"That seems risky." Mila shakes her head, releasing a deep sigh. "People should be on the lookout for her. She has a very clear MO. She goes for people between the ages of eighteen and twenty-five. We should put all of the university campuses in the region on alert."
"Agent Starling." I put a hand up to get her attention. "Stop, please. You're talking extremely fast, and I'm scared you're not breathing. Let me explain what we've done to contain the threat. We are canvassing the towns surrounding the prison. She was seen leaving in a white truck, so every similar vehicle is being stopped. There are roadblocks in and out of the city."
There's no way in hell this stopped Sveta Markov. She was killing people, undetected, for nearly thirty years. Before she was arrested, she was the most respected hematologist in the world; she is a genius. I'd bet anything she's been planning this escape for a while. There’s been no word on who her accomplice could even be. One thing is for sure; there was definitely a getaway driver.
"She's already long gone, and you know it." There's an edge of panic in Mila's voice.
"I do." She’s right. I can't deny it. "So help me find her."
"We have to find her," Mila clarifies. "She can't be allowed to kill again. I'm still trying to clean up her first mess. Good thing I have an idea as to where we can look."
The determined set of her shoulders and her clear voice are pretty admirable. At least she doesn't seem to be rooting for her mother.
That’s a huge comfort.
Mila walks to one of the multiple workstations on which a large box named Project Broken Mamma sits.
“What’s in the box?” I ask, frowning in curiosity.
Ignoring me, she pulls out a large map and unfurls it onto the table. "The first step should be to go to her old safe houses."
"That's too obvious," I argue, surprised she would even suggest that.
Mila shakes her head and rolls her eyes. "Not the ones we know about and raided. Others. Ones that we never discovered."
Looking down at the map, I'm hit with a profound sense of sympathy for Mila. She's clearly spent a lot of time thinking about her mother's crimes, and I can't even begin to imagine would that would be like.
The map is an organized mess of color. Some cities are circled in red with a wider black circle traced around. Others are marked in orange or yellow.
"So," Mila begins, "while she was an active serial killer, my parents rented a few lake houses for the summer holidays. I looked up each little town, and I traced back the number of missing people. The yellow is for towns with zero to five missing people during the time we visited. The orange is between six to ten, and red is eleven to twenty." As she speaks, she points to different areas of the map. "Taking into consideration the national average of missing people, I've pinpointed the ones that seem likelier to be an epicenter of her victims. I've cross-referenced each concentration of missing people with places we visited during my childhood or where my mother lived or worked.”
Mila seems so detached from the fact that we are talking about her mother that I have to wonder how it must have been for her to discover that her mother was a serial killer. And at such a young age.
"We can check a few of these, but I'd start there." She drops a delicate finger on the map over a small town by a lake. "When I was a kid, we had a cabin there for a few summers. I'd bet this is the first place she'd go. She put go-bags everywhere. Like the one that was found at the Maple Ridge property.” Mila’s mention of one of the country’s most notorious mass graves makes me shiver. “She had fake IDs, passports, and enough cash to disappear without a trace at each location. A total of four different go-bags were discovered. So that's why we have to check these. She’s going to be looking for cash and identification. If we don't find her at Willowbend, then it'll be at Lake Murray." She points to another town by a lake.
“Why do you suspect Willowbend above the others?”
Realistically speaking, she could be on her way to any of her old haunts to find a go-bag.
“It’s either one of these two.” Her conviction is strong. “These seemed to be some of her favorite locations. Not to mention, the go-bags at those cabins were really well hidden. Even if my mother suspects that her stuff was found, she’d head to one of those two.”
“Right. I remember.” The recollection of Mila’s own books pop into my mind. “She buried them far away from the bodies instead of with them.”
“Precisely. And those two cabins are so far back in our family history that she might think they’re safer than the rest.”
"You've thought about this." There's no stopping the wonder in my tone.
“I was hoping that this would never happen. I really wanted my research to be used to find more hidden bodies, not to find her."
Mila sighs and flips her long hair over her shoulder, taking the ends to twirl them around her fingers.
“How much time have you spent on all of this?”
I reach into the box and pull out case file after case file of notes Mila has taken.
"A lot.” She sighs. “I've dedicated my entire adult life to finding all of her victims. I want to give those families peace. Closure. I know it can't bring their loved one back to life, but..."
She turns around and begins typing away on her computer. Sensing that she
