Page 91 of We Are All Guilty Here

Jude flipped down the visor so she could look at him in the mirror. “Sweetheart, are you googling me?”

Emmy caught Cole’s flash of guilt in the rear-view.

“Mom,” he said. “It says she captured Freddy Henley.”

Emmy had watched the Pinnacles Killer docuseries with Dylan last year. “There were no women on that case.”

Jude said, “Not every cop wants to be interviewed.”

Emmy turned onto Main Street. “Especially if they’re supposed to be dead.”

“True, but he would’ve stopped talking to me if I’d become more famous than he was.” Jude looked back at Cole in the mirror. “Maps and mistakes. That’s what caught Freddy Henley. That’s what catches a lot of these guys. Ted Bundy was stopped on a moving violation. Son of Sam got a parking ticket. BTK used the wrong computer. It’s not that investigators are particularly clever. It’s that the bad guys panic and make stupid mistakes.”

Emmy could tell she had Cole’s interest. He asked, “What about the map part?”

“Freddy’s third victim was abducted inside Pinnacles National Park. The rest were abducted from areas around UC Santa Barbara, which has one of the top geology departments in the country. Pinnacles is a remarkable geological site. The park is split in two by rock formations. There’s a west gate and east gate, but the roads don’t connect. The caves on the east side are closed to protect the bat population, but the ones on the west side are open. You following?”

“Yes.” Cole wasn’t just following. He was hanging on her every word. “The west side is more isolated.”

“Right, so if you want to hide a body, you choose the west entrance. The parking area leads to flat hiking trails. Easier to get in and out, lots of cover, less effort on your part. From mid June to early September, it’s too hot to climb, which means the west area is sparsely populated, but you don’t want to be the only person there, right?”

“Right,” Cole agreed.

“I checked the weather patterns, figured out the best monthsand times to visit, cross-referenced those times to the abductions, then talked to every person who had a connection to both the university and the park who’d visited during the optimal time periods going back to the late eighties.”

Cole looked astonished. He’d done his share of door knocking on patrol. “How many people was that?”

“Nine hundred and twenty-eight.”

“You talked to all of them?”

“I got lucky at 649.” Jude’s smile said there was a hell of a lot more to the story. “One day, I knocked on Freddy’s door and he confessed.”

“Just like that?”

“A little like that.” Jude hedged. “It’s lonely being a serial killer. There’s not a lot of people they can talk to about their hobbies.”

Emmy saw the corner of Cole’s mouth lift in a smile.

He asked, “Are you a profiler?”

“The Behavioral Sciences Unit already had its token number of women when I joined. I’m a criminal psychologist. My focus is on missing and kidnapped children. It’s your turn, sweetheart. Paisley Walker. I’ve already got the timeline. What do we think we know?”

Emmy felt gut-punched by the question, which she’d only ever heard from her father.

Cole didn’t skip a beat. “Paisley’s kidnapping is similar to the kidnapping of Cheyenne Baker, which is linked to the kidnapping of Madison Dalrymple. Abandoned bike on the backroads. Damaged rear tire. Blood at the scene.”

“Are we sure Paisley was kidnapped?” Jude asked. “Technically, a kidnapping occurs when a child is separated from his or her parent. An abduction is when the child is removed and held against their will.”

Emmy bit her lip. She didn’t need this woman schooling her son.

Cole asked, “Are you saying maybe the parents took her?”

“The father was having an affair. The mother could’ve staged the kidnapping for revenge. Or Elijah could’ve staged it to give himself leverage over Carol. Or there could be someone else in the father’s life who took her.”

Cole started nodding his head. Emmy felt her eyes wanting to roll. This woman was some kind of witch. Fewer than five minutes had passed, and Cole was already in her thrall.

Cole asked, “What if it’s a serial killer, though?”

---