After returning the key to the rental office, she got her deposit back and thought, That’s it. The job had been necessary, but it was also another goodbye—a final goodbye—and she’d been exhausted when it was done. That, in combination with the poor night of sleep she’d gotten the night before, had her in bed by nine and out cold by ten after.
She’d needed it.
Evan, apparently, had spent the rest of the day doing online research into anything that might have connected to the story the man with the slight accent had told her so long ago.
Jewels.
Abducted women.
Twins.
A potential massacre.
Like the FBI, he hadn’t found any specific crimes that matched perfectly, but he told her he did have some possibilities, and so she’d met him in his office.
“What did you find?”
He opened the folder, and she could see that it was a short pile of printouts. “I have to believe that if the part of the story about abducted women is true, the man who committed the crime was never caught. Or even charged. Maybe he killed them and then died himself, and his crimes were never discovered.”
“Even a massacre?”
He shrugged. “Maybe it was a small massacre.”
She gave him a look that was the melding of a smile and a grimace. “Hmm. Okay. Well, that doesn’t help us.”
“No, but I did find a few things that might be of interest. I narrowed my search to specific dates, which made it a little easier.”
He handed her the printouts, and she took them, scanning the page at the top of the pile. She moved that one to the back and read the second one. Each page was a series of articles from different locations about local missing women who were never found. She pulled the third page forward and read that one. “Slovakia?” she said. “You went worldwide?”
“Where I could,” he said. “Because of the accent.”
“Good thinking,” she murmured, looking quickly through the rest of the stack. It was pretty depressing to know that a basic internet search pulled forth so many missing women.
“I still need to do some digging,” he said. “But it’ll take more time. As it relates to other countries, there’s not a lot in English, so I pulled what I could for now. That’s just my initial find.”
Noelle moved back to the one from Slovakia, reading quickly through the headlines for that one. Several young girls had gone missing. Children under twelve. There was once a man who collected things, very fine things. Jewels. Rubies. Emeralds. Diamonds. And he draped them on the women he stole. No, if she was going to take the man who’d told her the story at his word, then this didn’t exactly fit.
She flipped the page, reading brief snapshots of crimes from the Netherlands that weren’t quite right either. There was the headline from an article near the bottom of that page that interested her, and she read the small portion that Evan had printed out and compiled on the one page. “Do you have the entirety of this article printed out?” she asked, tapping her finger on the one she meant.
He craned his head slightly and then nodded. “Hold on.” He had another folder on the other side of his desk, and he pulled that one out, going through the larger stack. She liked how he’d compiled snippets for each geographical location onto one page. It made it much easier to get an idea of what she was thumbing through. A few of them she’d been able to dismiss right away, as the timing didn’t quite work as far as the age of the man she thought they were dealing with.
She scanned the page he’d handed her. “Local authorities looked into a man in Brussels named Dedryck Van Daele, the heir to Van Daele Diamonds, a major diamond-mining company.” She looked up. “Diamonds?” Jewels. He draped them in jewels . . .
Evan nodded. “I remembered you mentioned jewels and thought that might be an interesting link.”
She read through a few more paragraphs. “So they looked into this man named Dedryck because a few young women went missing in the area where he lived, and one of those women—a waitress in town—told her friend that Dedryck had invited her to a party a few nights before she disappeared.” She frowned. “That’s all the evidence they had? That sounds kind of weak.”
“I guess the local authorities thought so, too, because I didn’t find any more information about the police looking at him for the other disappearances that followed.”
“Did Dedryck have children? Specifically twins?”
“No,” Evan said. “At least none that he claimed at the time. I actually can’t find any more information on him after that one article. The family business is no longer in operation.”