19

“Well?” Darren asks.

I shake my head. “She doesn’t know anything. And to be honest, if she did, I think she’d already be dead.”

Darren nods. “Maybe you’re right. Our perps haven’t made many mistakes so far. Our only real lead would have been Janice.”

“And look what happened to her.” I lean my elbows on the desk and put my face in my hands, rubbing my forehead.

“I take it you had no luck with the family?”

I look up and am greeted by Cross’s bulk.

“No. It’s a dead end. They don’t know anything.”

He nods.

“How’d you do with Cindy’s admirer at Hugo’s?” I ask.

“Dead end, too. All his movements check out. He hasn’t been out of Vegas.” He sighs. “So, what are you guys going to do? Head back?”

Darren and I look at each other. I shrug, he shrugs, he nods, then I nod.

“Guess so,” Darren says to Cross.

Cross shifts his weight from one foot to the other. “Not much more you can do here. I’ll call you with the autopsy results and forensics as soon as I get them.”

“Thanks, Cross,” I say.

“Yeah, thanks for all your help.” Darren forces a smile.

“Never let it be said that the Vegas force isn’t cooperative.” Cross puts his hands on his hips.

“Hey, what about your days off?” I ask, worried about missing two days of investigative time while the results sit on Cross’s empty desk.

“The ME and lab know to call me on my cell. Don’t worry, you won’t be waiting for me to come back on shift.”

“You’d fit right in on the Tucson team,” Darren says.

“Any Homicide team,” I add.

It’s hard to completely clock off when you know lives are at stake. This case is no exception. In fact, if we’re right, we’ve got four days until the next kill. Maybe someone’s already holed up in the Mojave Desert, at the hands of our femme fatale and her new partner.

I zone out of the conversation as the men swap Homicide war stories, and lean back in my chair, ticking off a mental list of leads. One thing we haven’t checked are the victims’ financial records. I interrupt the male bonding. “Cross, have you looked at financials for Janice?”

“Not yet, and the detectives before me were investigating it as a straight OD so they didn’t either.”

“Back to the basics?” Darren says to me.

I give him a wink. “You know what they say, follow the money.”

Darren smiles. “An oldie but a goodie.”

Cross walks over to his desk and picks up a file. “They found one Visa card and one ATM card in Janice’s wallet, plus a checkbook on the kitchen table. They filed all their bills and bank statements. I’ll get them sent over from evidence.” He picks up the phone and starts dialing.

“I’ll call Hamill,” Darren says. “See what we can get happening for Malcolm.”

I look up Cindy’s file. Her wallet was never recovered.

Cross finishes on the phone first. “They’ve got the last twelve months’ worth of statements for both girls. That should do us.”

Darren hangs up. “Hamill’s going to look into it and get back to us.”

“Was there anything else to indicate serious money? In the apartment?” I’m asking both Darren and Cross, while also trying to trigger my own memory.

“A neighbor…” Cross says. “One of the neighbors saw a limo a couple of weeks back.” He starts flipping through Janice’s file. “It was from that nosy neighbor opposite them. It didn’t seem like much at the time. Limos in Vegas are commonplace.”

“A couple weeks back,” Darren says. “Like around the twentieth?”

Cross starts flipping through his notebook. “Could be.” He flips another two pages. “Here it is.” He reads, then looks up. “She couldn’t remember the exact date or day, but it’s definitely the week Cindy left Vegas.”

I scribble on a new sheet of paper. Excited, money, limo, Mojave Desert, New York. These mean something.

Darren looks at my list but doesn’t comment on it. Instead, he says, “We may as well still head back to Tucson.”

“Yeah. We can fly back this afternoon. We’ll have the bank records today and an autopsy update tomorrow. For now, let’s work on our time line.” I grab a sheet of paper from the nearest printer and turn it horizontally. I draw a line across the sheet of paper.

“So the twentieth is the day Malcolm said he was leaving.” I use a red pen and write Malcolm, March 20 on the very left-hand point of the line.

“And the twentieth for Cindy too.”

I nod and use a blue pen for Cindy to mark in her “disappearance” date. The next date is red, for Malcolm. “Malcolm was killed on or around the twenty-sixth.”

“Then Cindy a week later—around April second,” Darren says.

I go back to blue and mark in Cindy’s murder date. “Then we’ve got Janice. She was found on the first, but the ME said she’d been dead for about twenty-four hours.” I use a black pen to mark in Janice’s death. “So Janice was killed a couple of days before Cindy, around March thirty-first.” I flick the marker back and forth between my fingers. “The cat was out of the bag,” I say. “Janice knew where Cindy really was and our killers found out.”

Darren leans back in his chair, studying the fledgling time line. “So if Cindy mentioned that Janice knew where she was, then obviously Cindy didn’t feel threatened in any way at that point in time.”

“No. Not unless it was beaten out of her.” I pause. “But there was no indication of torture or physical trauma.”

Darren nods. “So she didn’t think she was in danger, and she certainly didn’t realize Janice was.”

AmericanPsycho: Congratulations, Never. Brigitte is all yours.

NeverCaught: Thank God for Wednesdays. I’m stoked…soon I’ll have her.

DialM: I’m jealous.

AmericanPsycho: What are you going to do with her?

NeverCaught: Take her to that special house. Tie her up. Play with her for a while, then introduce her to my knife.

AmericanPsycho: No knife! I told you the rules when you joined the club. She must be strangled.

NeverCaught: I know. But I can still show her the knife…and run it along her body.