“Caroline, what the hell is going on?” Sarah demanded.
“He’s so striking—Caleb Anderson, I mean. And I admit I’ve been trying to throw you at him. It’s time for you to start dating. I mean, your fiancé’s been gone for longer than you knew him….”
“Caroline! What are you trying to tell me?”
“All right. Remember how I told you I was sure I’d seen Caleb Anderson before, and you thought he looked familiar, too?”
“Yes,” Sarah said warily.
Caroline looked around again, then reached into the pocket of her homespun cotton skirt and produced an old photograph.
It had been framed and placed under glass to preserve it—the museum was careful with all its artifacts. It was dusty, probably from being in the storeroom, since they rotated exhibits.
“Okay, it’s a photograph. An old photograph,” Sarah said, taking a quick glance, then looking back at Caroline. “I think it’s a Brady, and since it’s in good condition, probably very valuable.”
“Look at it,” Caroline insisted.
Sarah did—and nearly dropped it.
It was the same man she’d seen standing at the foot of her bed.
It was Caleb.
In nineteenth-century garb, complete with one of the sweeping plumed hats that had been in vogue at the time.
“The name is on the back,” Caroline said. “It’s Cato MacTavish. MacTavish. This guy owned your house, Sarah, and Caleb Anderson is his spitting image!”
7
“I’ve had my men cruising every street, we’ve searched in the water, and we’ve questioned every kid that was at the beach party before Winona Hart disappeared,” Tim Jamison told Caleb. “We’ve checked out the parents—because when a kid disappears, right or wrong, we look at the parents first. We’ve interviewed every ex-boyfriend and all her girlfriends—we never kid ourselves. Girls can be jealous and vicious.” He was sitting behind his desk at the station, and now he leaned back, looking weary. “We were on this faster than a brushfire. If she was there to be found, we would have found her. Here’s what’s really sad,” he admitted, leaning forward and folding his hands on his desk. “Last year, when we started the search for Jennie Lawson, it was impersonal—we just didn’t believe that it had anything to do with us. Unlike you, we couldn’t find anyone who saw her after she picked up her car in Jacksonville, so we assumed she never got here, that she went somewhere else or was taken before she got this far. As time went by, we assumed it was a random crime, tragic, but a one-off. You and I both know that the percentage of violent crimes that go unsolved is staggering. Old cases get shoved to the back burner when new crimes are committed. But now…now we’ve got two women who’ve as good as vanished—into thin air.”
There was a tap on the door. A young officer came in at Jamison’s bidding, handing him a file, which he in turn handed to Caleb. “Take it with my blessing. Anything you can find, we’ll be grateful to hear about.”
Caleb nodded. “Thanks. I’m really hoping I can find something here, because I think we’re looking for someone who’s going after a certain physical type, and that the two cases are related.”
Jamison shook his head. “I don’t know. I’ve only taken a few classes in behavioral crime, but you’d think this guy would escalate, not snatch one girl a year.”
“Maybe he was somewhere else in between, or maybe there’s a method to his madness,” Caleb suggested.
“No one sees anything, and we’ve got nothing at all to go on,” Jamison said glumly. “They say there’s no perfect crime, but this guy seems to be getting away with what he’s doing pretty fucking well. No bodies, no blood, no signs of a fight or fingerprints, footprints, no witnesses—nada.”
“Criminals are often strangely brilliant,” Caleb reminded him. “This guy may study people. Follow them, watch them, looking for the perfect victim, making the perfect plan to get her. But sooner or later—and I hope like hell it’s sooner—he’ll make a mistake. I’m going to start by talking to the kids from the beach. You never know what will jar a memory, or what little overlooked piece of information might come out.”
“Like I said, you have my blessing,” Jamison told him. It looked to Caleb as if Jamison hadn’t been sleeping. As if there were more on his mind than just the missing girl.
Caleb stood and thanked him. For a moment he toyed with the idea of mentioning that someone might have broken in to Sarah’s carriage house, but he refrained, seeing as she still seemed to half believe that that someone had been him.