Perry didn’t breathe. He didn’t move. Standing, listening to the crickets, he still swore he heard something else. Anyone wandering around in the yard after midnight wouldn’t be up to any good. Not that he was, either. But at least his cause was justified. He wanted sound confirmation the black Suburban in the garage was the same one he and Kylie had spotted every time Peter came around. Fake tags or not, if they matched the tags on file for Peter, then Franco was their man.
Perry would take Franco out, limb by limb, if the bastard was stalking Mission Hills, torturing, raping, and murdering teenage girls. His blood boiled just thinking about it.
Standing against the garage, Perry glanced behind him toward the street. It was so dark where he stood, he barely saw to the end of the driveway. Beyond that was a black abyss, quiet and serene. Too damn quiet. He focused on the bushes in front of him, which stood about as tall as he did. The branches moving would give him away. But Perry wouldn’t chance entering the garage and taking a picture of the license plate until he knew the area was secure.
The last thing he needed right now was to run into a cat burglar trying to break into one of these houses while Perry was snooping around, off the clock. He didn’t want to have to decide whether he would run a common crook down or let him be the ultimate distraction so Perry could fight for a higher cause. Stealing physical possessions didn’t rank as high of a crime in his book as taking lives, let alone young ones.
He heard something again. So did the crickets. Silence fell over the yard as if the black velvet blanket draping across the sky fell to the earth, enveloping all around it with an eerie quiet that sent chills rushing up his spine. Someone was in the yard. Perry was sure of it now.
The best thing to do at this point was become invisible. Mentally calculating the space between the tall bushes and the back of the garage, Perry pushed himself into the narrow space, enduring scratches on his arm and face while struggling not to move any more branches than necessary.
That’s when he saw her. At least he guessed it was a woman. A person had raised one of the upstairs windows in Franco’s house and was climbing out. The dang fool would break her fucking neck. And if she turned in Perry’s direction, she would spot him hiding behind the bushes from her elevated vantage point. Fortunately for both of them, she was intent on her mission and not paying attention to bushes or trees in the yard.
Perry watched, somewhat amazed, as the person shimmied down a drainpipe and jumped the last four or five feet to the ground. She rolled over the grass, then came to her hands and knees, frozen for a moment until the crickets started singing again. Then she sprinted to the edge of the yard and jumped the four-foot fence, disappearing in the yard behind Franco’s. In the next minute she was gone, leaving Perry and the crickets alone in the yard.
What the fuck had he just seen?
Perry stared at the spot where the girl had vanished, positive she was female now by how she ran and the shape of her body when she climbed the fence. Returning his attention to the window on the second floor, he stared at the open window, watching a curtain move in the breeze. Someone had just fled from the house. From what Perry knew, Franco wasn’t married and didn’t have any kids. Perry wouldn’t swear to it, but from what he could make out in the dark, and the shape and movements of the person who had just darted through the yard, he would guess she was young, possibly a teenager.
His blood pressure skyrocketed as his imagination fueled the images that popped into his head as to possible reasons why the girl would take off running. He returned his attention to the spot at the fence where she’d jumped free and disappeared. Should he go after her?
No one appeared to be following her. The way she boogied across the yard and over the fence, he doubted she was hurt, at least not seriously enough to slow her process. She disappeared quickly. Perry weighed his options and turned toward the side garage door. He would inspect the Suburban. If he found anything suspicious around it, he would seek out a warrant. Possibly inspecting the inside of Franco’s home was in order, too.
Once again Perry put his hand on the doorknob to the side door of the garage. He stared at his reflection in the clear, dark glass but didn’t focus on it for long. This time, pushing his face up to the glass, he shaded it with his hand and stared inside the garage.
There was no vehicle in the garage. It was empty.
Too much time had passed to chase down the girl. Nonetheless, Perry drove around the neighborhood after returning to his Jeep, searching yards and looking for any sign of anyone. There wasn’t as much as a single soul walking along the sidewalks.
The clock on his dash told him it was almost one o’clock in the morning. He turned at the next intersection, realizing he headed toward Kylie’s home instead of his own. His cell phone rang and he jumped, grateful it hadn’t rung while he’d been alongside the garage. He’d forgotten to put it on vibrate.
“This is Flynn,” he said, his voice sounding scratchy when he answered the call from Dispatch. He was off duty and it was the middle of the night; there couldn’t be anything good coming from this phone call.
“Flynn, Lieutenant Goddard asked me to call you.” Cliff Miller, the dispatcher, spoke quickly and sounded out of breath, which he often did when he was upset. The guy never moved out of his chair at the station, but when an urgent matter came through the man would sound as if he’d just run a mile. “They found another teenager over on Antioch, near the mall.”
“Fucking hell,” Perry growled, understanding now why the Suburban wasn’t in the garage. Peter had been busy. “What is the exact location?”
Miller gave him the address. “Flynn, there is a situation, which is why Goddard wanted me to contact you personally.”
“What’s that?”
“He asked you to get there ASAP. He said it’s personal.”
Perry didn’t have a hard time finding the crime scene. After he turned onto Antioch, flashing lights from several police cars and an ambulance grabbed his attention. He pulled up and parked not too far from the crime scene tape and hopped out of his car. No one said anything when he climbed over the tape and walked over to Pete Goddard.
“What do we have here?” he asked Goddard, a decent cop who’d been on the force about as long as Perry had been.
Pete Goddard was fair complected, with strawberry blonde hair that was closely shaved to his head. He was tall and lanky and his uniform always looked as though it was half a size too big.
“It’s pretty ugly.” Goddard shifted his attention to a body, which lay crumpled up against the side of the building. “She had ID on her.”
“Oh, yeah?” Perry walked up to the girl, who didn’t look a day older than Dani, and stared at her half-nude and bloody body. “Who reported her?”
“Anonymous nine-one-one call.” Goddard moved in next to Perry, holding a clipboard and staring grimly at the dead girl. “We’ve cataloged all the personals found on her, which were basically a purse, a wallet with seventeen dollars on her, and makeup, along with a cell phone.”
“She wasn’t robbed.” Perry followed Goddard over to the back of Goddard’s squad car where Baggies were spread out in an open briefcase, already tagged and numbered and ready to be taken to the station. “What was her name?”
“Elaine Swanson.” Goddard sifted through the evidence Baggies and picked one of them out, then held it at eye level. “This letter indicates she went by ‘Lanie.’ ”
Perry glanced past the hood at the crumpled body, another teenager robbed of life before given the opportunity to really start living.
“And look at this-grades.” Goddard sounded disgusted, but it wasn’t from the report card he held up in another bag. Elaine, or Lanie, made all A’s and B’s. “She was a sophomore. My son is a junior, still a virgin, hasn’t been out on a real date yet. That girl was a child. To kill someone like her.”
His tone registered the anger radiating from him. Perry looked at Goddard, whose reddened complexion made his strawberry blonde crew cut stand out and look more white than light red. His light green eyes darkened as he met Perry’s gaze.
“This whole thing turns my stomach.”
“It’s fucking sick as hell,” Perry agreed.
After glancing at the case filled with evidence bags, Perry walked around the patrol car, leaving Goddard to talk to his partner. Perry noted Goddard didn’t have blue eyes, not that he would have guessed the cop was Peter.
