Fifty-three

5/6/2000

The plan had been to take both of them.

He wanted Rachel. He was angry with her, hated her for the way she treated him and he wanted to teach her a lesson. He wanted her to be his first.

I wanted Elena. I wanted her to know it was me who’d taken Melissa away from them. I wanted her to know who I was and what I’d done. I wanted to tell her the story of how I’d come so close to doing the same things to her sister a few years ago. She’d slipped through my fingers and gotten away, by some miracle. But miracles have a price and little Elena was going to pay it.

So we compromised.

Dizzy, Sabrina closed the journal for a moment, pressing her hand against the cover as if trying to keep it shut. Val. Oh God. How close had Wade come to taking her? To taking the one person in her life who’d known her. The real her.

Close, darlin’—real close. And if it hadn’t been for more pressing matters, I’d have done it too.

The memory came to her in a flash. The night Wade killed Andy Shepard for harassing her. “Almost as cute and twice as sweet,” Val had said, laying on a lazy southern drawl. “If he tips more than fifteen percent, I might offer to have his baby.”

He’d been there. In the diner.

Like fishin’ with dynamite, it was. She was just like the rest of them—practically jumped right into my boat. A few smiles and she’d been ready and willing to follow me anywhere …

Sabrina shook her head and reopened the journal.

We let them leave, deciding to follow them home because it was easier and it’d kill some time. We gave them a head start so by the time we made it to Rachel’s house they’d already be there but when we got there, Ellie was gone. They’d had a fight and Ellie decided she wanted to go home. I was angry but decided not to ruin Nulo’s fun. It was his first time, after all.

Talking Rachel into the car was easy. She wasn’t the good girl she pretended to be. She got into the back seat and we drove around for a while, drinking beer while we decided where to take her. Nulo wanted me to show him where I’d taken Melissa but I said no. It was a special place. Sacred. Hers and mine and I wasn’t going to share it, no matter how special the occasion was for him.

We finally settled on taking her back to the irrigation shed. It was secluded. In the middle of nowhere. Not perfect but it would do. No one would hear her screaming while I showed Nulo how it was done.

Her hands started to shake so she closed them around the journal in her lap, clamping down so hard on it her knuckles turned white. Everyone. Wade had planned on taking everyone away from her. Knowing that made her angrier than she’d ever thought possible.

“I’ve got a question for you.”

Sabrina looked up to find Santos standing in the conference room doorway, glaring down at her. He looked confused and angry as hell about it. She caught a glimpse of Alvarez, standing in the hallway, arms crossed over his chest, head tipped down. He looked uncomfortable. Like he didn’t want to be there. That made two of them.

“Okay, hopefully I have an answer,” she said, setting the journal aside before motioning for him to take a seat. He refused, obviously preferring to stand over her and glare. His use of classic interrogation techniques would have been amusing if she wasn’t so pissed off.

Who you so mad at, darlin’? It ain’t him and it ain’t me … not really. Could be you’re mad at yourself for letting our boy jerk you around by your nose?

“Yesterday, you and your partner show up and give us the standard we’re just here to help speech, and not more than twenty-four hours later”—Santos swiped a rough hand over his face before letting it fall to his side—“you hijack our interrogation without so much as a here, hold my jacket.”

Twenty years ago, he’d reminded her of a boxer and she saw it now, in his calculating gaze and tightly clenched jaw. “Well?” he barked at her when she didn’t offer an explanation or an apology.

“Well what?” she said, rocking back in her chair. “I’m still waiting for the question.”

His hands tightened into fists. “Okay. Here’s my question: what the fuck is going on?”

She didn’t answer him. Instead, she sighed, lifting the lid off the box before tipping it over, spilling out its contents. Journals. File folders. Discs housed in paper sleeves. 8x10 glossies. It all scattered and slid across the table and he watched it go with a look of confusion. “What’s all that?”

“It’s Wade Bauer’s murder box,” she said, her gaze drifting across the avalanche of filth that stretched in front of her. “He was active for nearly two decades and is thought to be responsible for the deaths of nineteen women. The evidence in this box raises that number considerably.”

Santos crossed the room, Alvarez trailing behind him, arms finally unlocked and hanging loose. He was carrying files. The same four files he’d been carrying yesterday—she could see the names across their tabs.

Santos pulled a pen out of his coat pocket to poke through the pile. “None of this is cataloged.” He turned to look at her. “Where did you get this?”

“A reporter bought it off Bauer’s wife for two thousand dollars,” she said, skirting dangerously close to the truth. “After an uncharacteristic crisis of conscience, he turned it over to me … and before you ask, I’ve had it for less than twenty-four hours, so, no—I wasn’t hiding it from you.”

“Has any of it been dusted for prints?” Alvarez said, leaning across the table to read the name off the front of one of the paper-sleeved discs. “Run through forensics?”

“What’s the point?” She shook her head. “We know who it belonged to. It was kept in a storage locker for the better part of two decades—a storage locker no one but Bauer knew about until his wife got notice that it was going to auction for nonpayment.”

“I appreciate the share, Agent Vance,” Santos said, lifting one of the journals with his pen to get a look at the one under it. “But I don’t understand what any of this has to do with our case.”

She stood, circling the table to lift a file folder off the table. It was thick, secured with a sturdy binder clip. She slapped it down on the table in front of him. “Love letters from our current whackjob to Bauer. Bauer wrote back. A lot.”

The confusion deepened, mingling with an odd sort of understanding. “You think—”

She shook her head. “I know. Wade Bauer was here,” she said, reaching over to lift the journal she’d been reading from where she’d dropped it. “And he taught our killer everything he knew.” She put the journal on top of the pile and watched Santos’s face drain of color when he read the name written across the front of it.

Rachel

“Is he in here?” he said, snatching it up to rifle through its pages. “Does Bauer mention Vega by name? If he does we can—”

“No.” She shook her head. “Wade’s careful. He never uses his partner’s given name. He probably didn’t even know it. His partner called himself Nulo.”

“Nulo?” Santos shook his head. “Not familiar. Alvarez?”

Alvarez stared at the table’s contents in disbelief. “No. Sounds like a street name.”

Sabrina cleared her throat before continuing. “As far as I can find, there’s no record of who this kid really is. The closest I got was the PO box used to send and receive the letters between him and Bauer, and that was leased and paid for by Graciella Lopez.”

“That’s why you went so hard at Vega.” Understanding bloomed across Santos’s face. “You think she took out the box for him.”

She let Santos recover from the evidence bomb she’d just dropped, turning her gaze toward Alvarez. “You’ve been carrying the same four files all day,” she said, her eyes drifting down to the collection of files clutched in his hand. “Why is that?”

“Well …” Alvarez gave her a sheepish look. “What you said the other day at Rachel Meeks’s crime scene got me thinking,” he said, smacking the stack of files against his fist. “Every victim was alive because they’d received some sort of miracle. That’s the—are you Catholic?”

She shook her head.

“I didn’t think so,” he said, that sheepish look intensifying into full-fledged embarrassment, tinged with excitement. He was on to something. “Well, we’re big on saints. We’ve got one for just about everything. And they aren’t born. They’re made.”

She looked down at the stack of files in his hand. Tried to grasp the string he was dangling. “You think this guy is making saints.” It wasn’t a question and she didn’t phrase it like one. “What does that have to do with them?” she said, jabbing a finger in his direction.

“Everyone in these files was in dire need of a miracle.” He tossed the first folder onto the table between them. “Sara Pike was born barren. She couldn’t have kids, no matter how many fertility experts she saw. Ed Sherman was paralyzed from the chest down in Iraq. Trudy Hayes was blinded in a boating accident. All of them disappeared a day or two before our victims but, unlike our vics, they’ve never been found.”

Before she had a chance to digest what Alvarez just said, Church popped her head through the doorway. “I’ve been going through missing persons. I think I found something.”