The One That Got Away (7 page)

Her answer spurred a raised eyebrow. “I wouldn’t have guessed. How long have you been doing that?”

“About a year. Can we get back to what happened tonight?”

“Sure. Can you tell me what you were doing between 10:00 p.m. and midnight?”

“Just hitting a bar,” she said and instantly regretted the answer. “Ferdinand’s.”

He nodded at her dress. “With friends?”

She was slow to answer. “No.”

“Alone?”

She nodded.

She watched his expression change as he tried to work that one out. She willed him not to press the subject. She had information that would help their investigation. It didn’t matter that she’d gone barhopping alone; she could help them find a killer. Thankfully, Greening heeded her mental urging and let the subject die.

“Can anyone confirm you were at Ferdinand’s at that time?”

She was sure Rick Sobona and a few others could provide her with an alibi, but not the kind she needed right now. “It was busy. I doubt anyone would remember me.”

“So, you were having a night on the town and you just happened across the crime scene.”

More credibility testing
, she thought. “No, I was in the bar and I saw it on the news. The second I did, I made the connection and came down.”

“What connection?”

“The person who killed this woman tonight is the same person who killed my friend Holli and . . . abducted me.”

“What makes you think that tonight’s events are linked to your own?”

Christ, isn’t the scar enough?
He was testing her. If he’d checked her out, he knew what had happened to her. She guessed she’d have to jump through his hoops. “The news reported the woman was naked and suspended by her wrists. That was what he did to Holli.”

An image of Holli hanging from that damn hook flashed through her mind. Now another woman was dead, and this time, in the city where she lived. The status quo had been broken. Her future was uncertain because her safety was uncertain.

She suddenly became aware of Greening’s gaze on her. It was sympathetic, but she didn’t feel any less uncomfortable under its weight.

“Tell me about your abduction, Ms. Sutton,” Greening said.

Another cop, another retelling
, she thought. Besides Jarocki, it seemed police were the only people who ever heard this story. She wasn’t sure if it was the booze overtaking the waning adrenaline in her system, but a sudden wave of lightheadedness washed over her. She asked Greening for some water.

When he left to get it, she took the moment to compose herself. She needed to do this.

Greening returned with a bottle and cracked the top before handing it to her.

She unscrewed the cap and drank. The water touched her somewhere inside that produced a shiver.

“OK, Ms. Sutton, I’ve spoken to the Mono County Sheriffs, and I have the bare bones of what happened, but I’d like you to walk me through it. You and Ms. Buckner had gone to Vegas.”

Zoë was silent for a minute. She felt the weight of Greening on her as she steadied herself against the past before speaking.

“Holli and I had driven there for a long weekend. We drove back on Sunday. The AC in my car wasn’t all that great, so we set off late. We stopped at this little town to get something to eat. That’s when he abducted us.”

She found it a little easier to say the A-word this time around.

“And this was in Mono County?”

Zoë went silent again.

“Ms. Sutton?”

Her hands balled into fists.

“Zoë?”

She smashed her fists on the table, toppling the bottle of water onto its side. “I don’t know,” she bellowed. “I don’t know, OK? It happened. I don’t know where. I don’t know when. And I don’t know with whom.”

Zoë saw the shock and surprise on Greening’s face and regretted her outburst. It made her look unstable. And just to underline her mistake, it was all on tape for everyone to see. She could almost feel Jarocki’s disapproval at her display.

“It’s OK, Ms. Sutton. There’s no need to get upset. We’re just talking.”

“I’m sorry. I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to fly off the handle. I just remember so little from that night, and it pisses me off. That bastard is out there, and I saw him, but when I try to remember him, all I see is a smudge. If I’d identified him back then, this woman wouldn’t be dead now.”

“You don’t know that, and you are not responsible for what others do.”

“That’s easy for you to say,” Zoë replied.

Greening turned to his notes. “The officer I spoke to told me you’d been roofied. It’s not surprising you don’t remember much. The stuff is used for a reason—it’s effective. Why don’t you tell me what you do remember?”

She shook her head. “It’s all in fragments. I remember that we stopped in a small town, but I don’t know which one. It could have been Mono County or somewhere else. We were drinking. We flirted. With whom, I don’t know. I remember waking up in a shed, naked, bound and bleeding from where he cut me.” She touched her hip that held the scar. “Where that was, I don’t know either.”

“But something must have happened, because you were found naked and unconscious at the side of US 395 in your car.”

“I escaped and went for help.” She didn’t have the courage to say she ran away like a scared little bitch, leaving her friend behind.

“How far do you think you got?”

“It could have been up the road from the bar or a hundred miles away. I have no idea.”

“Holli was never found?”

“No.”

“What do you think happened to her?”

“He killed her.” Her words seemed to hit the walls of the cramped room and fall to the floor with a dull thud. “The last time I saw my friend, she was hanging from a hook in the ceiling of some tin-roofed shithole, like a side of beef, naked and bleeding while that psycho circled her with a whip, and do you know what I did? Did I help? Did I fight? No. I ran. I saved my own ass at her expense.”

Zoë dropped her head in her hands and closed her eyes. Images of Holli filled the void, her dangling slack from the hook in the ceiling, with him standing behind her with his whip in hand.

“What do you think he did with her?”

She’d run through the possibilities a hundred times, none of them pleasant or respectful of the dead. “What do you think? He buried her. We were in the middle of nowhere. No one would ever find her. C’mon, you’re just wasting time.”

Greening raised his hands. “I’m sorry, Ms. Sutton. We can take a break and get some air if you like.”

She shook her head. “No, it’s OK. I’m fine. Sorry about this. Tonight has just been a shock.”

“I totally understand, but anytime you want to take five, just say the word, all right?”

She nodded.

“Why do you think he took you and Holli?”

“I don’t know. I remember him with his whip, asking Holli if she was sorry.”

“Sorry about what?”

“God only knows. You’d have to ask him.”

“That scar on your hip. Does it mean anything to you?”

She looked down at herself. “He did it, not me. It means something to him.”

“I know, but I was wondering what your thoughts were about it.”

“I assumed it was his initials—IV. That he marked me as his property.”

Greening nodded. “Do you remember a similar marking on Ms. Buckner?”

Zoë closed her eyes and then shook her head. “I’m sure he cut her, but I can’t remember if it was the same. That woman you found tonight, did she have the same mark on her? I know you can’t tell me everything, but I just need to know that. I won’t be able to sleep otherwise. I won’t say anything. I promise.”

“She had been cut on her left hip, just like you, but she wasn’t marked with an
IV
. It was
VI
.”

“He screwed up his own marking? That’s crazy.” She stopped. This guy wouldn’t have made a mistake like that. “They’re not letters, are they?”

He shook his head. “We think they’re Roman numerals.”

Zoë’s stomach turned as the enormity of what that meant struck her. “That means she was number six.”

Ryan Greening left Zoë Sutton again and walked into the observation suite. Edward Ogawa stood in front of the monitor to Interview Room Three. Zoë was sitting with her head in her hands but suddenly sat up, sneered at the bottle of water on the table in front of her, and batted it away.

“That’s one angry young lady,” Ogawa said.

“One damaged lady,” Greening corrected.

Greening had pigeonholed Zoë Sutton as a drunken party girl when she had come busting through the cordon. That scar elevated her from some hammered chick to someone of great interest. She was a game changer. Their whole investigation had shifted in scope and emphasis because of her. They weren’t dealing with an isolated case.

Greening flipped through his notes on Zoë Sutton and looked over the scant details he’d managed to get out of the Mono County Sheriffs. In the early hours of the morning, the duty officer had managed to track down a case number but couldn’t release the file without the investigator’s approval. He’d gotten lucky that the duty officer had been one of the responding cops, who’d been called to the scene of a naked, semiconscious Zoë found at the side of the road. The officer had been able to give him a snapshot of what had happened to Zoë and her friend, which highly suggested that the Jane Doe at Pier 25 and Zoë were connected.

“What do you think?” Greening asked.

Ogawa shook his head. “Something doesn’t smell right. The Mono Sheriffs never found the location where the girls were held, the friend, or anything else to support her account. There was also no sign of sexual congress, consensual or otherwise.”

“She was doped. She’s not going to be reliable on facts.”

“That’s my problem.” Ogawa tapped the papers with his finger. “Reading between the lines in this report, these guys couldn’t determine what was fact and what was fiction.”

Greening had also gotten that feeling from the account. “I’ve got a call in with the lead investigator on the case. Hopefully, he can shed some light. In the meantime, just looking at the similarities, she is tied to this. Her scar matches ours, and no one outside of the investigation knew that detail. Her friend was supposedly suspended and flogged. Ditto for our girl. No sexual assault in her case, and it looks to be the same with ours.”

“Most of her story is uncorroborated. Anything could have happened.”

“But a few things support her story. One, the friend has disappeared. No one has seen her since the trip, and there’s no record of her since that weekend. So, where is she? Two, while the Mono Sheriffs wrote her off as an unreliable witness, they found Rohypnol in her bloodstream, so something definitely happened. And three, she has the scar on her hip. That scar cinches it for me at this stage.”

Ogawa leaned against a wall of the cramped room. He stared at Zoë Sutton on the monitor. “That scar. Goddamn that scar.”

That wasn’t the kind of reaction Greening was expecting. “Why are you all bent out of shape?”

“If that scar is connected to all this then we’re looking at a serial killer and I don’t want that.”

If the case went multistate, they’d forfeit it to the Feds, but Greening had worked with Ogawa long enough to know that losing the case wasn’t upsetting him. He didn’t care about jurisdictions and credits. He cared about getting criminals off the street, and a serial case would be hard to solve and suck up thousands of man hours. Serial cases made careers, and they also destroyed them.

“I don’t like this twist in the tale,” Ogawa said. “Zoë Sutton could be the break we need or a pain in the ass. If she is connected, we don’t know how.”

“She could be our best lead.”

“Or our prime suspect.”

It was a theory that Greening didn’t buy. Ogawa was tossing out all possibilities, and they couldn’t ignore any of them, but Greening didn’t believe that they were staring at the killer.

“Right now, she’s a distraction. Zoë Sutton isn’t our case, the Jane Doe is, and the clock is ticking. That has to be my primary focus. So I want you to run with this, find out if there really is a connection here. That’s your top priority, OK?”

“Sure thing.”

“I’m going back to the scene. You talk to her. Get everything you can out of her and report back to me.”

“Will do.”

On the way out of the observation room, Ogawa patted Greening on the back. “I think this one is going to get ugly.”