Page 79 of A Step You Shouldn't Take

“Neither did I. Did you get the files?”

“Yeah.” He gingerly touched his nose. “There’s another seven possibles going back three and a half years.”

“Fuck. I thought maybe one or two…”

“If this is true, we could be looking at the most prolific serial killer in decades around here, and he’s flown right under our radar. I haven’t said anything at work yet, but I’m gonna need to go through your evidence so we can decide how to proceed.”

Right. All that evidence we didn’t have. I’d deal with that later, after I’d seen Wyatt’s files.

“Sure. I’ve made dinner. We can eat while we talk.”

“You’re still into all that cooking shit?”

“Gotta eat, buddy.”

Wyatt rolled his eyes at the sushi, but he still helped himself to a ton of it. Kim lined hers up daintily on a plate and ate it with a knife and fork while we talked.

“I searched the database for any case where a girl in her twenties went missing from a public place in the last five years and hasn’t been seen since,” Wyatt said.

“Five years?”

“It’s a starting point. He may have been active for longer, but right now, we need to find clues and witnesses so we can stop this guy, and that’ll be harder for older disappearances.”

“Okay, five years. There have to be more than seven unsolved cases in four states.”

“Maryland, Virginia, Pennsylvania, Delaware, and I included DC too. Although if that’s where he’s from, it would be risky for him to hit so close to home. That gave me a list of twenty-seven. But I filtered out working girls, daytime abductions, and any locations that didn’t have a parking lot close by. That fits with what we know so far.”

“So who have we got?”

Wyatt pulled a stack of files out of his bag.

Gina.

Dawn.

Isla.

Emma.

Georgette.

Jacqueline.

Hailee.

Brianna.

Danielle.

Kimberly.

Tamara.

Seven plus the four we already knew about. Suddenly, I didn’t feel so hungry anymore. Instead, I slid the first file towards myself and began reading. Brianna Clifford had vanished late one evening after filling in for a friend as a cocktail waitress at a racetrack in Virginia. An afternoon of horse racing followed by evening drinks, canapés, and live music for anyone rich enough to afford a ticket.

The switch between Brianna and her friend had been a last-minute thing, suggesting her abduction wasn’t premeditated. Colleagues reported no difficulties, no arguments, no complaints about her work that day. Quite the opposite, in fact. Brianna had been a pretty brunette who’d proven popular with the partygoers. Another waitress commented that Brianna had picked up more tips than anyone else. Police speculated that the cash could have been a factor in her disappearance—a robbery gone wrong—but no body had ever been found.

I discounted Danielle, whose boyfriend had disappeared at the same time, and Tamara, because the investigator’s notes suggested a neighbour had been a serious suspect in the case before he committed suicide. That left five new possibilities. Nine women in total who’d gone missing in strange circumstances, and one man we suspected of having a hand in those disappearances. The question was, how did we find him?

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