TWENTY-EIGHT

 

 

September 26th, 2016

Las Vegas, Nevada

 

AFTER THEY SAT there for a moment, they all ordered lunch and Andor joined them.

Lott and Annie told him about what had happened with Maxwell and his wife and all Andor could do was shake his head.

Julia had just been trying to figure out how Maxwell and his wife both could have vanished in Reno that quickly. It would be fairly easy to button down the roads in and out of Reno. So all she kept coming up with was that they never left Reno.

And the second time she heard herself think that, her stomach sank.

An impossible thought took over. She could remember numbers of missing women’s cases almost every week in Reno. Some resolved themselves, others were runaways, but many fit this pattern of women just vanishing in thin air and their cases going cold.

Could these three have also been working in Reno the same way Vaughan was working Las Vegas?

She took a deep breath and said, “I have a horrid thought.”

“At this point any thought is better than where we are at,” Andor said.

“I don’t think so,” Julia said. “I’m wondering why Maxwell, in a small town like Reno, with limited exits out of the city, could just vanish like he has done. And as his wife has done. And what that leads me to believe is that they have a place to go there that is off the books.”

“Makes sense,” Lott said.

Julia took a deep breath and went on. “What happens if these three have been doing the same thing in the Reno area all this time as well as down here?”

Silence.

“And maybe there is a woman involved with Paul as well, not just Paul dressing up as a woman. Four killers,” Julia said.

“Maybe more considering the two college kids of Maxwell,” Andor said softly.

“And we don’t know if Paul and another woman had kids either,” Julia said.

More silence.

So Julia took the idea to the last level. “Have men gone missing in the same way?”

Intense silence filled the booth, so intense that it seemed to even push back the sounds of the casino beyond the plants and café customers.

Extreme silence.

“Damn it all to hell,” Annie said and took out her phone.

She quickly had someone on the other end looking up relationships between types of cars missing with women and men missing in the Reno area and cars Maxwell had sold. She also had her tech people search for women and men in the Reno area who had gone missing on the same dates as the missing women in Vegas. And then she had them add in a search for missing men, twenty-two years old, in Las Vegas on those same dates.

She wanted them to do a preliminary search first, as fast as they could and get back to her before going deeper.

Julia hoped like hell she was wrong. But if she wasn’t, they had just barely scratched the surface of this ugliness.

And a lot more people had died over the years.