Page 96 of Love Me Fierce

“Yeah, that.”

“Why would Marin keep it?” Zach asks.

“Maybe he gave them to her? Send it with the phone and I’ll get our team on it.”

“One last thing from our visit,” I say. “Looks like Marin didn’t have the necklace before the day she was killed.”

“I think the key pendant is part of the killing ritual for him,” Ballard says.

How can someone this sick have the ability to function in real life, to the point he’s invisible to us?

“He places the pendant on the victim’s neck after death. There are no markings on the skin that would indicate it gets trapped there during the act.”

“Is the pendant for him, or for us?” I ask.

Ballard sighs. “Primarily for him. But he also enjoys the sense of superiority it gives him to leave the pendant for us to find. This is someone with severely crippled self-esteem. This killing ritual is his only source of power, the only way he feels any sense of accomplishment. He’s learned how to milk it for every ounce of pleasure he can get.”

I huff an impatient sigh. While I know the psychological angle is critical in our investigation, there’s a limit to how much of it I can tolerate.

“So how does the killer get his victims into place before he kills them?” I ask to get my head back in the game.

“One thing’s for sure, I think they go willingly. It would be extremely difficult for him to carry them that far, plus unless he takes extreme measures, we’d have his DNA on the bodies. Once inside a mine shaft, the killer has two things he needs. The first is privacy. Remember, he’s worked very hard to get his victim in exactly the right setting. He’ll feel justified in drawing out the ritual involved withkilling.”

“I can guess the second thing,” I say. “A mine can conceal a body.” The map of missing girls Ballard identified as possible murder victims flashes through my mind. There are probably thousands of abandoned mine shafts in our region. How many of them are at this very moment doubling as graves?

“Exactly,” Ballard says. “Once the ritual is satisfied, the killer wants to dispose of his victims as quickly and as permanently as possible. A mine shaft is ideal.”

“He had to have scoped out these mines ahead of time,” Zach says. “Too bad none of them have a visitor log.”

“Right. Unless someone notices this guy out traipsing around, we’ll never know he was there.”

I think about a killer going to all this trouble to satisfy some sick urge. It paints a chilling picture.

One we need to crush, once and for all.

“So, what went wrong with Marin?” I ask.

“One theory is she refused to go with him. You also had that surprise snowstorm. Maybe that messed up his plans.”

There are several abandoned mine shafts in Lost River Canyon, but we never found any evidence they’d been disturbed. It’s most likely the killer was headed to one of them, but we’ll never be sure.

“Another theory is that Marin tried to escape, and the killer panicked.”

Could this case get any more heartbreaking?“Forcing him to adapt.”

“Your forensic team found her blood on top of that overlook, but I think the killer took her life somewhere else.”

“Like inside his vehicle,” Zach says. “Or possibly out on that road.”

When we found Marin, we weren’t sure what we were dealing with. Ballard had yet to link her murder to the others. We did our due diligence in collecting evidence, but there was no way to search every inch of that dirt road and the parking area at Thrasher’s Corner after the snow and rain had turned it to mush.

What if we missed something?

An image of a terrified Marin running for her life in the snowy darkness fills my vision. I close my eyes, but I only see snowflakes caught in the killer’s headlights as he chases her down.

“If he used his vehicle,” Ballard says. “Her DNA will be all over it.”

“That only helps us if we get someone in custody,” I say. Teresa’s bullshit story filters into my mind, but I shake it off.

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