Total pages in book: 114
Estimated words: 114820 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 574(@200wpm)___ 459(@250wpm)___ 383(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 114820 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 574(@200wpm)___ 459(@250wpm)___ 383(@300wpm)
He couldn’t see them dragging a vacuum or cleaning supplies with them either.
Maybe the lab would turn something up.
But until now, Rus would have sworn they got there in a vehicle.
Rus had halted, but Moran kept walking.
Rus watched as the man stopped beyond the concrete in the dirt. He stared at the ground, looked up the mountain, and then stared at the ground again.
He was as pissed as Rus that they hadn’t found the perp’s ingress and egress.
It wasn’t strictly necessary to know.
But when you were investigating a crime, everything you could learn was necessary to know.
More importantly, if you could gather convincing evidence to tell the story of how they did it, you could help the jury members raise their hands for a guilty verdict, or better, convince the perpetrators to plead it out.
He watched as Moran squatted, still staring at the ground.
The sheriff lifted his head and looked off into the distance.
He then turned to Rus in a way Rus went to where he was.
He saw it before he got close, something easily missed, unless you knew the only way it could be was right there.
This was why his team, who thought to print the outside of a bathroom window, and according to their report also inspected this area and saw no road, no easy access, and no immediate tracks, missed them.
It was a definitely a miss, they should have looked closer.
But it still wasn’t easy to see.
He saw it where the concrete ended, and a narrow area of gravel and mud began before the mountain started to ascend.
It was barely enough room to fit a vehicle.
But if they wanted it bad enough, went slow enough, it’d not only work, you could go without your lights because the motel lights would guide your way. Your car was dark, no one would see you from the street.
Or the motel.
Rus felt his heart start to pound.
“It was raining that night and had been raining off and on for a few days,” Moran said. “Including the day we found her and the day after.”
Yeah, it was.
That was why it was muddy enough, a vehicle left deep depressions that wouldn’t go away, even if there was more rain.
Because those motherfuckers were still right there.
You could barely see them. There were no tread marks anymore. Some of them had been completely washed away. They looked like grooves in the mud.
And they were.
Grooves made by car tires.
Rus turned his gaze where Moran had, and he saw, less than a quarter a mile away, another business.
It looked closed, but there was activity because it was under construction.
They started walking that way.
“Place used to be an Italian restaurant. They closed about a year ago. Now, believe someone’s opening an outdoor gear store there, sales and rentals,” Moran said.
“Mm-hmm.”
Rus’s eyes didn’t leave the tracks. They were broken, there were full yards where they’d been lost to the elements, but then they returned.
They led all the way to the back of the store.
The broken concrete around that property was lousy with dirt washed in from the rain, gravel, blown in pieces of litter and construction debris.
But there was a lot of dirt washed in from the rain.
And through it, car tire tracks, not construction vehicles, car tire tracks turned onto that back area that wasn’t actually a back lane, but it had served as one, and then those tracks returned to drive through that business.
“They came previously, unlocked the window, and rolled in from back here,” Moran deduced.
“Mm-hmm,” Rus agreed.
Rus stared at some men coming from inside the building and tossing some demolition materials in a dumpster.
Then, at the same time, he and Moran both turned and raced back to the motel, phones to their ears.
TWENTY-EIGHT
Two-Point-Seven Stars
Rus sat in one of the chairs in front of Moran’s desk with his phone resting on it. Moran was behind the desk. Both of them were listening to McGill talking through the speaker.
“They gave it up, no warrant. They’re pissed as shit. This is a big deal to them, beyond the fact it’s a big fucking deal,” McGill was saying. “I’m sending you some pictures of her they have on file. Her name is Carrie Molnar. She lives in Tacoma. She’s a dominatrix with several subspecialties including stranger scenarios, public play, the kind where you do sex shit in alleys or wherever with a possibility you’ll get caught, and consensual rape. Usually it’s male rape, but to do that, she always works with a partner, she’ll do what they do to a female, and they confirmed she was assigned Shannon.”
Carrie Molnar.
It sounded innocuous, like Ted Bundy or Ray Andrews.
Until it wasn’t.
McGill continued to lay it out.
“She’s been registered as a contract worker with them for sixteen months. She has a two-point-seven-star rating out of five, so they weren’t real hot on her to start off. They want their people to strive for at least a four-point-five, anyone below a four is flagged. She’s been flagged awhile, and that while would be for around sixteen months. They’ve been considering losing her. Reading subtext into all this, she gives them the heebie-jeebies.”