“And we have no leads,” Laura said. She closed her eyes momentarily, rubbing the bridge of her nose. She’d had more challenging cases than this one, but hardly by much. There were so few clues to go on, and she hated the idea that they might need another death in order to start putting the pieces together.
Two was a coincidence. Three was a pattern. Everything they thought they knew… it could still be changed.
“Maybe,” Nate said, thoughtfully. “We do know that both women had to have been abducted more than twelve hours before they died. That’s a long enough time for someone to get suspicious.”
Laura looked at him, starting to understand what he was saying. “Someone doesn’t come home from work, or turn up for their shift, or answer calls about how they were supposed to meet a friend for dinner.”
“Maybe they didn’t even show up to work this morning,” Nate pointed out. “We could have a missing person report already.”
“So, we start there,” Laura nodded. “Prioritize any local women who have been reported missing in the past day. Get Blackford and his team going out to conduct interviews, get as much information as possible. Anyone whose disappearance is out of character, especially.”
Nate put his phone to his ear again, nodding. “I’ll call again, get this all set up. I just hope there are enough leads to make this work. I don’t know how many missing person cases there can be in such a short space of time. And there’s always a chance the next one, whoever she is, might fall through the cracks. No one noticing until it’s too late.”
“Then we use the other piece of information we have,” Laura pointed out. “The locations. He always chooses abandoned locations. We should have as many units as are available sent out to any abandoned buildings they know of. Even if he’s still in the process of setting up a new platform somewhere, we could find it, set a team to stake it out and wait for him.”
“Good idea,” Nate said, turning around to make the call.
Laura watched Milford, making sure he wasn’t about to make another break for it, without really seeing him.
If they didn’t get any immediate leads, this was about to be a long night. She hooked her hands under her arms, crossing them tighter across her chest, thinking about how the temperature was going to drop as night fell. Somewhere out there, in a cold, abandoned building, she couldn’t help but picture another woman. Bound and alone. A clock ticking around her neck.
And they only had a handful of hours to check all of the abandoned places in a city as big as Atlanta.
What were the chances, Laura wondered, of them actually getting it right?
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
Lincoln tried and failed to get his breathing under control, attempting to remember some techniques a therapist had told him once, years ago. What was it? Count five things you can see?
Well, that wasn’t easy, in itself. The light outside was fading, and though he’d been able to see a little further earlier, now he was barely able to make out anything. The clock on his chest, that was one. It only had a few hours left on it, now. The timer ticking down.
A fresh wave of panic ran through him at the thought of that timer. He’d asked. He’d been conscious enough when the stranger was setting him up on the platform that he’d been able to ask, even if he wasn’t able to struggle away.
No, don’t think of that now, Lincoln told himself. He needed to calm down first. Calm down, work out a way out of this, and then consider everything that had happened later.
What else could he see?
The ropes around his body. That was another thing. They tied his hands together and his ankles, and wound across and over his chest as well, pinning his arms to one side. He felt like a pinata, about ready to drop. He couldn’t see the one around his neck, could only feel it.
The third thing he could see was the window opposite him. It was so filthy that it barely let in any light and seeing anything through it was mostly out of the question. At least he’d had a little muted daylight, earlier. Now that was gone, too.
The fourth thing was the platform he was standing on, which he could make out if he tilted his head. It was some kind of rough wood, not polished or painted, and clearly only a temporary construction. The fifth thing he could see was the floor, not so far down he couldn’t make it out but definitely far enough to be out of reach.
Okay, good. He was doing it. Now, what was next? Oh, yeah – four things he could feel. The ropes, that was easy, because it felt like they were cutting into his skin. The fabric of his jacket, right under his fingers if he tried to stretch them out. What else? He felt… cold. It was cold in here. And he could feel the bounce of the platform under his feet, how unstable it was if he tried to move. The wood was kind of springy. Maybe because it wasn’t attached to anything at the other end, like a diving board. He’d been afraid, at first, that it wasn’t going to hold his weight.
Next was three things he could smell. Huh. It was musty up here; he could smell that. Like the place hadn’t been disturbed in a long while. And a faint smell of something that he thought was probably the rotting hay he’d seen in the corner when the sun was still out. He hadn’t ever smelled it before, but he had a feeling it had to be that. And the gag that had been pushed into his mouth, wrapped around his head so it wouldn’t come out, that had a kind of oily smell to it. At least, he thought so.
Two things he could hear. He listened, hard, for a moment. The ticking of the clock. And out there… nothing.
No, not nothing. Some kind of bird call. He didn’t know anything about birds, didn’t know if it was an owl or a sparrow or something he’d never heard of before. But Lincoln could identify it as a bird. Which in itself worried him, because he wanted to hear traffic and people’s voices and things that might save him.
The last thing was something he could taste. He could taste his own blood. He’d bitten his tongue trying to get the gag out of his mouth.
Lincoln breathed deeply, trying to surround himself with the immediacy of it. That was what his therapist had said to do. Be in the moment.
Okay, well, in this moment, he was trying not to die on a goddamn platform in the middle of an abandoned building with a timer telling him exactly how long he had to live.
As it turned out, meditation techniques weren’t much use in this kind of situation.