The first thing Riley noticed was a curve in the train tracks, the same as the Barnwell crime scene. The killer had chosen this spot carefully, knowing that the engineer wouldn’t see the woman until it was much too late to stop.
Riley crouched beside the body and studied it with her flashlight. The headless corpse was twisted in a writhing position, similar to Reese Fisher’s body. Like Reese, this woman had been all too conscious during the last moments of her life, and she had desperately tried to thrash her way loose.
Riley turned her flashlight toward the head that had rolled down the embankment. Riley felt a chill as the woman’s dead, terrified eyes seemed to stare directly into her own.
She quickly noted the resemblance to the other two women—the same thin face, longish nose, and curly brown hair.
The killer is fixated on a physical type, all right, she thought.
She heard Jenn ask her, “What do you think about the car?”
Riley shined her light over at the parked hatchback.
A scenario had been forming in her mind ever since Bull Cullen had mentioned that the woman’s own car was found at the scene.
Riley walked over to the car, followed by Bill, Jenn, Cullen, and Chief Buchanan. Riley saw that the passenger door and driver door were both still open.
She felt a welcome shift in her mental focus as she began to get a faint sense of the killer’s thoughts and actions.
She walked slowly around the car, telling the others what she was thinking …
“Her car was parked somewhere else a while ago—a place where she often parked The killer knew exactly where to find it, and when to expect her to come back to it. He knew there weren’t likely to be a lot of people around. He lay in wait for her out of sight near the car.”
She stood beside the driver door and said …
“She took out her keys and opened the driver door. At that moment, everything was right for the killer. No one was watching. He made his move. He subdued her with a blood choke, then injected her with flunitrazepam. As she lost consciousness, he had no trouble pushing her into the car and over into the passenger’s seat.”
Riley leaned into the driver’s seat. She reached out and touched the wheel lightly. “Then he drove directly here. He got out, walked around to the passenger side, pulled the woman out, and carried her over to the tracks. He bound her to the tracks, just as he had the others. Then he …”
Riley paused.
Then he what? she wondered.
He hadn’t used the woman’s car as a getaway vehicle. Did that mean he’d had his own car parked and waiting nearby? Or did he slip away on foot?
Riley’s connection with the killer suddenly vanished.
She stifled a sigh. The feeling had been much too fleeting.
Were her instincts never going to kick in reliably on this case?
She said to the others, “A forensics team will need to scour the car for DNA.”
Not that it will probably do any good, she thought.
She had no idea how many people might have ridden in Sally Diehl’s car. And she felt sure that the killer wasn’t an idiot—he would have worn gloves, so there wouldn’t be any of his DNA on the wheel.
She turned away from the car and asked Chief Buchanan, “What can you tell me about Sally Diehl?”
The uniformed woman scratched her head.
“Well, Sally had lived here in Caruthers for two or three years. She taught third grade in our public school. She was single—divorced, I think. Yeah, I believe she told me that she got divorced before she moved here. I don’t know where her ex-husband might live. She doesn’t have any family here in town.”
“What about friends?” Riley asked.
Buchanan smiled sadly.
“Oh, she had friends, all right. Me included. She was sweet and charming. Everybody liked her. Which is why it’s so hard to imagine …”
The police chief’s voice faded away again.
Riley asked, “Do you have any idea where she was or what she might have been doing today before this happened?”
Buchanan thought for a moment.
“Well, it’s Sunday, so she wasn’t teaching school. I wouldn’t know where she was. But somebody else might. I’ll ask my team to talk to people around town who knew her, ask if anybody knows.”
Riley’s head began to fill up with unanswered questions. She knew which one she wanted to ask first.
“Did she sometimes travel to Chicago?”
Chief Buchanan tilted her head.
“As a matter of fact, she did. I think she had a brother there, and she visited him from time to time. I have the impression that he was in and out of trouble a lot.”
“Did a passenger train come into Caruthers from Chicago today?” Riley asked.
“Why, yes,” Chief Buchanan said. “About an hour or so before this happened.”
Riley looked knowingly at Bill and Jenn.
Jenn nodded and said what Riley was thinking. “The other two victims were on trains from Chicago shortly before they were killed.”
Bill said, “Maybe Sally Diehl was on that passenger train.”
“We need to find out,” Riley said. “If she was, somebody needs to try to find people who were on the train who might have seen her or talked to her. We still don’t know whether the killer might have been on the train as well, but we can’t overlook the possibility.”
Just then Riley heard wailing sirens and saw the flashing lights of several approaching official vehicles. She remembered Bull Cullen saying that he’d ordered his own railroad cops and FBI agents from the Chicago field office to come straight here.
They made it here in a hurry, Riley thought.
In a matter of seconds, a swarm of law enforcement personnel poured out of the vehicles. Led by the Chicago field office chief Proctor Dillard, the FBI people hauled an electrical generator and floodlight stands out of a truck and set them up around the body.
When the lights snapped on, the already surreal crime scene suddenly became a whole lot weirder. The glare of the floodlights was as intense as sunlight, making the whole place seem like some sort of movie set.
But this scene was all too real.
Riley, Jenn, and Bill helped Chief Dillard organize the newly arrived personnel, assigning them different tasks.
Soon Riley noticed a tall, older man in plainclothes mingling among the others. He was looking around the crime scene with a mixture of horror and intense interest, writing down notes in a notepad.
Where have I seen that man before? she wondered.
Then she remembered.
It was Mason Eggers, the retired railroad cop who had caught Riley’s interest at the meeting in Chicago. She remembered being intrigued by his keen concentration at the meeting in Chicago earlier that day.
She also remembered what he’d said shortly before his abrupt departure.
“Just playing around with a little theory.”
Riley headed toward him.
It was time to find out what had been on his mind.
CHAPTER TWENTY FOUR
As Riley walked toward Mason Eggers with mounting curiosity, she remembered something that Cullen had said about Eggers at the meeting …
“He keeps coming around whenever there’s a new case.”
She guessed that Eggers had either driven here as soon as he’d heard about the new murder, or he’d hitched a ride with the railroad police.
Cullen had also said …
“He’s always got ideas and theories.”
That’s what really intrigued Riley about him, and she wanted to hear what was on his mind. Mason Eggers seemed to be lost in thought as Riley walked up to him.
“Hello, Mr. Eggers,” she said.
He looked up from his notes, startled.
“Agent Paige,” he said.
He looked toward the body and shuddered.
“It’s so horrible,” he said. “I’d seen pictures of the other two victims. But being right here, seeing all this …”
His voice faded off for a moment.
Then he added, “Back in my day, railroad cops didn’t have to deal with this kind of intentional thing. What kind of a world are we living in?”
He shrugged and said, “But you’re with the FBI. I guess you’re probably used to this sort of thing.”
You never get used to it, Riley almost said.