Page 27 of Into the Veins
Shit. Blair closed her eyes against the sorrow she tried to keep out of her voice, but her sister was smart. Despite their lack of shared DNA, they’d developed a connection stronger than most siblings, forged in the wake of trauma and friendship. “I’m so sorry, Ri. I know this isn’t how long you imagined it might take.”
“It doesn’t have anything to do with my job. The agency wants two parents in the home, but after what happened with Lincoln… I just… I’m not ready to be hurt again.” The weight of her sister’s pain crushed the air from Blair’s lungs. Lincoln Dunn. It’d been a long time since she’d heard that name, but she’d never forget the son of a bitch who’d stolen a job opportunity out from under her sister. While promising her forever. “Never mind. Enough about me. I’m more interested in the fact Colson Rutherford is something you can’t control, and watching you two fight it out is going to be more fun than Shark Week. That’s what scares you, isn’t it? That’s why you had me pull his phone records? He’s nothing like the men you’ve dated in the past, and you’d rather destroy something that might be good for you than live with the unpredictability.”
The accusation hit her in the gut, and Blair forced herself to sit up. “That’s not what this is about.”
“Then why are you spying on the man you invited into your own investigation and obviously care about?” January asked. “You do this, you know. You’re so worried about letting people get close that you shut them out completely before they have the chance to hurt you, or worse, be taken from you like your parents were. You’re looking for a reason not to trust him when you should be thanking him for saving your life out there.”
“This coming from a woman who can’t even hold onto a relationship.” Blair clamped a hand over her mouth, and instant regret filled her. Her defenses were at an all-time high as she questioned her own motivations for asking January for the favor, and it’d spilled into her personal life. “I’m sorry. I didn’t mean it. I… January—”
“You’re right. Maybe I’m not the right person to be giving you relationship advice, Blair. After all, I’m just the one who was there for you when your parents were killed. I’m just the one who was there when the nightmares came and talked with you until you got tired enough to go back to sleep when we were kids, who convinced my parents to take you in when you had nowhere else to go.” Ten seconds. More. “But you and I both know you didn’t ask me to pull Colson’s phone records as part of your investigation. This is your way of pushing the people who care about you away, and for some inexplicable reason I keep trying to break through that wall.” Her phone pinged with an incoming email. “There. You should have Colson’s LUDs now. I hope you don’t find what you’re looking for.”
The call ended.
Blair lowered the phone, staring at her sister’s name in the Recents log. Inky blackness closed in around her as her screen went dark, and even though she could feel Colson in the next room, she’d never felt more alone. This happened a lot during her investigations. The detachment from her friends, her family, her fellow deputies as she obsessed about the case. She’d forget about the people who’d gotten her here in the first place, yet January had never given up on her or let her own bullshit get in the way of what she needed to hear.
She swiped her thumb up the screen and targeted the email from her sister. A ring of truth pulsed between her thumb and the attachment waiting for her attention. Had Colson lied to her at the trailhead and again in the garage, or had her fear of giving one more person the chance to hurt her amped up her paranoia? She hesitated over January’s email. There was only one way to find out. One touch. That was all it would take to reveal the truth or destroy the thread of reliance she and Colson had built.
“What the hell are you doing?” She compressed the power button, her lungs emptying on a strong exhale as she got to her feet. It didn’t matter. Her feelings for Colson, her motivations for requesting his phone records, her sister’s accusation—none of it mattered. Because no matter how many times she’d entertained the idea, she and Colson didn’t have a future. They were going to find the killer, and he’d collect his investigation fee from Rachel Faulkner’s father. There was no other alternative. Not for him. She strode to the bedroom door and twisted the knob as quietly as possible so as not to wake him, but the soft glow of her dining room chandelier stretched down the hallway. He was awake. Her bare feet stuck to the wood flooring as she rounded into the too-small space. Hesitation coiled low in her belly as she caught sight of him at the kitchen table, so focused on the stack of files in front of him. “Your mouth does this kind of snarl when you’re concentrating. It’s cute.”
He brought his head up and set that luxurious dark gaze on her. Shoving to his feet, he maneuvered around the end of the table and swiped his palms down his jeans. He’d changed out of the T-shirt she’d smeared with paint, and a fresh hit of soap filled her lungs. “Hey, I was going through the autopsy report for our second victim. Cardin Townsend. Dr. Moss had the file sent over a few hours ago, but I didn’t want to wake you. How are you feeling?”
“Better, and thanks. For making sure I got to bed instead of drowning in my own bathtub.” A tendril of pleasure snaked through her at the thought of being this man’s center of attention, and she folded her arms across her robe, overly aware of her lack of clothing. She closed the space between them and pulled out the chair nearest his, her awareness of him at the top of her pleasure response. “Anything of note?”
“Nothing that tells me who’s killing social media influencers or why, but the ME is without a doubt convinced both victims were killed by the same perpetrator.” Colson took his seat and turned the files toward her. “Same MO across the board. Cardin Townsend was poisoned with strychnine, and as we know all too well, disposed of on the hiking trail within an hour of her death. The lab confirms her blood matches the sample we found in the trailhead parking lot. Looks as though the killer might’ve miscalculated Cardin’s ability to fight back. There was a struggle.” He dug a photo from beneath the stack of papers and set it on top, tapping it twice. “Our victim didn’t go down without a fight.”
“There’s evidence of blunt force trauma. The killer hit her with something hard enough to fracture the parietal bone, but the wound doesn’t look deep enough to kill her. Most likely knocked her out, giving whoever attacked her the opportunity to poison her.” Blair studied the photo of Cardin Townsend, her skin purple and gray in the light of day. The haze of the past twenty-four hours cracked. “Okay. We need to talk to Cardin’s friends and family and narrow down a time frame from when she was abducted to the minute we came across her body.”
“Your friend from the FBI, Agent Mitchell, has already interviewed the victim’s acquaintances, and Dr. Moss is certain Cardin Townsend was held at least twelve hours before her body was left for us to find. She couldn’t narrow down a location, but she’s positive the killer used the same place to keep both women,” he said.
“The killer is keeping them for an extended period of time after she abducts them. That must be when she forces them to admit their lies to their fans on video.” Blair scrounged through the case file until she found the first victim’s incident report and her collection of notes. Swiping a pen from the table, she circled the time January noted the victim had been caught leaving her estate and the time of Evyn Garder’s 9-1-1 call. “Rachel was last seen around midnight and was found at six the next morning. From the rate of decomposition, Dr. Moss estimated she’d been on that trail approximately two hours, which leaves four hours unaccounted for. For Cardin, she was also last seen the night before, but her remains weren’t discovered until the evening the next day.”
“She’s holding them somewhere hours before she injects the poison and disposes of their bodies,” he said. “To throw off the timeline or give herself an alibi?”
“No.” Blair swiped the photo of the second victim and handed it to him. “Look at the injection site on Cardin Townsend’s body. There is more than one puncture wound in the bruising. Dr. Moss’s report confirms these four punctures happened pre-mortem, but the only toxin in the victim’s blood is the poison.”
Three distinct lines deepened between his brows, and the left side of his mouth curled higher. “The killer poisoned Cardin Townsend more than once.”
“The ME also noted hypodermic needle marks in Cardin’s arm and traces of saline on her skin.” Blair lowered the file to the table’s surface. “So whoever is behind this finds out Rachel Faulkner and Cardin Townsend aren’t who they portray themselves to be on social media, abducts them with the intention of exposing their secrets, then administers the poison. Only Rachel Faulkner dies too quickly. The killer wanted to punish these women, but a full dose of strychnine kills within thirty minutes. What if thirty minutes wasn’t enough when it came to Cardin? This time, the killer administers the poison, working up from a small dose to the one that kills her victim while forcing saline into her bloodstream in between so she can start all over again.”
“She’s escalating.” Colson scrubbed a hand down his face. “She doesn’t just want them to die. She wants their last moments to be the worst of their lives.”
Blair tapped the photo with her pen. “It would make sense. Every piece of this MO is telling me this isn’t just a statement as the killer wants us to believe with the videos and the vipers left on the remains. This is deep-seated hatred. It’s personal, and unless the killer found some way to keep her victim’s screams quiet, she had to keep them somewhere remote. Not the maintenance shed she was using to extract the poison and breed the snakes. There are too many risks one of the rangers would hear something.” The facts splayed out in front of her, and her heart shot into her throat. She pressed her abdomen into the side of the table as the drugging haze of trauma and exhaustion cleared. “Colson, the crime scene unit collected six more ruby-eyed pit vipers in addition to four trees our killer was using to extract the poison, and given the timeline of when both victims were taken and when their bodies were discovered…”
She didn’t want to say it. Didn’t want to think it.
Colson sat back in his chair. “She could already have her next victim.”
CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO
There was a possible third victim.
While the killer couldn’t get her hands on the evidence CSU had collected from the Tiger Mountain maintenance shed to recreate the MO used on the first two victims, he doubted she would let that stop her.
He and Blair had been through the files a dozen times each already, but there had to be something in here that would give them a clue as to why the killer had specifically targeted the first two victims. They just couldn’t see it yet. Colson counted the deputies roaming through the bullpen on the other side of the glass windows of the Maple Valley station conference room. They’d been at this for hours since realizing the killer might have already targeted or abducted another victim, but no new evidence aside from the time discrepancy between when the victims had gone missing and when their bodies were discovered stood out.
Strychnine, ruby-eyed pit vipers, remote dump sites that ensured the bodies wouldn’t be found right away, and lies. Hell of a combination.
“There haven’t been any missing person reports filed for women between the ages of twenty and forty in the past twenty-four hours or that have a large following on social media.” Blair rubbed at her eyes before a yawn contorted her face. “Okay. Braydon Caddel’s security system places him at home at the time of his wife’s disappearance and when her body was discovered the next morning. The alarm company doesn’t show anyone deactivating the system from the time Rachel armed it herself before getting into Cardin Townsend’s SUV to go to dinner. But with Rachel Faulkner dead, he inherits all of her estate, which beats out only getting half in the divorce if she didn’t get help for her addiction to her phone.”