NOWHERE SAFE by Kate Bold

Author:Kate Bold [Bold, Kate]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 2022-05-23T00:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER SIXTEEN

“This changes the game,” Harley said as the uniformed officer waved them through the checkpoint. Ahead of them, the side of the hill blazed with the flashing lights of several police cars and two ambulances. Officers and paramedics milled about, most of them wearing hardhats, talking in low voices and tracking Callaway’s pickup with curious eyes.

Crime scenes always filled Harley with a dark kind of excitement. It took a degree of fascination to profile killers. If all she had felt was revulsion, she never could have stomached the depth of study it took to think like them. One had to practice a cold detachment, keeping feelings of grief and outrage at a distance so they didn’t interfere with one’s logic.

It was a skill Harley knew well.

Callaway turned the key, and the truck faltered and went silent. “You thinking serial?” he said.

Harley nodded. “I think we have to at this point.”

According to the Serial Murder Symposium conducted by the FBI, a serial murder was “the unlawful killing of two or more victims by the same offender, in separate events.” Two could be a coincidence (doubtful, but not impossible), but three was a strong pattern.

Three meant the killer probably intended to kill again.

As they climbed out of the truck, a uniformed officer stepped away from the paramedics. She was broad-shouldered and broad-hipped, with a ponytail that flopped side-to-side as she walked. Her face carried a worried, funereal gravity as if she didn’t quite know what she had gotten herself into.

“You with the FBI?” she asked, looking them both over.

Callaway showed his badge and introduced them.

“Juanita Valdez,” she answered, shaking hands. The worried frown returned. “Think this has anything to do with the other two murders on the news?”

Shit, Harley thought, wondering who had talked. “We can’t comment on that now,” she answered, keeping her tone as professional as she could.

Valdez studied her. The look in the officer’s eyes suggested she had already formed her own conclusion.

“If you could show us the body,” Callaway said.

Valdez nodded, still looking troubled, and led them past the flaring lights of the emergency vehicles to a wooden structure that might have once have been used to lower miners into the mine. Now the structure was little more than a tumble of weathered timber surrounding a burrow of disturbed earth.

At the lowest point of the burrow, they could see a dust-covered figure huddled beneath the jagged roof of the mine. Her hands were unbound, but there were angry red marks around her wrists consistent with restraints.

Harley took a slow, calming breath. It was one thing to be told there was a third body, and something else entirely for Harley to see the girl with her own eyes.

Someone’s daughter, she thought. Probably someone’s sister, too.

“Who found her, officer?” she said.

Valdez jabbed a thumb over her shoulder, indicating the trio of boys sitting against one of the ambulances. “Some kids out from Loma Del Rey, looking for an adventure. Saw the mine had collapsed, so they decided to dig through, looking for buried treasure.

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