The Nobody Girls (Kendra Dillon Cold Case Thriller Book 3), Rebecca Rane [best book club books of all time txt] 📗

Kendra gave Shoop a look but then agreed. She didn’t have time to worry about her long list of relationship shortcomings if they were taking this on.

“Right.”

Chapter 6

Offering a snack, a little treat, helped.

That made it so he could get in close. He liked to know they were breathing heavy, but he didn’t want their smell on him. Their odor of fear had a weight. It could stick to him. He wouldn’t have that. Couldn’t.

The first time he hurt something, his dog, it made him feel funny. It was shameful. But it was good. So, he did it again.

Then he got a new puppy.

It took a while to get to this point. He’d honed his skills. How to look, how to stay unseen, and then how to predict.

Predicting wasn’t a guess. It really was a science. If they looked hungry, he had food. If they looked needy, he had kindness.

And some? Some he could see required a firm hand right away. He traded “Hop in” for “Move your ass” in those cases. When they were a little harder. It worked.

Some of them liked that kind of talk. He gauged it individually, adapted his approach. This one, though, she’d been snacking, chewing, looking around, long enough.

“Hey, you know, I have an hourly rate.”

He nodded. “It can’t be very much, by the looks of you.”

“Hey, that’s mean!”

And then he smacked her face, hard. Hard enough to sting his hand. Hard enough that a red welt appeared on her cheek immediately.

She’d been around, though. She’d been hit before. She wasn’t a nice girl. She was getting what she deserved. The smack got her attention.

“There will be no more sass, okay. I don’t want to hear sass.”

“Look, maybe you should just let me out. I’m not into this.”

“Maybe you should be quiet, really quiet, and I’ll get you to where you need to be.”

She was quiet. She looked out at the road. They could be anywhere, any number of dozens and dozens of fields along the highway.

Maybe about now, she wished she’d paid more attention to where he’d turned, the name of the street? He stifled a chuckle. He knew what came next. And sure enough, she started looking at the vehicle.

Where was the door handle? Where was the lock? Where was the knob to roll down the window?

They weren’t where they should be.

He kept driving but watched from the corner of his eyes. He could feel her heart beating faster, could sense the blood inside her chest quickening. He felt it too.

They were almost to his pre-ordained place.

She could scream all she wanted, though he’d put a quick stop to it. She could try to find the door handle, maybe kick her way out.

But that wasn’t going to happen. He’d made sure of it. It was like the oil change and the tire pressure. He had no loose ends when it came to her trying to escape his trap.

That was a lesson learned from experience. He never made the same mistake twice. These creatures were evil, fetid, and deserved this treatment. But they were also survivors. They had a flight instinct. His job was to be sure that there was no way to act on that flight instinct.

So, like the little mice or vermin they were, their little animal brains reverted to the next survival instinct, fight! They’d never get away, so they’d have to fight.

That’s where this process got so, so intriguing.

The fight.

He chuckled. No need to hold back. No one could hear him but her, and she wasn’t going anywhere.

Chapter 7

“Let’s spread this out from our three,” Kendra said.

“Do you have more from BCI?”

“No. But let’s list what we know about the High Timbers body, the stuff we have without the crime lab.”

Shoop stood up and grabbed a stylus from the tray mounted to the bottom of their smart board. “Let’s hear it.”

“Location, we’re going to have to focus on the highway, not the entire state or county or whatever. Whoever dumped the body on the side of the highway, let’s assume they did that each time, since that’s how it is with the cases we’ve found.”

Kendra knew, especially in prior decades, when traffic cameras weren’t everywhere, that an isolated stretch of highway was a good place to do evil then leave it behind. But I-75 pierced through Ohio from its top at Toledo to its end at Cincinnati. It was a heck of a lot of ground to cover, even in their own state.

“We’ve got three, Linda Kay Ellis, 1978, Sincere Anderson, 1980, and the woman from High Timbers,” Shoop summarized. “Any guess on what year she was killed?” she added.

“There’s no way to know the exact timing for High Timbers, except we have some idea that it was about forty years ago. The tights, the decomposition—I’m not going to be surprised if it’s back in that same era as Linda Kay or Sincere.”

They both were in the habit of using the names of their podcast subjects. They weren’t bodies. They were people.

“We’re looking at the late 1970s, early 1980s?”

“I think so.”

Shoop wrote it on the board.

“Plus, there’s the tights. They were around her neck. And the bag. Those details should be something we can track,” Kendra pointed out.

They stared at the board. They had one unidentified woman and a list to check on to see if she was a tragic anomaly or a part of something else.

“I’m going to head back to the Port Lawrence OHP Post.”

“Meeting up with Omari?” Shoop asked.

“No, ambushing Sargeant Newkirk.”

“What do you want me to work on while your ambushing?”

“Let’s get a number, if we can, in that ten, fifteen-year period. Let’s see if there’s a pattern in what we can find.”

“On it.”

Kendra had selected her favorite summer bag for today, the Kate Spade Toulouse Canvas Satchel. It was lightweight. She opted for white blouses and cigarette pants as her summer work uniform, and always with her Chuck Taylors.

Kendra’s mother had recently come around to her footwear selection. Kendra