a blanket or towel to block other drivers’ views. She wanted to be the kind of mom who brought out Ava’s smile and courage, as her own mother had done for her. But Ava didn’t owe her any of that. If she was being honest with herself, all she could guarantee was safety and security and support. “Nothing in here.”

She and Ford moved through two more classrooms without luck. They’d almost reached the end of the corridor. They were running out of places to search, but Dean wasn’t here. As they walked, the silence between her and the marshal turned physical but not uncomfortable. “Any word from the medical examiner?”

Ford kept his head down. Focused on his feet while the entire campus threatened to unravel at the slightest touch. “They sent one of their techs over for an update when the wind died down for a bit. Alice Dietz’s autopsy is at the bottom of their priority list at the moment. Seems we’re on our own for now. Chasing ghosts.”

“She was hiding something from her roommates.” Leigh faced the exit she’d shoved through when running after Dean. Rain pounded the glass and created rivulets of water pooling beneath the door and working its way inside. Had he reallybeen there? Or had the connection to the past started playing tricks with her mind? Maybe she wanted him to be the one they were hunting. For closure. For the assurance she’d never gotten. Maybe the idea of him had slipped through her detachment to this place while she hadn’t been paying attention. “Alice was sneaking out in the middle of the night when she thought they were asleep. Hiding private messages. Acting paranoid.”

“Her phone wasn’t with her when she was found,” Ford said. “Fat chance of a judge signing off on a warrant for her phone records and financials until this storm passes. At this rate, we’ll be lucky if we don’t have a mutiny on our hands.”

“What about her laptop?” There had to be something alluding to Alice’s whereabouts since her disappearance. “Where’s her backpack? Her purse? What about her textbooks?”

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