Then she said to Chief Royce pointedly, “I want four of your best people down there as well.”
She noticed that Cullen cringed at her words—and the implication that he wasn’t the “best” in her estimation, at least for the job at hand.
Royce brought a select few of his local cops into his office and gave them their assignments. Riley thought they also looked more like movie stars than cops, but they all seemed to understand what the chief was telling them very well.
They’ll do fine, she told herself.
Within an hour, everyone was at an appointed post. And just in the nick of time, too. It was almost 12:30 by the time Riley, Bill, and the two plainclothes cops stepped out onto the train station platform to mingle among unsuspecting people.
Riley spoke into her hidden microphone, “Can everybody hear each other?”
Bill and the two cops answered in the affirmative. So did Jenn, who was sitting in a nearby room watching the surveillance feed.
Now we wait, she thought.
The few remaining minutes seemed to take forever. But soon she heard a train whistle and the dull, monotonous roar of the locomotive.
Riley’s heart started to pound as the train approached the platform.
CHAPTER THIRTY TWO
Riley’s heart pounded harder as the train slowed to a stop. Her breathing quickened.
Why am I so nervous? she asked herself.
After all, this was hardly the first stakeout of her long career.
But then she realized—it was extremely rare to catch a perpetrator in the very act, in the moment before a crime was committed. Opportunities like this didn’t arise very often.
We’d better not screw it up, she thought.
She glanced around to make sure that Bill and the two cops were well positioned to see who would come out of the train cars. In a matter of moments, passengers were climbing down the steps from the cars.
After a few minutes, the stream of passengers slowed to a trickle.
Just when she thought almost no one was left on board, Riley’s eyes lighted on one woman in particular.
At that moment, she heard Jenn’s voice over her earpiece.
“I see someone. She’s coming off the fifth car back from the engine.”
It was, in fact, exactly the same woman Riley had just spotted.
She looked remarkably like the three victims—thin body, thin face, long nose, curly brown hair.
Riley murmured into her hidden microphone, “Does everybody see her?”
Bill and the other two cops said yes.
“OK,” Riley said. “Let’s follow her. Stay at a radius of about twenty-five feet. Try not to be conspicuous.”
She could see Bill and the other cops start moving into their positions. There were enough people clustered around—mostly passengers and people greeting them—to help camouflage their actions.
Carrying a small suitcase, the woman continued on inside the small brick train station.
Riley said to the others, “We’ll go single file through the door, with me in the lead, and Agent Jeffreys right behind me. Keep about ten feet away from each other.”
When she led the way into the train station, Riley saw that the woman was continuing on through the building and heading out through the front door. Sure that her companions were behind her, Riley followed the woman out into the parking lot.
An SUV that was moving through the parking lot slowed as it approached the woman. Riley could see that a man was driving it.
Riley’s hand neared her weapon.
“I see a man in a vehicle,” she said to the others. “Get ready to move.”
The SUV came to a stop. The man looked out the window and waved at the woman.
She knows him, Riley thought.
Of course, she’d realized early on that the murdered women might have known their captor.
But then the side doors of the SUV slid open, and two small children bounced out—two little girls yelling, “Mommy, Mommy!”
The woman put down her suitcase and welcomed the children with a hug.
The man looked out the window and said to her, “The girls have missed you.”
The woman laughed and said, “I can see that. I’ve missed you too. All of you.”
The woman reached for her suitcase and picked up the smaller girl with her free arm. The other girl scampered alongside the woman, and they all got into the SUV, laughing and chatting together.
The SUV drove away.
Riley’s mouth dropped open from shock.
Was it possible? Had they been wrong?
She asked Jenn over the phone, “Did you see any other passengers who resembled the victims?”
“Not even close,” Jenn said. “And I got a good look at each and every one of them.”
“Are you sure they’re all off the train?”
“Yeah. The departing passengers are already starting to board.”
Bill and the other two cops joined Riley in the parking lot.
“This isn’t over,” Bill said to Riley. “Maybe he’s made some adjustments to his MO. The killer’s next victim might not have been on the train at all. He might be abducting her somewhere else as we speak. Or …”
Riley finished his thought.
“Or the killer might not be sticking to his usual type, and we may have missed the real victim when she got off the train. Maybe he’s already abducted her.”
Riley said to the two local cops, “Agent Jeffreys and I need a ride to the lookout tower.”
One of the cops dashed away toward a parked vehicle.
Riley spoke again to Jenn through the microphone, “Bill and I are heading on over to the tower. Stay on the surveillance feed, just in case something new comes up.”
“Like what?” Jenn asked.
Riley suppressed a discouraged sigh.
“I don’t know,” Riley said. “Just keep watching.”
The cop who had walked away a moment before drove up in his vehicle. Riley told the other local cop to stay at the station and keep in touch with Jenn. She and Bill got into the car, and the driver took them out of Dermott—as fast as he could move without drawing attention to the car. Even without the use of sirens and lights, just minutes later they were entering the lush forests of the neighboring state park.
As the car wended its way into the beautifully forested hills, Riley looked at her watch. It was about time for the passenger train to leave the station again. According to Mason Eggers’s dispatcher friend, the freight train would come through in about an hour.
But she also remembered what Eggers said about freight trains …
“They don’t follow any strict schedule.”
How soon might the freight train follow after the passenger train?
Riley had no idea.
The road that wound up through the hills seemed interminable, even after the huge wooden tower came into view above them. Riley’s spirits sank further when she realized that they had to park the car at the base of a cliff about seventy-five feet below the tower itself.
She flung the car door open and raced up flight after flight of wooden stairs up the side of the cliff, with Bill close behind. Then they climbed another several flights of stairs to reach the top of the sixty-foot tower itself.
Riley’s chest and legs were hurting by the time she and Bill reached the top. For a few moments, they both stood gasping for breath.
Three men armed with binoculars were already there on the highest platform of the wooden tower—the Dermott police chief, the Chicago FBI chief Proctor Dillard, and Mason Eggers.
All three looked astonished to see Riley and Bill.
“What’s going on?” Dillard asked.
Struggling to bring her breathing under control, Riley gasped, “We didn’t see the victim get off the train. Either we missed her or …”
She was too out of breath to finish her sentence.
She leaned against the railing for a moment, dizzy and exhausted, her heart pounding fiercely. She couldn’t help noticing that the view from the tower was truly astonishing. Lakes were visible in the distance, and so was the town of Dermott. Even without binoculars, Riley could see that the passenger train was no longer at the station platform.
Bill asked the three men, “What have you seen so far from here?”
Mason Eggers said, “The passenger train passed through a little while ago, right on schedule. Now we’re waiting …”