As Paige walked, she looked around, trying to spot any signs that might point to a shallow grave or a hidden body. At this point, as horrific as the thought was, her every instinct told her that Nikki Ashenko had been killed.
They reached a small stream, and Christopher spread his hands. “What now?”
Paige got out the file, reading. “It says here that on the night Nikki Ashenko went missing, it was raining heavily, which sounds like another reason they gave up so quickly. My guess is that even if they had searched, any clues would have been washed away.”
Washed away. Those two words stuck in Paige’s mind, refusing to dislodge.
“There was heavy rain,” she repeated. “That might mean that a stream like this might flood. It would be flowing faster… we need to check downstream.”
It would explain why there hadn’t been anything to find in the woods, because the stream might have carried Nikki Ashenko clear of them. Then, when the water receded in the morning, the police would see the stream and think it was too slow and meandering to be relevant.
Paige set off along the bank of the river, heading downstream, searching as she went for any sign that might point to what had happened that night. Christopher went with her, but he clearly wasn’t as convinced as she was.
“I know you’re following your instincts on this, Paige, and I trust them, but this feels like a bit of a long shot. We have a lot of assumptions piling up on one another to get us here.”
“I know,” Paige said, “but I really believe this is what might have happened.”
That seemed to be enough for Christopher. “All right, we’ll keep going.”
They walked along the bank of the stream together, and it might have been pleasant, if not for the reason that they were doing it. Both of them kept their eyes down, checking the stream and its banks, not wanting to miss anything.
They walked until they were well clear of the woods, and there was still no sign of anything. They must have gone at least a mile, now.
“I think we need to call this,” Christopher said. “Even with a flood, there’s no way that the stream could have-”
“Wait,” Paige exclaimed as she spotted something on the bed of the stream. “What’s that?”
Something shone white there, and as Paige hurried forward to get a better view, she realized with a sickening feeling that it was the top half of a skull. Horror started to fill her, and for a second or two, she might have been back in the forest, staring down at her dead father, but there was also excitement mixed in with it that she’d found the one thing they needed to keep going.
They’d found Nikki Ashenko’s body. A killer had indeed murdered her on the night she’d gone missing, a night when Lars Ingram had been busy committing a different murder. This was the work of someone else, and if it proved to be the work of the copycat, then it might be a step closer to finding him.
A fresh wave of horror hit her at that thought. If Paige was right about all of this, then that meant that the copycat had been working for years.
The trick now was working out which other murders were the work of the copycat, and exactly how much Lars Ingram knew about him. As much as Paige hated it, there was only one way she was going to be able to do that.