“Jennifer Green, right, I remember: Crescent City.”
Jimmy pushes a piece of paper across the table. At the top of the page the victims are listed in chronological order of their disappearance, starting with Valerie Heagle. Jimmy watches me as I study the list; he doesn’t say a thing, just lets me digest it.
“Do you see it?” He knows that I don’t and loves every minute of it.
I hold my finger up, begging for more time.
“It’s right in front of you, clear as day.”
“If it was clear as day you wouldn’t have spent two days working on it.”
“I had to do some research first.”
“Research?”
“Yeah, I had to let you check for shine.”
“So your research is actually my research?”
He grins. “Well, if you put it that way, I suppose so.”
“Wonderful.” I push the paper away. “And what did my research reveal?”
“Our research revealed a strange phenomenon hidden within the first five lines of the list.” He pushes the paper back to me.
“Line number one?” he says. When I don’t answer, he gets annoying. “Line number one, come on, Steps, what is it?”
I glance down at the paper. “Valerie Heagle,” I growl.
“Number two?”
“I’m not playing this—”
“Line number two?” he persists.
“Jennifer Green,” I snap. “And then Tawnee Rich, and then—”
Dammit! I see it. He’s right.
“—and then Leah Daniels and Ashley Sprague, the first five victims.”
“And,” Jimmy says, “the only victims whose vehicles were occupied by and driven by Sad Face.”
“But we’re up to eleven victims; why only the first five?”
“That’s the big question. Something happened, something significant enough to cause him to change an established routine. We figure out what it was and we’ll be closer to catching him.”
“Maybe he didn’t have a car during the first abductions.”
“Maybe.”
“But you don’t think so? You think it’s something else?”
Jimmy shrugs. “I think he liked using the victims’ cars. I think it gave him a sense of power and added to the fantasy. It’s not something he would give up easily. Besides, if it was working so well for him, as it appeared to be, at least for the first five victims, why switch to your own car? That just increases the risk. Now it’s your license plate number someone might see as you’re stuffing the victim in the trunk, or your license plate number attached to the parking ticket written outside the victim’s apartment. That’s how they caught David Berkowitz, you know.”
“Berkowitz?” I know the name.
“Yeah, the Son of Sam killer.”
“He got caught because of a parking ticket?”
“He did,” Jimmy says.
I mull this over a minute. “So, what if Sad Face used the victims’ cars because, like Berkowitz, he almost got caught for some other crime, maybe a burglary or a robbery, something like that, and learned his lesson about using your own car during the commission of a crime? If that’s the case, what’s he doing for transportation now? He wouldn’t use his own car, or a rental—that can still be traced back to him.”
“Maybe he uses his own car, but swaps out the plates for some that are stolen?”
“That’s good,” I say. Then I remember something from a conversation three months earlier. “Dex was telling me that a lot of their dopers buy cheap cars and never put them in their name. They just drive them awhile and then sell them to someone else.”
“Don’t they have to register the car in their name to renew the tabs?”
“Yeah, but you can drive up to a year before the tabs expire. And if the seller doesn’t fill out a report of sale and turn it in to the Department of Licensing there’s no way to find out who actually owns the vehicle.”
“I like that one better than the switched plates,” Jimmy says, “but that’s not going to help us track Sad Face, if his real name’s not attached to anything. And we don’t have time to wait for him to screw up.”
No, we don’t, I think. I reach into my pocket and pull out the locket, Lauren Brouwer’s locket. It still pulses, like a small heart beating in my hand. Jimmy watches me from the other side of the table. After a moment, I slide the locket back into my pocket.
“We need to work faster,” I say.
Jimmy just nods.
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
I was ten years old when I lost my mind.
It was temporary … mostly.
When I emerged from the woods two years earlier—and recently dead—the shine was no more than a dusty hue brushed over the world with gentle strokes. A lot changed in two years. By age ten the shine had fully blossomed: an apocalypse of color that shoved its way through my eyes and bounced around inside my skull.
I hadn’t yet learned to control it, to turn down the volume. That wouldn’t come for a few more years, and then slowly; in the meantime I lost my mind. I remember my father cradling me in his arms when I sobbed, his eyes wet with a father’s grief, not knowing what to do.
We kept it from Mom as best we could, though I heard snatches of conversation on occasion, usually late in the evening when they thought I was asleep, and often after those days that were particularly tough. She knew something was wrong, but never got the why or the what of it out of Dad. He would deftly answer her questions without answering and then redirect her concerns in a harmless direction.
It was best that way.
Meanwhile, Dad was determined to find a solution to the shine, so we started spending weekends on a variety of father-son outings. We consulted experts in various religions, in mysticism, in spiritualism. We visited several parapsychologists and one regular psychologist. We experimented with colored glasses and infrared lights.