The sun had set long ago by the time Asher, Faith, Grayson and Police Chief Russo ended up in UB’s second-floor, glass-walled conference room to discuss the day’s harrowing events. Asher glanced down the table at the power play happening between Russo and Grayson. Across from him, Faith gave him a “what the heck is going on” look. Just as confused as Faith, all he could do was shrug his shoulders.
Russo thumped his pointer finger on the tabletop, his brows forming an angry slash. “Six bodies, Grayson. Your investigators led my team to the graves of six people. I want to know how that happened and who the hell their suspect is, right now. I don’t want to wait for them to cross their t’s and dot their i’s in a formal report. The media’s already all over this and I need something to tell them. Make your investigators turn over their files to my team so we can run with this.”
Grayson leaned forward, his jaw set. “And this is why I refused your request for Asher and Faith to go to the police station. You’d be grilling them with questions as if they were criminals. Treat them with respect or the next person you’ll speak to is Unfinished Business’s team of lawyers. And you won’t get one more word about what UB has, or hasn’t, found in relation to this cold case.”
Faith cleared her throat, stopping Russo’s next verbal volley. “Can we please bring down the temperature a few degrees? We all want the same thing, to figure out why our belief that Jasmine Parks was buried on that mountainside turned into the discovery of a serial killer’s graveyard. Because that’s exactly what we’ve got here, a serial killer. No question. And now that his personal cemetery is all over the news, we have to expect he’s already switching gears and making new plans. He could change locales, go to another county or even another state and start killing again—unless we work together to stop him.”
“Unfinished Business will do everything we can to bring the killer to justice,” Grayson said, still staring down Russo. “But if Gatlinburg PD can’t be civil, we’ll continue this investigation on our own.”
The staring match between Russo and Grayson went on for a full minute. Russo blinked first and sank back against his chair as if exhausted. He mumbled something beneath his breath then scrubbed his face, which was sporting a considerable five-o’clock shadow.
Grayson, on the other hand, seemed as fresh as he had when he’d first stepped out of his Audi this morning. He could use a shave, sure, but there wasn’t a speck of lint on his suit and the stubble on his jaw gave him a rugged look that appeared more planned than accidental.
Asher didn’t know how his boss always managed to look so put-together no matter what was going on around him. Kind of like Faith. She, too, looked fresh, as beautiful as always, while Asher’s suit was rumpled and his short dark hair was no doubt standing up in spikes by now. Russo was just as bad, maybe worse. He seemed ready to drop from the stress of the unexpected discoveries in his jurisdiction.
The chief held up his hands as if in surrender. “Okay, okay. I may have been too harsh earlier.”
“May have been?” Grayson shook his head. “You practically accused Asher and Faith of being the killers.”
Russo winced and aimed an apologetic glance at the two of them. “I didn’t mean to imply any such thing.”
“Russo,” Grayson warned.
“Okay, all right. At the time, the implication was on purpose. It seemed impossible that you two could have stumbled onto something like that without some kind of firsthand knowledge. Still, I know you both better than to have gone there. It was a knee-jerk reaction. My apologies.” He frowned at Grayson. “Talk about overreacting, though. You sure are touchy tonight.”
“With good reason. I cut short a visit with my little girl to come back here. And then the police chief acts like a jerk instead of being grateful that Asher and Faith’s hard work is going to bring closure to six families who have never known what happened to their loved ones.”
Russo’s expression softened. “I’m glad you’re finally getting to establish a relationship with your daughter after thinking she was dead all these years. How old is she now?”
Grayson still seemed aggravated with his friend, but his voice gentled as he spoke about Lizzie. “She’s about to become a precocious, beautiful, nine-year-old. And she’s delighted to have two sets of parents around for her upcoming birthday. Twice the presents.”
The chief laughed. “I imagine it will be far more than twice with you as her dad.”
“Actually, no. Willow and I have come to a co-parenting agreement with Lizzie’s adoptive parents. They didn’t know she’d been abducted when she more or less fell into their laps as a baby. And they raised her all this time, giving her a loving, secure home. I don’t want to upstage them or even try to replace them. Willow and I are being careful about not trying to outdo them in the gift department so that we don’t unduly influence her toward us because of material things. We want her to stay grounded and continue to love the Danvers and, hopefully, grow to love us as well. But not by trying to buy her affections.”
“You’re a better man than me. I’d use every advantage at my disposal to win my little girl over, including suing her foster parents for custody. But I sure do admire that you’re putting her interests above your own.”
Grayson’s mouth twitched in a rare smile. “If you’re trying to soften my disposition with flattery, game well-played. I can’t stay mad at you for long. Too much water under that bridge.” He motioned to Asher and Faith at the other end of the table. “It’s getting late and every one of us will be besieged tomorrow by reporters and families of missing persons wondering whether their loved ones are among the dead who are still being dug up on that mountain. Asher, Faith, just answer the chief’s main question now and we can reassemble bright and early tomorrow to brief his team about the rest of the investigation. Does eight o’clock work for you, Russo?”
He nodded. “I’ll limit my entourage to two of my best detectives and one crime scene tech so we can all fit in your conference room with your full team. Appreciate the cooperation.”
Grayson nodded as if the two of them hadn’t come close to blows a few minutes earlier.
Asher glanced at Faith, silently asking for her help. He couldn’t remember the chief’s main question at this point.
She took mercy on him and filled in the gap. “The chief wants to know how we knew where to dig.”
“Right. Thanks. I got lost there for a minute.”
“That’s why I work with you. To keep you straight,” she said, deadpan.
“And I appreciate it.” He winked, earning another eye roll and a quick wave of her hand, signaling him to hurry up.
“The best answer to your question, Chief, is that it was geographical profiling. But it wasn’t traditional profiling. We only had one victim to work with, not sets of data from several different victims. We couldn’t extrapolate and come up with a good hypothesis of where the killer might live, which is traditionally how we’d use geographical profiling. Instead of focusing on what we did, or didn’t, know about the killer, we created a geographic profile of our victim. We found out everything we could about her and built complex timelines for what she did every day in the three months before she disappeared. It was a painstaking process and involved performing dozens of interviews of just about anyone who’d known her.”
Russo and Grayson were both sitting forward, looking as if they were about to pepper him with questions that would probably have them there until midnight. Hoping to avoid an inquisition, Asher hurried to explain.
“Our goal, initially, was to determine Jasmine’s routine and mark all of the spots that she frequented on a map, from her home, to her work, where she bought groceries, where her doctor and dentist were, friends’ homes, movie theaters she favorited—”
“You’re talking victimology,” Grayson said.
Asher was always impressed with how much his billionaire businessman boss and former army ranger had picked up on police procedures since starting his cold case company a few years ago. Back then, he’d had one purpose—to find out who’d murdered his first wife and what had happened to their infant daughter who’d gone missing that day. And he and Willow—a former Gatlinburg detective—had done exactly that. In truth, his knowledge of police procedures rivaled both Asher’s, as a former Memphis detective, and even Faith’s, who’d received numerous commendations as a detective in Nashville.
“Victimology, exactly. We’d hoped to zero in on the locations in her routine that would lend themselves the most to allowing an abductor to take her without being seen—which, of course, is what we believe happened. We came up with three most likely locations. From there, we worked as if we were the bad guy, scouting each one out to see how we would have kidnapped someone in that area and where we might have taken them.”
Grayson frowned. “Maybe it’s my lack of law enforcement background. But this isn’t making sense to me. Not yet anyway.”
Faith exchanged a nervous glance with Asher before jumping into the conversation. “What Asher’s saying, in his adorably convoluted way, is that we came up with one main potential crime scene for the abduction as our working theory.”
Asher grinned, wondering if she realized she’d said adorable. Slip of the tongue most likely. Nothing personal toward him.
Unfortunately.
“Instead of our theory leading to a suspect,” she said, “it led us to ask questions about what would happen with the body after he killed her. There was really only one area near that location that made sense—a place not frequented by tourists, with very little traffic around it, close enough to the abduction site that the risk of being caught while transporting a victim in his car was low. It made sense that he’d take her into a wooded area, do whatever awful things he wanted to do, then dispose of her in the same location. Thus, the mountainside we were at this morning.”
Grayson interjected another question before either Faith or Asher could cut him off. “What made you so confident in your theory that you arranged to have a cadaver dog, a ground penetrating radar team and Russo’s techs all waiting there for a discovery that might not have happened?”
“It wasn’t as bold as you think,” Asher said. “We went over and over our theory, doubting our conclusions. We even spoke to one of our FBI profiler contacts about what we’d come up with. His suggestion was to get a cadaver dog out there first, which is what we did. Lisa and her forensic canine came out a few days ago and she was confident there was something there. Based on her track record, we went to Chief Russo. He agreed to send techs and officers out this morning in case the GPR team came up with a potential gravesite. Lisa had the dog rerun the route once everyone else showed up and it alerted on the same areas.”
Russo swore. “You didn’t explain this flimsy geographical profiling theory when we spoke. You said your months of investigating had you confident that was where Ms. Parks was buried. Sounds to me like you’re lucky we found anything at all and I didn’t waste all of that manpower for nothing.”
“Russo,” Grayson warned again.
The chief held up his hands. “Okay, okay. Your theory proved out. But finding a veritable graveyard of victims was never something I anticipated. None of us expected it. I get that. But when it happened, I wasn’t prepared to deal with the fallout. That dang anchorwoman.” He shook his head. “My guys should have escorted her out of there the minute she arrived. This whole thing is blowing up all over the news, along with that tourist’s accidental death at Crescent Falls this morning.” He shook his head in disgust. “First time we’ve had a death there in over twenty years, but now everyone’s raising Cain saying it’s not safe.”
He eyed Grayson again, his expression a mixture of aggravation and stress. “A killer’s graveyard found a football field’s length from where a hiker drowned today is horrible for tourism. The park service is going to conduct a full-blown safety study of Crescent Falls. I’m getting calls from the tourism council, the mayor, and even the governor, asking when all of this will be resolved. Even TBI is threatening to park themselves on my doorstep.”
Faith leaned forward in her chair. “Calling in the Tennessee Bureau of Investigation isn’t a bad idea. We believe that one of the six bodies is Jasmine Parks. But we don’t have a clue who the others might be. If TBI can explore missing person cases and narrow down the timeframes and locales to give a list of potential IDs to the ME, that could jumpstart the victim identification process.”
Grayson was nodding his agreement before she finished. “That’s a good idea. We could drive that part through Rowan, our TBI liaison. I’ll alert him tonight and ask him to attend our meeting tomorrow morning. Sound good, Russo?”
“Works for me. This all started because we don’t have the budget to work our cold cases. Now we suddenly have six to look into and everyone demanding action.” He eyed Grayson. “Speaking of resources—”
“You’ll have our full support. If necessary, I’ll bring in contract investigators to temporarily expand our team. That’s standard procedure here when the scope of work increases like this. We can ramp up quickly. TBI can do some of the grunt work for both of our organizations. And we’ll coordinate the logistics together, you and me, so we can impact your budget as little as possible. Fair enough?”
Russo’s brow smoothed out and he actually smiled. “More than fair. Thanks, Grayson. I owe you.”
“That’s how I prefer to keep it.”
Russo laughed and stood. “I’ll see you all in a few hours. Hopefully, tomorrow will be a better day than this one was.” He opened the door and strode toward the stairs.
Asher and Faith stood, ready to follow Russo.
“Just a minute.” Grayson crossed to the glass wall that looked down on the main floor below with its two-story-high ceiling. What would have been called a squad room at a police department was affectionately called the war room by Unfinished Business’s investigators.
He watched as Russo headed through the empty room, everyone else having gone home for the night. And he waited as Russo went into the parking lot, the view through the one-way glass walls allowing those inside to see out but no one outside to see in, even with the lights on. It was only once Russo’s car was backing out of his parking space that Grayson turned around, an ominous frown on his face and his eyes the color of a stormy night.
“No one leaves this conference room until you tell me why you both just lied to the chief of police. And to me.”