Vendetta (16 page)

“We always thought there might be a connection between all the girls,” Nikki told Tyler, as they continued through the files. “But we never found it.”

“I cross-checked every connection I could think of, but you're right,” Sam said. “There was never anything.”

“After all these years, I'm wondering if it's even possible to find anything new,” Irene said, topping off her husband's half-empty mug. “I can't tell you how many late nights Sam has pored over these files, and I know you've done the same thing, Nikki. If there was something to find, don't you think you would have already found it?”

“Probably, but we have to be missing something. We never found him.”

“I know it's believed he stalked his victims, but is there any evidence that they knew him?” Tyler asked, drumming his fingers against the table.

“Not that we know of,” Sam said. “But like Nikki said, we never found a common denominator between all the girls.”

Nikki leaned back in her chair and tried to stretch out the tight muscles in her neck. “Bridget's abductor contacted her via social media, and she developed an emotional attachment. But we still don't know if she was just a random victim or if he chose her specifically. If it is the same abductor, he's changed along with the advances in technology.”

“How long did he keep the girls alive?” Tyler asked, opening up another file.

“The longest was . . .” Sam looked to Nikki. “Two days?”

“Except for Jessica Wright,” Nikki said, wishing sometimes that the details weren't so readily available. “She went missing after school on June 15 and was found dead five days later. But the autopsy revealed she'd been killed two days before.”

“In their investigation, the authorities came to the conclusion that the abductor had chosen his victims ahead of time. The problem was that we don't know what kind of contact—if any—he'd had with the girls ahead of time, because he killed them all.”

Nikki tapped her fingers against the table. Something niggled in the back of her mind. Cases lined up over the years tried to blur, but she'd kept meticulous notes and files and read every line of every report. She'd also made detailed profiles of abductors and serial killers. Some were able to hide in plain sight with jobs, homes, and sometimes even families. Some fit the profiles; others, not so much. But they weren't all white males, just like most of them weren't the insane, evil geniuses Hollywood often portrayed.

“What if that isn't true? What if he didn't kill them all?” she asked finally.

“What do you mean?” Tyler asked.

“There was a girl who was kidnapped about six months before Sarah vanished.” Nikki looked up at Sam. “You led the investigation. She managed to escape from her captor.”

“I remember that case. Her name was Amanda Love. She didn't speak for days but was finally able to give us a description. It was close to the general description of the Angel Abductor, but we eventually dismissed that theory.”

“Why?”

Sam shrugged. “Nothing else about the case fit.”

Nikki paused as a memory of a conversation came to the surface. “Do you have a copy of Amanda's file?”

“Yes.” Sam stood up. “What do you need?”

“The transcript of her conversation with the police. In it she said that she spoke to her abductor before he took her.”

Like Bridget.

Two minutes later, Sam handed her a file.

Nikki flipped it open and started scanning through the transcript. “Here . . . She told the officer who interviewed her that she was leaving the library after checking out a pile of books for a research paper. She dropped them on the way down the front stairs. A man stopped to help her pick them up. Said he was a teacher who was going to start teaching math at the local middle school. Asked her if she had any advice for a new teacher. Then he left.

“At the time, Amanda told us she never thought anything about the conversation. But when we followed up on that conversation, there wasn't a new math teacher starting that year.” She tapped her finger against the paper. “He ended up being her abductor.”

But Amanda had managed to survive.

Nikki had followed Amanda's story during the media storm surrounding her disappearance and more recently when Amanda did an interview with CNN on the ten-year anniversary of the day she'd escaped. She was twenty-six now. A constant reminder to Nikki of what might have been if Sarah had escaped. But while Amanda might have managed to elude her captor, she hadn't been left without emotional scars. During the interview, she'd talked about her ongoing nightmares. Her fear of strangers and dark places . . .

“My partner and I followed that lead,” Sam said, “but we never could conclude 100 percent certain he had been the Angel Abductor. And Amanda was blindfolded during her abduction, so we were never able to get a good description beyond the vague sketch of the man who talked with her at the school. She was able to confirm that the voices matched, though. The man
at the school and the man who abducted her. But that's all we were ever able to get.”

The conversation around Nikki faded . . .

She and Sarah had been sitting in a booth in the back of their parents' restaurant a few months before her abduction, eating barbeque sandwiches and French fries and catching up. The room was quiet after the lunchtime rush. Above them the walls were covered with retro signs and vintage guitars.

Sarah stuck a fry into her mouth. “We're getting a new biology teacher. I met him after school today. He was lost and looking for the lab.”

“What about Mr. Philips?” Nikki reached for her chocolate milk shake. “I have a hard time imagining him ever leaving. He's been around forever.”

Sarah shrugged. “I don't know. Maybe he's retiring. He's got to be close to seventy.”

“Seventy?” Nikki laughed. “I don't think he's that old, but he does have to be close to retirement age. Can you believe he was my biology teacher?”

“I told you he was old.”

“Thanks.” Nikki rolled her eyes. “So this new teacher . . . Did he seem nice?”

“I guess. He didn't say much. I pointed him in the right direction, and he said thank you.”

“Now for the next question you know I have to ask,” Nikki said, dipping a French fry into a pile of ketchup. “What about boys? Anyone you like at the moment?”

Sarah took a sip of her Coke and blushed. “Okay, there is this new guy, though I'm sure he doesn't even know I exist.”

“Why not?”

“He's popular and runs track. But he's so cute.”

“You're popular and run track, so what's the problem? Have you ever talked to him?”

“Once or twice.”

“What's his name?”

Sarah's smile had widened as a dreamy look settled in her eyes. “Brice.”

“Nikki?” Tyler's hand brushed her arm, pulling her back to the present. “You okay?”

She glanced up at him. “Yeah, I'm just tired.”

Emotionally . . . physically. She was fighting an inward battle. Knowing she had to stay focused if they were going to find Bridget. Knowing also that there was no way to avoid those emotions.

She stared down at the file in front of her, the memory of the conversation still strong. How had she forgotten that conversation? Three years later they'd celebrated Mr. Philips's retirement in that very restaurant.

“I just remembered a conversation I had with Sarah a few months before she was abducted.” Nikki stared across the piles of files. “She mentioned speaking briefly to a man at her school who needed directions to the biology lab. Said he was a new teacher.”

“What if that was a part of his MO?” Sam asked. “What if that's how he first found his girls?”

Nikki nodded. “We're going to have to search the video footage at the school.”

“You know that the chances of us finding footage of him, while possible, are slim,” Tyler said. “It could have been months ago.”

“I know, but it's worth a shot. All we need is a photo of this guy . . .”

But he was right. More than likely any footage that had been captured had already been erased.

“It's worth looking into, but you can't do that until tomorrow. Which means if you ask me, you all need to stop for the
night. It's after midnight.” Irene laid her hand on her husband's arm. “Not getting any sleep and not being able to function won't help Bridget.”

“I know, but we're still not any closer to finding her.” The yellow walls of the dining room began to close in on her. Nikki pushed her chair back. “I'm sorry. I . . . I just need some fresh air.”

Nikki sat down on the top of Sam's front porch steps. How was it that between the four of them, they'd spent hours going through every file Sam had collected and still come up with nothing concrete? Because looking for Bridget's abductor among hours of footage could easily end up being another dead end. He'd know to avoid getting caught on camera. Because whoever this guy was, he knew how to play them. Knew how to get under her skin.

Like Hansel and Gretel. A trail of bread crumbs. Was that really what this was? A part of some game he was playing?

She rubbed the back of her neck, trying to untangle some of the knots that had settled in over the past few hours. They needed to catch this guy in a mistake. Which surely was inevitable. Most criminals ended up being caught because of their own carelessness, inexperience, or even arrogance. Other times it was an escaped witness or a fluke, like finding a dead body at a routine traffic stop. Hollywood tended to make their serial killers brilliant, but the reality was they were all fallible.

She shifted on the step and stared out across the dark clouds
covering the night sky. Temperatures had dropped. A light mist had begun to fall. But she didn't care. Maybe the cold would help numb her heart.

The front door opened and closed behind her. Tyler handed her a fleece jacket and sat down beside her. “Irene insisted.”

Nikki couldn't help but smile as he squeezed her shoulder. “She's a sweetie.”

“Yes, she is. And you're as tight as a board.”

“I know, and I'm sorry I just walked out, but I needed to clear my head.”

“We all needed a break. Why don't you wait a minute before you put on the jacket?”

He nudged her down to the next step, slid in behind her, and started working out the knots in her neck and shoulders. He moved slowly across the muscles and pressure points until she finally felt herself relaxing.

“Why haven't you ever offered to do this before?” she teased, letting out a soft groan. “My knots have knots, my head feels like it has a bomb about to explode inside it. But after this, I just might be able to function again.”

“Good.” Tyler laughed. “Katie used to beg me for back rubs, especially when she was pregnant.”

Nikki lowered her head and felt her muscles continue to loosen as he concentrated on her neck, then moved to her shoulders and down her spine. She breathed in slowly, trying not to worry about what their next step should be, but instead focusing on the comfortable silence between them and the calm reassurance of his touch.

“Better?” he said after a few minutes.

“Oh, yeah. More than you can imagine.” She slipped into the jacket and shifted around in order to rest her forearms on his knees, and looked up at him. “But except for the long shot that they can find footage of this guy at Bridget's school, I feel
like tonight has been a waste of time. I'm wondering now if we should have been out there looking for her.”

He pulled the jacket tighter across her shoulders, then brushed a strand of her hair behind her ear. “Where would you look?”

“I don't know. That's the problem.” She caught his gaze again, but this time, the intimacy of the moment shot through her.

“I don't remember you always second-guessing yourself like this.”

She swallowed hard, then turned away, not ready to examine what had just passed between them. Or why her heart was thudding at his nearness.

“This time the stakes have risen,” she said. “This is not only about finding Bridget but about finding the person who took Sarah.”

The rain was starting to get heavier and splashed against her feet. She scooted up the steps until she was completely under the covering.

“And on top of that,” she continued, “every lead ends up being a dead end. Every time I turn around, I feel as if I'm back at square one.”

“You're going to figure this out.”

“And if I don't?” she whispered.

He wrapped his arm around her and she allowed herself to nuzzle her head against the warmth of his shoulder. “Somehow, I just know you are.”

“I hope so.”

Moments of silence passed between them. Comfortable, and yet holding an edge of newness she didn't understand. She sat back up, wanting to ignore the new layer of confused emotions triggered, she knew, by his nearness.

“Did you ever get through to Liam?” she asked finally.

“Just before Mom put him to bed. He had a great day with her and is doing fine. Which reminds me of the other thing Irene said.”

“What's that?” Nikki asked.

“She's insisting you crash on their couch for a couple of hours until you need to relieve Jack and Gwen. And I think she's right.”

“There are still more files to go through.” Nikki rubbed her temples, staving off the headache that was threatening to return. “We're no closer to finding anything since we got here, but I can't help but think we're just missing something.”

“Maybe so, but you need to rest. No one expects you to work all night, and you'll feel better if you sleep.”

She rested her chin on her knees. “I don't think I can sleep. I just keep thinking of Bridget out there. I know what this guy did to the other girls, and it's cold tonight with the temperatures dropping. What if he dumped her somewhere, what if—?”

“We don't know any of that.”

“Which is the worst part. The not knowing.” Nikki shook her head. “You should have gone home, Tyler—”

“When I agreed to stay and help, I wasn't expecting this to be a simple nine-to-five job. And besides that, I wanted to be with you. But you won't be able to help Bridget if you don't take care of yourself.”

“You sound like my mother,” she said, nudging him with her shoulder. “She's always worrying that I'm not eating enough or not getting enough rest.” The memories were there at the forefront again—this time of all the nights she'd come home to a takeaway bag of barbeque on her kitchen counter and a handwritten note from her mother. “I remember the weeks after Sarah went missing. I was teaching full-time. I'd come home at night, grade papers and tests, then spend the next few hours corresponding with media contacts and poring through the case information I had. I didn't hang out with friends. I was convinced I couldn't stop looking, because if I did, I might miss something that would lead us to her.”

“Like you're doing tonight?” he asked.

“Daddy would bring me food from the restaurant, convinced I wasn't eating enough.”

“You probably weren't.”

“No, but I didn't care. I just wanted to find her and bring her home. I never gave up hope, but now . . . after all these years . . . I don't know. I thought if I took this job I'd be able to find girls like Bridget, but I'm afraid that part of me isn't able to handle this emotionally.”

He took her hand, pulled it against his chest, waiting for her to continue.

“Before I joined the task force, I kept the bigger goal in the back of my mind and was able to keep my personal stuff separate. But lately, when I'm assigned to a new case, it dredges up all the old emotions. I'm supposed to be the professional. The one who can put her feelings aside and just do my job. But it's hard. And this time . . . knowing that it could be him . . . the man who abducted Sarah . . . out there.” She looked up at him, her eyes wide with questions, and shook her head. “I don't know if I'm cut out for this.”

“I can't answer that for you, but what I do know is that you're making a difference.”

“And where is God in all this? It just seems so . . . wrong.”

“You're questioning your faith?” he asked.

“Don't you? I want to scream at God. Ask him why we never found Sarah. Beg him for answers, but the answers are never there. And that's changed me. It's changed my entire family and how I see God. And I think that scares me the most.”

She and Tyler had talked about their losses over the last year. About how those losses had changed them, but she'd always felt as if she were skirting around the reality that sometimes her faith threatened to crumble beneath her.

“Did you ever just want to throw in the towel?” he asked.

“On God?” She caught his expression in the porch light and
realized this wasn't about her anymore. It was about him and losing Katie. She couldn't forget she wasn't the only person who'd loved and lost. Today had magnified that fact over and over.

“I have. More often than I want to admit,” he said.

The rain had slowed to a gentle patter. She realized their questions might never be answered. Questions of how and why. The longing for justice in a world where sometimes there simply wasn't any.

Tyler rubbed his thumb across the back of her hand. “I can't help but wonder what Katie would think if she could see how I'm handling things. Or rather how I'm not handling things.”

“In what way?”

He drew in a deep breath and let it out slowly as if contemplating his answer. “I used to think my faith was unshakable. But in the time I spent on the ground in Iraq, I saw things that horrified me. That changed me. Things I never spoke of, even to Katie. And yet somehow, through it all, I never lost my faith. It was as if I knew I was on the winning side, and God had sent me to stamp out evil. Which meant as hard as it was, I was the good guy. The hero who came home with the Purple Heart.”

These were things they never talked about. Even his Purple Heart was stuck in a drawer and never mentioned.

“And after Katie died?” Nikki asked, not wanting to push him to a place he didn't want to go but wanting desperately to understand him better.

“Everything changed. And now . . . I don't know, Nikki, I can't find my way back. I'm like one of the missing girls you're searching for. Lost, with no idea how to find my way back home.”

She waited silently for him to continue, hearing the vulnerability in his voice. A car drove by, its light picking up the splatter of rain in the narrow beam of headlights. The same way he was giving her insight into how he felt.

“There are things about my relationship with Katie that you don't know about. I know you think we had the perfect marriage, and it
was
good, but there were problems between us when she died.” He hesitated for a few moments. “When I came home from the Middle East that last time, it really messed Katie up. I'd been shot, and she was scared. She threatened to leave me if I signed up for another tour.”

“To leave you?” Nikki tried to digest the information. “I can't see Katie ever leaving you. She told me she was worried. Afraid even that if you went back again you'd come home in a body bag. But she never hinted she didn't support you.”

“I didn't think at the time she would have actually followed through. I think she just wanted to scare me. And it did. I left the military and changed my career because of her.”

Nikki looked up at him, catching the trace of resentment in his voice. “I thought going back to school was your idea.”

“It was the obvious next step, and I knew I couldn't blame her. Shoot, I'd been almost killed. She was pregnant and facing being a single mom. And she was tired of waiting for me to come home after each tour. And when I did, not knowing if I'd be coming home injured or in a body bag.” He drew in a deep breath. “We both knew plenty of guys who came home missing limbs or dealing with PTSD, and on one level she accepted that could happen to me, because when she married me, she signed up for more than just a husband. But after I was shot . . . she told me she couldn't take it anymore.”

“So you left the military.”

He nodded. “For her.”

“Did you resent her?” In all the time they'd spent together, especially over the past year, he'd never mentioned that it hadn't been his idea to leave his military career. Never said a bad word against Katie.

“For a while, yes. I resented it. Resented her for pressuring
me to leave, because I loved my job and my country. Not being there to defend it has been a tough transition. I was used to being out on the field, not sitting in a classroom hour after hour.”

“What about now?” she asked.

“I don't know. Today reminded me that I still want to be out there saving lives and making a difference. I thought I was doing the right thing for my family when I went back to school, but now with Katie gone . . . I don't know. I have to think of Liam and what he needs.” He shook his head. “What really bothers me is that I know all the right answers—about God, about life and death, but it doesn't help. I
know
Katie is in a better place. I know she's in the presence of God. But none of that makes me miss her any less.”

She'd watched him over the past few months, knowing he was struggling. She figured when he was ready he'd come to her and talk. Not that she had the answers. She still couldn't understand why God allowed someone to take Sarah. Or why God would allow a young mother to be ripped from this world in an instant.