bathroom. I could feed you to the dogs, and nobody would ever know about it.”
“I don’t hear any dogs. And you don’t have any dog hair on your clothes. My friend has a dog, and she always has dog hair on her.”
The man’s eyes narrowed. “What are you, Sherlock Holmes? I don’t go near the dogs. They’re too vicious. I just push food out through the mail slot, and they devour it.”
“Sher…Sherlock who?”
“Sherlock Holmes. What the hell do they teach in school these days?”
“I’ve heard of him,” she insisted unconvincingly.
He snorted. “He’s a detective. The greatest detective of all time. I can’t believe you don’t know that.”
Kennedy didn’t say anything.
“That’s it for now. I’ll be back later to let you use the bathroom again.”
A tear trickled down her cheek.
“How long are you going to keep me here?” she asked and then snuffled. She wiped the tear away with a trembling hand.
“As long as I need to. But you’re alive, aren’t you? I haven’t killed you or fed you to the mutts. So it could be worse.”
“Why did you take me?”
“That’s not your concern. I had my reasons. That’s all you need to know.”
Kennedy decided to try a different tack. “My mom is an FBI agent. She’ll be going crazy to find me.”
“I expect she will. I would.”
That wasn’t the response she had been expecting. “Then you know about that. So why am I here?”
“To give me an entertaining hobby. Now go in the room and keep quiet. There’s no escape, so don’t hurt yourself trying to come up with one, or you’ll be sorry. Just behave yourself, and you’ll be okay. That’s all I’m going to tell you.”
“Will you leave the light on?”
“If you’ll promise to be good.”
“There’s not many ways I could be bad in an empty room.”
“That was the whole point.”
“What if I have to go to the bathroom before you come again?”
“Hold it. Or do you want me to give you a bucket? It would be easier than me coming down here every five hours.”
So he was coming down from somewhere. That confirmed her feeling that she was in a basement. She’d never really been in one before, but had seen them on TV in police shows.
She gave him a dirty look. “I’ll try to hold it.”
“Do that.”
The door closed with a metallic clunk.
Silver drifted back into Kennedy’s room and touched random items on her desk, silently agonizing over the ordeal she must be going through. She wasn’t hugely religious, but had found herself praying, promising any kind of bargain if she could only have her daughter back safe. A part of her was afraid to imagine what could be going on — she’d spent far too much time looking at crime scene photos of innocents who had been subjected to unspeakable horrors by sick animals masquerading as normal people. She understood all too well the violations, the depravity that people were capable of. But it would do no good to allow her imagination to run away with itself.
Her eye caught something she’d missed earlier. In the closet. There were three empty hangers. She did a quick scan of the dirty clothes basket in the bottom but couldn’t find the clothes she was sure she had hung up.
What were they?
She was almost positive there were two stretchy tops and a pair of jeans.
Her pulse quickened, and she moved to the dresser, opening each drawer to see if anything was missing.
There. Panties and socks. She wasn’t sure how many, but there were fewer in the drawer than before.
A cautious flicker of hope glimmered to life within her. If the kidnappers had taken clothes, then they were planning on her needing them — which meant that they were planning on keeping Kennedy alive. At least for a while. There was no other reason to do so.
She ran to the living room and grabbed her phone and called Art’s cell. He listened patiently and agreed that was indeed positive. But beyond that agreement, it didn’t change much.
Still, it was a reason for optimism. And at this point she’d adopt it.
It meant that her little girl’s chances of being alive were better than she’d believed an hour ago.
Silver made her way to her computer by her bedroom window and sat. She quickly made a series of keystrokes and logged into the FBI network, then searched through her recent messages. There it was, from Seth. A series of files was attached to the main body.
The search results were collected in several batches, with precise instructions for modifying the parameters to change the searches. She opened another window and studied the reports of the interrogations, and then followed the step-by-step directions Seth had left, and created a new algorithm, looking for decapitations that were geographically-proximate, as well as in any way related to their three likeliest suspects.
She knew from Seth’s warning that the results would take some time to churn out — it wasn’t like the movies, where the super-sleuth agents waved their hands over the touch screen wall monitor and the processing power of a small sun yielded answers in nanoseconds. In the meantime, she busied herself reading the interviews with the two who hadn’t run headlong into a truck, searching for the smallest inconsistencies.
The Regulator was killing methodically, and his schedule, while accelerating, didn’t seem erratic. Most of the time when a serial increased the frequency, it was because his impulse control was breaking down, which was how they tripped up — they started making mistakes, cutting corners because they were in a hurry. But this killer hadn’t made any she could see, other than allowing himself to be photographed by the traffic cams — assuming that was even him.
She opened Seth’s folder and studied the face — hard to make out in the shadows, even with the image enhancement. With all the facial hair and the cap, it was tough to be sure, but he looked older than the average psycho — which pointed to their Brooklyn possibility. Assuming her idea that the current killings were mirroring earlier incidences was even valid — a conviction that was rapidly fading. She pushed back from the keyboard in frustration — she was getting nowhere.
After pacing a few lengths of the living room, Silver moved into the kitchen and opened the refrigerator, searching for something sweet. She was reaching for the box of emergency chocolates when a thought struck her with the force of a blow.
This serial was highly intelligent and had left nothing to chance. Did it make sense that type of meticulous planner would simply not notice, or ignore, the traffic cameras that even cursory research would have revealed? They had been working under some assumptions, and one of those was that he hadn’t known about them. But what if he had? What if he’d planned on being photographed because there was no way around it, and disguised himself to throw them further off the scent?
She hurried back to screen.
Pulling up the driver’s license photos of the three possibles, she ruled out the Pennsylvania PI. He had a round, cherubic face, and the man in the photos had a longer face. But it also still didn’t look much like either of the remaining two. Was it possible that her hunch was that far off?
Silver opened the secure e-mail browser and sent the images to the technicians, asking them to do their best to remove the facial hair. Also, to put a beard and long hair on their two driver’s license photos and to modify the noses to match the traffic cam shots. And to run facial recognition software to see if it could spot any similarities that her naked eye couldn’t.
She’d be lucky if she got those back by the next morning, but she wasn’t in a huge rush — it wasn’t like she had places to go. And what if one of the two looked like the traffic shot?
She understood why Sam was pushing in a different direction. The odds were against her theory holding
