Voices Carry (15 page)

“I’d say they’ve all been very carefully planned. In each case, no one saw anything and no one reported anything unusual. Each time, the woman has gone out on a routine errand or to work, and has not been seen again. It’s as if she’s been plucked from the face of the earth.”

“By someone who has apparently been watching them closely enough to know their routine,” she said softly. “You think it’s the same someone?”

“I do.”

“Have any of these abductions been witnessed?”

“No. The closest we came was in the Omaha case, where a neighbor reported having seen an unfamiliar dark blue van in the neighborhood, but she didn’t know the make, model, or year. Know how many dark blue vans of indeterminable age and make there are in Omaha?”

“What’s the connection between the victims?”

“This is the most intriguing thing. On the surface, there doesn’t seem to be a connection,” he told her, “other than the fact that they were all within a certain age range and the fact that they all disappeared so mysteriously. Rex Egan has been brought in also, and he is, as you know, very good at finding common threads. He hasn’t been able to find a thing. We’ve had agents in each of the cities—Wilmington, North Carolina. Kansas City, Omaha, Chicago. Wheeling,
West Virginia and Mystic, Connecticut—talking with the locals. Haven’t found a thing that would connect these women.”

“To jump around geographically like that could imply that he or they or whomever is following some sort of blueprint. Otherwise, it wouldn’t make any sense.”

“I agree, but I can’t for the life of me figure out what the reason might be. We’re going to go over all the info that’s been gathered from the field in the morning. Egan has sent it all through the computer, but so far, there just hasn’t been anything obvious enough that the bells have gone off.”

“I guess they’ve already investigated their backgrounds to see if the women went to the same school. Or belonged to the same sorority or the same church?”

“That’s exactly the type of information they were looking for. It would have been great if something had popped up, but so far, nothing has.”

“Funny I haven’t heard a thing about this.”

“And with any luck, you won’t for a while,” John told her. “They are keeping a lid on this big time, hoping the press doesn’t pick up on it just yet and muddy the waters. So far, we’ve no motive, no suspects, absolutely nothing but six victims and six terrified families.”

“When was it determined that they could be related?”

“About four days ago.”

“Then there really hasn’t been enough time to sort through it all and see if there is a connection.”

“There could have been something that was simply overlooked as inconsequential at the time of the initial
investigation. Or maybe there was something that didn’t make it into the reports because it just didn’t seem relevant. But the pattern—the preparation—seems so similar. . .”

“For example?” she asked.

“The first victim was last seen leaving her office building at five o’clock on a Thursday afternoon and heading for the subway. She had to have been taken from some point between the building and her home, but no one saw a thing.” John slowed the car as he approached the toll plaza. “The second victim left her office on a small university campus and set out to walk home the same way she always did. Out the back door of the building in which she worked and across the parking lot. Stopped and chatted with a coworker. Now, at one end of the parking lot, there are steps leading down to a walk across a sort of commons, and through a lightly wooded area that separates a residential area from the university. This woman lived in that development on the other side of the woods. She never made it home.”

“And the coworker?”

“Saw nothing or no one out of the ordinary.”

“And there are no bodies and no phone calls and no ransom notes. And no reason to believe that any of these women would have left home on their own accord.”

“That’s right.”

“So we have someone watching his victims to learn their patterns. I wonder how long he watches before he feels he knows them well enough to move in. Assuming that it’s a he. Would have to be someone strong, I would think, to overpower these women. And then he takes them someplace. Where?”
Genna closed her eyes. “What does he want from them? What does he do to them? Is he killing them? If so, how is he disposing of the bodies? Or is he keeping them, like trophies. . .”

“Those are some of the questions we’ll be addressing tomorrow morning,” John said as he made a right turn into the parking lot behind Genna’s apartment building.

“It’s an interesting case,” she said as she brought her seat back to an upright position.

“They’re all interesting cases.” John turned off the engine and reached for her in the dark. “None, however, more interesting than you.”

Without protest, she moved into his arms and felt them close around her, and in a heartbeat, his mouth was on hers, needy and eager. She kissed him back, surprised to find herself doing so, surprised that she was every bit as needy. He traced the inside of her mouth with his tongue, and every muscle in her body turned to water. For Genna, it had always been like this with John. She had tried for months to forget what it felt like to kiss John Mancini, to have his lips and his hands on her, but she never had. All it had taken to bring it all back was for his mouth to find hers.

He kissed her slowly now, surely and deliberately, then left the hot well of her mouth to trace the outline of her jaw with his lips, so so slowly that she reached for his face and brought his mouth back to hers.

Finally, he drew back, and resting her head on his chest, stroked her hair with his hand. There were so many things he wanted to tell her, so much to say. He struggled with the words. Where to start? What would be too much? What would be not enough?

“I should be back by the end of the week,” he said at
length. “Maybe we could take a few days and try to sort things out.”

“John. . .”

“I’ve missed you, Gen. I’ve missed you every day and every night. Can you honestly say you haven’t missed me, even a little?”

“I have missed you.” She admitted as much to herself as to him. “Maybe more than a little.”

“That’s a start.” He nuzzled the side of her neck, then glanced at the clock on the dashboard. Time was running short. He’d have less than forty minutes to make it to Newark Airport. He sighed and said, “I’ll walk you inside. Do you have the goody bag my mother gave you?”

“You mean the four pounds of lasagne, the freezer bags stuffed with meatballs and sausage, the box of cookies and the wedge of rum cake that could feed forty people? I could cater lunch at my office for the next week with all the food she sent me home with. Not that I’d think of sharing, mind you.”

“She thinks you’re too skinny.” John grinned. “She and my grandmother and the aunts were discussing that very thing in the kitchen.”

“Ha! So that’s what they were talking about in Italian when we came in to say good-bye.”

Genna reached for the door handle and he stopped her. Turning her back to face him, he said, “I think that you need to know that I’ve never stopped loving you, Gen. I never will. Whatever else happened, I never stopped loving you.”

He put one finger to her lips when it appeared she was about to speak. “It’s something you need to think about.”

He reached across her and opened her car door for her,
then said, “I remember, one time when I was in my teens, I saw a movie where the guy says to the girl, ‘You’re my heart. You’re the other half of me.’ I never forgot the line because at the time I thought it was a really stupid and incredibly wimpy thing for a guy to say. How could anyone be the other half of someone else?”

He raised her fingertips to his mouth and told her, “Now I know.”

Later, Genna lay alone in the dark, her eyes closed, the tiny medal slipped under her pillow, and wondered if perhaps Saint Anthony could help her and John find what they’d lost.

She fell asleep trying to remember the words to John’s grandmother’s special prayer.

Three days later, Genna stood at her desk and stretched to get the kinks out. She’d been at her desk almost solidly since one that afternoon, and it was now almost eight-thirty. The only break she’d taken had been around five-thirty, when the secretary she shared with three other agents poked her head into Genna’s cubicle to announce that she was leaving and that John Mancini was holding on line three.

“How’s it going?” Genna had asked.

“Maddening. We can’t find one single thing to connect these women.” He paused, then said, “And there’s been another one.”

“Another missing woman? Where? When?”

“This morning, in Kentucky. A twenty-nine year old woman named Shelly Fielding dropped her four-year-old son off at nursery school and never came back to pick him up. Her car was in her driveway, so we know she made it home.”

“Witnesses?”

“None. Her house backed up to a creek.”

“What’s on the other side of the creek?”

“A parking lot.”

“This guy is good.”

“Well, I’m hoping that sooner or later, we’ll be better. But not knowing exactly where the other women disappeared from makes it impossible to locate evidence that we could compare.”

“So much easier to investigate the crime scene when you know where it is,” she sympathized.

“Damn,” John muttered, “I’m running late. I’m going to have to be leaving for the airport in about twenty minutes.”

“You’re going to Kentucky?”

“Assuming I make the plane.”

“Stay safe,” she told him, meaning it.

As she tucked one last file into her briefcase, the rumble from her stomach reminded her that she hadn’t eaten since noon, and then it had only been a container of blueberry yogurt and a banana. The sun had already dipped low behind the trees and was probably but a few more minutes from disappearing completely. Genna grabbed her handbag from the back of her chair where she’d hung it at eight that morning, and snapping off the light, walked into the outer office to find that she was the last person in the office.

She’d known that, she reminded herself. Decker had poked in at seven-thirty to let her know he was leaving and to remind her about a conference call they’d be making at eight the next morning.

Her heels clicked sharply on the highly polished wood floor of the hallway. At the front desk, she signed
out and gave an absent smile to the night guard. Strolling into the late July dusk, she paused to adjust her bag onto her shoulder, then walked to her car that she’d parked near the middle of the lot’s second row. The sun had already settled in for the night, casting a placid lavender over the early evening sky.

Setting the briefcase on the ground, she searched her pockets for the keys to her old Taurus, wondering for the third time in as many weeks if it would start. The new starter she’d just had installed aside, perhaps the time had come to trade it in, maybe for something smaller, sleeker, and faster. She wondered if the mundane errands of her life—grocery shopping, the dry cleaner, the mall—would seem less like drudgery if she got to zip there in a great little car. Maybe with the top down. . .

Something. . .
something. . .
caused the hair on the back of her head to stand up.

Glancing around, Genna scanned the parking lot. There was nothing. No one.

And yet she felt unseen eyes following her.

Spooked, Genna felt her bag for her gun even as she slid behind the wheel and locked the doors, hoping that this would not be one of those times when the Taurus decided to play with her and refuse to start.

It was not. The engine turned over, and she backed out of her parking place a little more quickly than she normally did. Forcing herself to drive at a snail’s crawl, she toured the parking lot, taking care to look between cars and behind them. There was nothing moving. There was not even enough of a breeze to stir the bamboo that grew along the grassy stretch between the road and the building.

Genna forced a sigh of relief and headed home, feeling silly.

It’s only the power of suggestion. All that talk about women being stalked and abducted. I should know better,
she berated herself.

And yet unable to shake the feeling she’d had in the parking lot, she locked her bathroom door later that night when she went in to take her shower, and tucked her Glock into the deep pocket of her bathrobe.

Before going to bed, Genna checked the dead bolts on her front door and the door to the balcony. Pulled the drapes shut on the living room windows, and turned off all the lights. She stood in the bedroom, peering out the window to the woods beyond. There was nothing.

She had similar experiences the following day, and was beginning to wonder if perhaps she wasn’t the victim of her own overactive imagination. She hadn’t mentioned it to anyone until John called later that night.

“Any movement on your case?” she had asked.

“Just that a second round of questioning two of the victims’ coworkers revealed that just days before they disappeared they’d felt like they were being watched.”

“What?”
Genna sat bolt upright.

“Followed or watched. The type of thing where you’re walking down the steps and feel like someone’s behind you, or that someone’s watching you, but when you turn around, there’s no one there.”

Genna’s breath caught in her throat.

“Gen? You there?” John asked.

“Yes.”

“Something wrong?”

“You just described the exact sensation I’ve had for the past two days.”

“What do you mean?”

“I mean, that for the past two days, I’ve been feeling like someone’s watching me. It’s unsettling, to say the least.”

“Did you talk to Decker?”

“Haven’t had a chance. But to be honest, I’ve tried to dismiss it. I’m still not sure that it isn’t my imagination playing with me.”

“I don’t like it,” he stated bluntly. Genna could almost hear the frown in his voice. “Talk to Decker and make sure that someone watches you leave at night. Maybe get someone to follow you home.”

“That may be a bit drastic. I think I’ve been thinking too much about your case and not enough about my own.”