“I know it’s hard, but this is how police work goes. If you ever get into it yourself, you’ll see this is the harsh reality of how it works. You don’t kick down doors every five minutes. There’s no instant gratification. It’s about long, hard, diligent work. We’re doing all that we can, but it’s going to be slow.”
If that was how law enforcement worked, then maybe being a cop wasn’t for her. It was why she liked her mall job. Something happened or it didn’t. When it did, the culprit was dealt with at that moment. The crime was solved as quickly as it occurred.
“So, do you have anything positive to tell me?”
“Yes, and it’s the main reason I came by to talk to you. I think we’ve found a connection between you, Holli, and Laurie Hernandez. Or at least the reason behind why the Tally Man targeted you.”
A chill ran through her. It served to cool her growing frustration with Greening.
“I’m sorry to say this, and I don’t mean any disrespect, but it looks as if he targets women behaving badly.”
Zo? flushed.
“Sorry, it’s just our working theory.”
She waved off his apology. “What do you mean by ‘behaving badly’?”
“Checking into Laurie Hernandez’s background, we found that she had a string of petty offenses to her name—theft, disturbing the peace, public drunkenness. And according to the witnesses I interviewed, she was hard to get along with. Things of that nature.”
Laurie Hernandez’s résumé sounded eerily familiar, but she saw one problem with it. “That wasn’t true of Holli and not of me, really. I had a clean record before the Tally Man.”
“Yes, but think about your night at the Smokehouse. You were being loud and raucous. The two of you were playing up to Craig Cook. The Tally Man would have witnessed this and found your behavior distasteful. You were breaking his rules.”
She sagged under the weight of shame, embarrassment, and guilt. They’d gone to Vegas only to let off a little steam. Yes, they’d been a pain in the ass with their antics at the Smokehouse, but they didn’t deserve to die for it.
“We were only passing through Bishop that night. How would he have targeted us?”
“He could have been in Vegas, but I don’t think so, seeing as he had an established place where he took you two. My feeling is that it was an impulsive move on his part. He was at the Smokehouse, and he acted.”
Impulse control. It seemed it wasn’t a problem confined to people suffering with traumatic-stress disorders. The what-ifs started building in her head. If she and Holli had behaved themselves, would the Tally Man have ignored them? If they’d taken a different route or driven at a different time, would they have avoided him altogether? If they’d driven at a different time . . . If they’d flown . . . If they’d stopped somewhere other than the Smokehouse . . . One what-if was harder to swallow than the others.
“If the Tally Man selected us based on our behavior at the Smokehouse, a few hours difference either way, and we would have never run into each other. None of this would have happened.”
She looked at her life over the past fifteen months and the shift it had taken from PhD student to mall cop, from content to miserable, from sociable to lonely. All of it was due to a random encounter. Tragic didn’t begin to describe it.
“Unfortunately, that’s how these things happen,” Greening said. “?‘Wrong time, wrong place’ describes a lot of victims of violence and crime. It’s not right. It just is.”
“Do you think that’s how he got Laurie Hernandez?”
“Possibly. It looks as if he grabbed Laurie on her way home from work. There wasn’t an incident at her work that day involving her, which leads us to believe he selected her, then studied her before abducting her. The theory is that he encountered Laurie at some point, didn’t like what he saw, then decided she was next. I’m guessing when you escaped, he learned that he couldn’t be so impulsive.”
“Glad to have been of help.”
“Well, predators like these aren’t created perfect. They develop their methods from their errors.”
“What does this big discovery mean?”
“Obviously, we know there are other victims, and we have a victim profile we can use. We’ll search for missing women who have a history of petty crimes and poor social behavior and connect some dots to a suspect.”
“Sounds like a vague search.”
“It is and a wide one. The Tally Man isn’t confined to one location, as evidenced by the fact that he abducted you in Bishop and Laurie Hernandez here in the city. We don’t know if he’s California-based or national. So we are up against it. But again, this is how police work goes.”
“What I can’t wrap my head around is how petty this all is,” Zo? said.
“Petty—yes. Surprising—no. Name one psychopath who has a noble, cogent, or understandable reason for killing people. They’re damaged people inflicting more damage on innocent bystanders. We’ll never be able to understand it.”
Nothing Greening told her filled her with confidence. The Tally Man looked to be holding the SFPD and everyone else at bay. She asked the one question that mattered to her most. “How long am I going to be stuck here?”
“A week. A month. I can’t say.”