“My eyes are seriously starting to burn,” Lucy Burk complained, rubbing both eyes with her fists. “I don’t know how much longer I can stare at this grainy footage.”
“Take a break,” Cassidy suggested, tossing a pillow at her friend’s head. “We aren’t going to be any use to anyone blind.”
“I’ve been taking a break for the last fifteen minutes,” Emma O’Sullivan admitted, “and I still can’t see straight.”
This comment caused the pillow to come shooting over in her general direction, but she tipped her crown of brown hair out of the way just in time. The girls were sprawled out on Cassidy’s bed, each armed with a laptop, pouring through footage from major airports looking for anyone who remotely resembled Giovani and/or Zabrina. So far, their efforts had only produced a sighting of Dominic Monaghan and a man with long hair who looked suspiciously like Zabrina--from the back--when Emma didn’t have her glasses on.
“Look, the guy’s not stupid, right?” Lucy rationalized, spinning to face her friends, her long blond ponytail whipping around as she did so. “We’ve already checked all of the major airports, all of the major airlines. Maybe he took a private plane. Wouldn’t that make more sense?”
Cassidy shrugged. “Sure it would, but most people who fly in private planes don’t ever come inside the airport. They wouldn’t be on the security cameras.”
“Maybe not those security cameras,” Emma agreed, “but the tarmac is still under surveillance. Didn’t Christian give us that footage, too?”
“I guess so,” Cassidy admitted as she pulled up the original files on her MacBook. After a few minutes of searching, she found an entire set of files labeled, “Exterior Cameras.” She unzipped the file, and then opened the first video. “This one is from London Heathrow,” she explained as the other two looked over her shoulder. Sure enough, they had a clear view of the tarmac and could even see a small plane deboarding in the background.
“Let’s take a look at those files,” Lucy suggested. “And let’s not start with the big airports; that seems too obvious.”
“Okay. What do you suggest?” Cassidy asked as she shared the files with her friends.
“We could just go through in alphabetical order and skip any airport in a major city,” Emma explained.
“Sounds good. Should we start in Austria, then, since Cadence thinks he’s in Europe?”
“Yep,” Lucy agreed. “I’ll take Vienna.”
“I’ll take Salzburg,” Cassidy said.
“I’ll try Linz,” Emma replied thoughtfully. “It’s pretty close to the Czech Republic, too. Kill two birds with one stone.”
“Or two Vampire bats,” Cassidy muttered under her breath. “Good luck, ladies!”
It seemed as if they had been searching for hours with not even a glimpse of a couple who fit the description of Giovani and Zabrina, when suddenly Emma sat up straight. “You guys,” she said, frantically hitting Lucy’s leg beside her, “what did Cadence say the first letters of a plane out of Brazil would be?”
“She said to keep an eye out for anything that started with PP,” Cassidy reminded her.
Emma was nodding slowly. “Take a look at this…” she said pivoting her laptop around so the other two could see.
“What am I looking at?” Lucy asked, shaking her head and rubbing her eyes yet again.
Pointing to the far back corner of the screen, Emma said, “It’s hard to see, but there’s a small plane back her, and you can clearly see the PP, though I can’t tell what the rest of it says.”
“Okay…” Cassidy said slowly. “And?”
“And then watch this,” Emma continued. The footage continued to play, and a few seconds later, a couple stepped out of the back of the plane. For a split second, the man turned so that his face could be picked up by the camera before a baggage handler blocked the view.
“Shut up!” Lucy screamed, covering her mouth. “I have goose bumps! Look at my arm! Look at it!”
“I think that’s him,” Emma said, much more calmly, rewinding the footage so she could look at it again. “What do you think, Cass?”
Cassidy had been staring at the video, her mouth agape, not able to speak. Finally, shaking her head to clear her thoughts she said, “I think… I’d better call my sister.”
For the hundredth time that day, Detective Abby Watson stared at the collage she and her partner had constructed in her office. She had been working Philly Homicide for almost twelve years, but she’d never encountered anything like this. Seven bodies, counting the one they’d pulled out of Cobb’s Creek Park yesterday evening, and absolutely nothing to tie the victims together except the fact that they were all women and all runners. There were no witnesses; no one in the vicinity had seen anyone or anything suspicious. Watson’s only hope lie in the slim chance that their latest victim, twenty-four-year-old Maddison Rigby, had managed to snag a clean DNA sample when she attempted to defend herself. It would make no difference for her, but if she could provide them with a suspect, it was a possibility that she could prevent anyone else from experiencing the same hell she just went through.
Watson stretched her back and absently smoothed her dark brown hair as she stared at the nightmarish images in front of her. Due to the athletic nature of the victims, the local media had taken to calling the perpetrator the Jogging Path Killer. Each woman had been surprised on an evening jog, dragged into the underbrush, and had her throat slashed. Ages ranged from eighteen-year-old Jasmin Brown to fifty-seven-year-old Judy Kessler. There was no rhyme or reason, no connection, and no precedence, save one isolated incident in Buffalo. But that had been six years prior to their first Philly victim, and though the calling card seemed to match almost perfectly, there was nothing to tie the murder of Barbara Gibbon to this strand of violence.
While all of the pictures were vile, the one that disturbed Watson the most was the photograph of Brown. Her face was frozen in a grimace of shock and horror, her eyes wide with fright. She remembered well the conversation she had, had with her mother only a few days after her body was found. Michelle Brown had sat in a nearby office, rocking back and forth in her chair, sobbing as she repeated the same phrase over and over again. “She was my world, my whole wide world,” Watson whispered, lightly running her hands over the photograph. “We’ll find him, Jasmin. I promise.”
“You all right, Watson?”
She turned to find her partner, Peter Dixon, eyeing her suspiciously, a file folder in his hand. “Pete? Oh, sorry. I didn’t hear you come in. What’s that?”
A small smile began to crack the corner of his chiseled face. “This is the lab report from the DNA sample we pulled from number seven last night.”
“Madison Rigby,” she corrected him. “Her name was Madison Rigby.”
“Right,” he said tossing the folder down on her desk so that she could look at it. “You’re never going to believe it, but we got a match.”
Watson’s eyes widened. “Seriously? You were able to locate a suspect in the database?”
As he opened the file, Peter Dixon nodded in the affirmative. “Yep, never arrested for anything major, just a charge of public intoxication back in 2010, but it’s definitely a match.”
Glancing over the mug shot, Watson’s brow creased. He didn’t look like the type of person who would drag a woman into the woods and slit her throat. Of course, the mug shot was six years old. Still, the man in the picture looked weak and intimidated, not like the hulking beast who could rip these athletes off of the track and into the underbrush against their will. However, one glance at the name at the top of the documentation both made her nauseous and completely convinced at the same time. “Steven Gibbon….” she read aloud.
“Yep, could be our guy,” Peter confirmed, his hands on his hips.
“Oh, it’s our guy all right,” Watson confirmed, and then standing to meet his gaze she added, “but we have eight victims, not seven.”