“The pattern here seems slightly different, though—Matcliff was strangled, not garroted. And he doesn’t seem to have been living with a cult—he was pretty far off the grid.”
Baldwin ran his hand through his hair, making it stand up on end, a gesture she recognized as pure frustration. “I’ll be honest, we don’t know what the link is. Right now it’s one hell of a coincidence. We’re running the specifics through ViCAP now, and I’ve extended the search parameters to include the surrounding jurisdictions where the girls went missing. Maybe we screwed up. Maybe there’s a more specific pattern than we realized. We’ve had multiple agencies on these cases across six jurisdictions, and no one’s been talking to each other. You know how it is—too many cooks. That’s why I’m here now, to coordinate the effort, see the links between all the cases, and work it to the end. With your help, of course.”
Sam nodded. “Of course we’ll help you. Anything we can do, you know we will.” But inside, she had to admit she was a bit surprised. If the FBI’s most hotshot profiler was asking for her help, things must be bad. No, that wasn’t a fair assessment of the situation; Sam and Baldwin had worked together on many a case in the past several years. He knew he could trust her. That’s why he was bringing her in.
A light went on. That’s why he wanted her as an official consultant. He trusted her judgment. She wasn’t a part of his system. A system that had been keeping the links between six kidnappings quiet until now.
Xander spoke up. “A stupid question. If the kidnappings are tied to the cult, could they be using these girls for something? Maybe a sacrifice of some sort?”
Baldwin got up and poured himself a cup of coffee, took a sip, grimaced then downed the cup as if it were a shot of espresso and rejoined them at the table.
“It’s not a stupid question at all. Now that we might have a link, it’s exactly what I’m afraid of. The notes would certainly lead us to believe that. You lose one, you replace one. The particular use of lose makes it seem the girls are dead. For years, we thought we had found Kaylie Rousch’s body, and the others simply were disposed of more thoroughly. This new DNA evidence throws that theory on its ear. Whether they were kept alive, and still are, or were killed after they grew out of the prepubescent stage, we won’t know until we can get our hands on the only one we know is still alive.”
“Kaylie Rousch.” Sam said. “I assume you’ve done your magic and put together a geographical profile of the kidnappings?”
Baldwin opened his iPad and showed them a map of the United States with a series of pins spread across it. Beside each red pin was a name and a black circle, another little girl lost. “There’s no discernible pattern. The girls have gone missing all over the country. Bethesda, Maryland. El Paso, Texas. Denver, Colorado. Hot Springs, Arkansas. Lexington, Kentucky. We find Kaylie, and Rachel Stevens, and we’ll find our answers.”
“And you said Eden was a female-oriented group. I don’t know if this has anything to do with it, but when I rolled Doug Matcliff during the autopsy, I found an incredibly intricate tattoo on his back. A triskele. Three spokes in a counterclockwise orientation. It looked Celtic to me, actually.”
Baldwin pulled a photograph from his file. “Does it look like this?”
Sam glanced at it. “Exactly. This one is smaller, though. His tattoo covered his whole back. It must have taken a long time to finish. The spokes were made up of a ton of different mystical symbols. Moons and stars and inverted circles with lines through them, all kinds of strange stuff.”
“This particular triskele is Eden’s symbol. We’ve never figured out the meaning, because we’ve never been able to talk to anyone about it. I’m hoping Kaylie Rousch can shed some light on things.”
“So where do we look for her? Lynchburg?”
“Might be the best place to start, yes. Though I’d like to go by the Rousches and see if perhaps Kaylie showed up there. If she’s free and alive, it would stand to reason she would want to see her parents, right?”
“It’s a good thought,” Sam said.
“That will be our last stop for the night, and we can head to Lynchburg first thing in the morning.”
Sam met Xander’s eye as they gathered their things. He shook his head slightly, almost as if he knew exactly what she was thinking.
There were so many lives at stake, and here they were, stuck sifting through evidence, trying to piece it all together. She wanted to get out there and start looking for Rachel Stevens herself, even though she knew there were hundreds of people with badges searching for her. She couldn’t help imagining the little girl, scared, alone and clearly in grave danger.
She needed to help Baldwin sort through the new information. The more they could discover, the better chance they had of finding the truth.
Chapter
34
1989