Edge of Midnight. Leslie Tentler

Чтение книги онлайн.

      6

      The team meeting scheduled for Friday morning at the Florida Bureau offices in Baymeadows had been moved to the sandy riverbank of the St. Johns. Five hours later, however, neither the water nor land search had turned up anything of relevance. Eric watched as the deputies who had helped with the grid-by-grid walk-through began loading into their cars.

       “The divers will be out here another two to three hours.” Cameron approached from his car, a bottled water in hand. He’d been upstream overseeing the dragging efforts while Eric supervised activities in the more immediate area where the body had been found. Like the other agents, both men wore chinos and T-shirts in the humid conditions. Eric felt perspiration roll down his back, the sun hot on his shoulders. The team had been taking breaks under a tarp that provided shade, or by briefly ducking into their air-conditioned vehicles.

       “Any word from the psychiatrist at the NAS?” Cameron asked. Eric had told him about the experimental therapy.

       “Dr. Wilhelm can see Ms. Hale at three today.”

       “She’s a trouper to go along with it.”

       Eric thought of the anguish he’d witnessed in Mia’s eyes the previous night. He had been worried she might change her mind, but when he’d called her earlier that day about the scheduled appointment, to her credit she hadn’t tried to back out.

       “You’re going with her?”

       “I want to hear anything she might recall firsthand.” He paused as a noisy group of sandhill cranes flew overhead. Several of the large, storklike birds were already fishing at the water’s shallow edge. “Besides, I’m the one who asked her to do this and I don’t want her to go through it alone.”

       Cameron checked his wristwatch. “You should get going, then. You’ll probably want to shower and change first. I’ll stay out here with the team to finish up the water search, at least for today. I figured a larger exploration out here was a long shot, but we’d be remiss not to do it. The problem is the river’s just too damn big.”

       “Has anyone spoken to Pauline Berger’s family?”

       “We’re withholding official notification pending the M.E. report. But unofficially we’ve already been in touch with next of kin and prepared them on the likelihood. I wanted to let them know before they turned on the news, heard about the female floater and put two and two together. Not to mention, the press are already speculating the body is one of the abducted women. No acknowledgment from us or the JSO, of course.”

       Eric had caught part of the local morning news prior to heading out to the river. He thought of the waiting families and it gave him a dull ache. “What about Cissy Cox’s relatives?”

       “We contacted her family as well and told them the body wasn’t a match. It gave them some relief, at least for a little while.”

       He figured Cam was thinking about the same thing he was—the possibility that her remains were also out here, somewhere.

       Cameron wore a baseball cap with the FBI logo emblazoned on it, and he lifted it from his hair to wipe his perspiring forehead. He moved to a lighter topic. “You still coming to dinner tonight?”

       “Unless something changes with the investigation, I’ll be there.”

       “Come around eight o’clock—I told Lanie we’d have to eat late. She’s in a major nesting phase so be prepared for something extravagant.” He smiled and shook his head. “She had issues of Martha Stewart spread out all over the kitchen when I got home last night.”

       “Agent Vartran? Agent Macfarlane?” A uniformed deputy strode toward them across the gravel lot. The man was heavily tanned, his already blond hair bleached nearly white by the sun. “I’m Deputy Hammond. Detective Boyet wanted me to let you know something that might be of interest.”

       They all shook hands. He pointed out to the two-lane road. “Last night, one of our men assigned to keep cars from stopping and gawking ran a few license plates, just for the hell of it. You never know when someone with an outstanding warrant might show up in the database, right?”

       Cameron shifted his weight. “Anything come up?”

       “Not last night. They were all clean.” He placed his hands on his gun belt. “But one of the vehicles that came through here was reported stolen as of this morning. The owner’s staying at one of the golf resorts in Ponte Vedra and hadn’t used his car since yesterday afternoon. He only noticed it missing at around 11:00 a.m. today when he got ready to check out of the hotel.”

       “Which means someone else drove it through here last night.” Eric understood why Boyet thought the information important. Along with the car Mia had been driving the night she escaped, it increased the possibility the unsub was using stolen vehicles for the abductions—eliminating any chance of being identified through license plates. Still, riding around in a hot car was a risk in itself. So was driving it past the dump site. But some perpetrators got off on seeing the turmoil they’d caused. Arsonists as well as murderers had been known to stand in crowds of onlookers, reliving their experience. If that were the case, however, Eric doubted the unsub had stolen another vehicle just to have a look. He probably had done it for a dual purpose. Like abducting another woman.

       “What’s the car’s make?”

       The deputy’s silvered sunglass lenses reflected like mirrors. He swatted at a pesky fly. “Black Audi A4, turbo charge. We’ve got an APB issued for the model and tags.”

       Cameron’s cell phone went off. He answered it, said a few words and then closed its cover. “That was Agent Olkarski upstream. The divers recovered plastic sheeting tangled around the leg of a dock. It has indentations consistent with the binding found on the body.”

       “Anything nearby on the river floor that might have been the anchor?” Eric asked.

       “Two standard-grade cinder blocks with frayed ropes on them. Nothing distinctive. The СКАЧАТЬ