“Her scar,” I say. “I noticed her scar on Friday. I noticed she was trying to cover it up with a bracelet. Wooden beads with a little silver cross on it.”
The detective looks down at her arm now, her wrist bare. I remember that rosary dangling there, in front of her veins, maybe a reminder for the next time she felt the urge to cut into her skin. It was definitely there, on her wrist, when she was sitting in my office that afternoon, fidgeting in my leather recliner. And it was there when she got up and left, when she was grabbed outside my front door. When she was drugged, when she was killed.
But now it’s not.
“Someone took it.”
CHAPTER TWENTY
My breath is ragged when I finally reach my car, parked outside the morgue. I’m inhaling massive, unsteady gulps of air, trying to wrap my mind around the implications of what I just saw.
Lacey’s bracelet is gone.
I try to tell myself that it could have fallen off; just like Aubrey’s earring was found mashed into the dirt in Cypress Cemetery, La-cey’s bracelet could have been flung from her wrist in a struggle, snagged on the side of the dumpster when the police dragged her body out from behind it. It could be buried in the trash somewhere, lost forever. But I’m sure Aaron would disagree.
I’m just asking you to trust your gut here. Listen to your instincts.
I exhale, try to stop the shaking in my fingers. What are my instincts telling me?
The coroner’s statement about the bruises on Lacey’s neck and ligature marks on her arms make it impossible to disagree with one fact: The same person is responsible for the deaths of both Aubrey Gravino and Lacey Deckler. Same method of killing, same finger marks on the neck. As much as I was trying to deny it before, convincing myself Lacey could have run away, maybe taken her own life—after all, she had tried to before—some part of me had known this all along. Abductions happen. Especially abductions involving young, attractive girls. But two abductions over the course of one week? Two abductions within miles of each other?
It was too coincidental.
Still, proof that Aubrey and Lacey had lost their lives to the same person doesn’t necessarily mean this person is a copycat. It doesn’t mean these murders have anything to do with my father, with me.
He dumped Aubrey in a cemetery, in her last known location.
I think about Lacey, dropped behind a dumpster in the alley behind my office—her last known location. Hidden in plain sight. Not only that, but now I know that she was moved there. She wasn’t grabbed at random and killed on the spot, the way I had assumed Aubrey had been. She was taken from my office, drugged, killed in another location, and then brought back.
For a split second, my heart forgets to beat as a thought materializes in my mind, a thought too terrifying to entertain. I try to push it out, try to discount the idea as paranoia or déjà vu or purely raw and unfiltered fear. Another irrational coping mechanism my mind simply generated to try to make sense out of something so senseless.
I try, but I can’t.
What if the killer wanted the bodies to be found … but not by the police? What if he wanted them to be found by me?
Aubrey’s body turned up minutes after I had left the search party. I was there. Did this person somehow know I would be there?
Even more terrifying—was he there, too?
I move on to Lacey, to the mental image of her body dumped feet from my office door. I was telling Detective Thomas the truth—I rarely go into that alleyway—but I can see it from a window in my office, very clearly. I can see the dumpster, and it’s entirely likely that had I not been in such a distracted daze this week, I could have noticed Lacey slumped behind it from the viewpoint of my lobby.
Did this person somehow know that, too?
Maybe there are clues on her body that he also wanted found.
My mind is racing faster than I can keep up. Clues on the body, clues on the body. Maybe the missing bracelet is the clue. Maybe the killer took it on purpose. Maybe he knew that if I found the body, and if I noticed the missing bracelet, I would put the pieces together. I would understand.
My car is hot at a stifling 85 degrees, but somehow, I still have goose bumps. I crank the engine, letting the air-conditioning blow through my hair. I glance over to my glove compartment and remember the bottle of Xanax I picked up last week. I imagine myself pushing the pill onto my tongue, that bitter pinch in the jaw before it dissolves into my bloodstream and loosens my muscles, cloaks my mind. I open the door and the bottle rattles to the front. I pick it up, turn it over in my hands. Twist off the cap and dump a pill into my palm.