44

Massachusetts

The interior of the sedan was redolent with the fried sugar-salt smell of McDonald’s mingling with Clancy Johnson’s Old Spice. If it were up to Stone, there’d be no fast food stops, no cologne you could buy from a drugstore shelf, no gum-chewing allowed in the car. But Clancy was still pissed at him for the double op in the Hawthorne Hotel lobby and Stone didn’t want to waste any more energy on Clancy.

He kept his thoughts to himself.

The lurid neon of the Holiday Motel sign didn’t quite reach their car parked tight to the abandoned gas station. Still, Stone kept his iPad on no-see mode, covered with an FBI-issue filter that gobbled up the light using reverse night vision technology. This allowed him to read in the dark with no telltale glow from the device. He was in the passenger seat. Clancy was behind the wheel, eyes on the door to room 11.

“The girls just got a pizza delivered. Four of ’em, it looks like. Any luck finding out who their two ragtags are?”

“Have you heard my phone ring?” It was out of character for Stone to snap at his partner. He kept emotions out of the business. It’d been a long two days, though, and Clancy knew better than him that the lab would call if they got anything on the photos they’d been sent.

Clancy grunted.

Stone never glanced up from his search, which, despite the high-end tech allowing him to use the device unseen in the dark, was research anybody with access to a free desktop at the library could do. He was looking for national, or at least Minnesota-local, news on the suspected kidnapping of Grace Odegaard and Vida Wiley.

Back in Minneapolis, he’d been relieved that the media hadn’t stumbled on the serial killer cases he and his team had been following for the last week, but since the Hawthorne Hotel lobby, he’d decided to get suspicious. His luck had never been that good. In fact, in his experience, if it looked like luck, you were missing something. So he’d started sniffing around the news sites. He’d located information on the five murders leading up to the Minneapolis case, but it was buried and too short for the murders of four white women.

Then he’d decided to see what a regular citizen could find out about the kidnapping of a successful realtor and a high-profile history professor in Minneapolis.

Turns out, nothing.

Not one peep on all of the Internet, though Mrs. Gladia’s murder had been reported.

Goddamn.

This went up high, up to someone powerful enough to muzzle the media and buy Stone’s partner. In this age of the Internet, where everyone with a phone had a camera and could find an online audience, that took bank and connections of a staggering scope. Stone pulled his eyes from the device and refocused them onto a spot about four feet in front of the hood of the car.

Goddamn.

Since the lobby, Stone had upgraded Clancy from neutral to enemy, which added another level of hassle to a situation that was already so far out of control as to be a joke if there weren’t lives at stake.

But what Stone knew that Clancy didn’t was that he’d finally received a break, the tiniest thread of hope that might lead out of this pit.

It had come moments earlier in the form of an email from a forensic scientist in the New Mexico Regional Computer Forensics Lab, the closest RCFL to the first murder and the location to which Stone had sent the hard drives and phones of all five murder victims.

She’d found something.

A connection.

Three of the victims—the New Age woman from Sedona, the Maine attorney, and the Nebraska farm wife—had all attended the same conference a month earlier, an all-female retreat in San Diego. He Googled the conference, called Women in Numbers.

The site was simple, consisting of a single page, soft blues and browns behind black lettering. The conference had been held October 1
and 2 in the Los Milagras Resort and promised two days of panels and breakout sessions designed to explore the role of women in history as well as their current role in politics, education, and the sciences.

The keynote speaker?

Dr. Vida Wiley.

A hot rush of triumph had pumped through Stone. Finally. He finally had a lead. The bottom of the page included an email address and a phone number, plus the tagline: Let’s Not Do Our Work Underground Anymore.

Bookmarking the page, Stone let his eyes drift back outside into the space of night. He thought his mother would have liked that, a group of women standing up and claiming what was theirs. She’d look up from the hamburger and noodles and canned peas she was pulling together for her two sons after a ten-hour shift cleaning houses, right before going to whatever floating part-time job she juggled to keep food in their bellies and a roof over her head, and she’d say, “Goodness, Luc, doing our work underground? We’ve been doing that shit right in front of your eyes for years. Just open ’em up.” Then she’d laugh that sweet, deep laugh that pushed aside every dark thought a person had ever entertained.

He’d give up his career, the one he’d scratched and fought and sacrificed for, just to hear that laugh one more time.

“They’re coming out,” Clancy said, starting the car. “They’ve got their bags and the pizza. Looks like they’re on the move.”