Mariah Stewart - Last Words

“Could it be personal?” she murmured aloud.

“What?” Beck stood in the doorway. Mia hadn’t heard the door open.

“I was just wondering if the fact that the killer left the first victim-”

“Colleen Preston,” he reminded her.

“Yes, thank you. Colleen Preston. We should use her name. I was wondering if maybe the killer left her for her family to find because there’s some personal connection. Some reason he’d like to rub their face in it.”

“In the fact that she’d been killed?”

“In the manner in which she’d been killed,” Mia corrected him. “He wanted them to know he’d had total control over her body and her life and her death. He wanted them to know exactly what he’d done to her. He wanted them to see just how much she’d suffered. How vainly she’d gasped for air. How terrified she’d been. And that he’d orchestrated it all.”

She stood and began to pace.

“Why else make the tapes? Why let them hear her last words, if not to taunt them?”

“Because he’s a sick son of a bitch.”

“Oh, that he is. But this goes deeper than just being sick. This has a personal edge to it.”

“You could be right about that. Right now, we need to take a drive.”

“Where to?” She slid her bag off the back of her chair and grabbed her notebook and phone from the table, then followed Beck into the hall.

“Sinclair’s Cove. It’s a bed-and-breakfast about a mile outside of town. I just got a call from the owner. He heard about the woman that was found in my car, and thinks he might know who she is.”

“Who does he think she is?”

“One of the grad students who worked for him. She went home for a family wedding in Colorado over the weekend of the first and never came back. Last week he called her parents’ house to find out if she’d quit, but they were under the impression that she was here. The Monday after the wedding, she left home to drive back to the inn. They spoke with her once while she was on the road, but they haven’t heard from her since.”

“And they didn’t miss her until her employer called?”

“She’s twenty-five years old, she’s been living away from home for some time now. I guess she didn’t check in all that often.”

As they walked past Garland, Beck held up his phone, apparently to show the dispatcher that he had it with him.

“Shit. My car…” Beck said when they reached the parking lot and he realized his Jeep was being processed as a crime scene and he’d loaned his cruiser to Hal.

“I’ll drive.” Mia pointed to the black Lexus SUV parked under one of the few trees with a canopy large enough to provide shade.

“Nice wheels,” he said as they walked toward it.

“Thanks.” She unlocked it with the remote, then opened the driver’s side door and slid behind the wheel.

When Beck got in, she said, “So, I guess this story is the big news around town.”

She snapped on her seat belt and turned the key in the ignition, then opened the windows to let out the air that had been cooking inside the closed car despite the fact that the car had been parked in the shade.

“Biggest thing that’s happened in St. Dennis since the British shelled it during the War of 1812.”

She stopped at the entrance to the parking lot to allow a TV news van to enter.

“Keep going,” he told her. “We’re not doing the news thing right now.”

“Which way?” she asked when they reached Charles Street.

“Take a right.”

“I’m going to need to hear the tape he left inside Colleen Preston’s wrappings,” she said as she made the turn. “And I want copies of the photos from both crime scenes.”

“What else?”

“The interviews, I told you that.”

“Anything else?”

“I want to walk your neighborhood at night. The Prestons’, too. I want to see it the way he did.”

“As best we can figure out, he must have been at the Prestons’ between eight and eleven. My place, sometime between one and five.” He glanced over at her. “You go walking around St. Dennis at that hour, I want to know about it.”

“Worried about my safety, Chief?”

“Not funny, Agent Shields.” He turned his face to the window. “Not funny at all.”

“It wasn’t meant to be. For the record, I’m well trained and I’m well armed.”

“Good for you. But you’re also the right age for this wacko to go after. Don’t put yourself in harm’s way.”

“I never do.”

“Make the next right,” he told her.

Sinclair’s Cove was marked by a white sign bearing the name of the inn and adorned with a painted great blue heron that was life-size and expertly done. The drive was tree-lined and reminiscent of the old South. It wound through a forest of azaleas to a clearing, at the far end of which was a house that took Mia’s breath away.

“Wow,” she said. “Take a look at that.”

“It is something,” Beck agreed.

The front of the large white structure was three stories high, with a porch that spanned the entire length, and was adorned with three pillars that went from the porch to the upper roof line. Tall windows graced either side of the front door. The circular drive off to one side of the house left the entire lawn unspoiled, and Adirondack chairs were scattered here and there for the guests to enjoy one of the many views of the bay.

“How old is this place?” she asked.

“Early eighteen hundreds, I think, but you can ask the owner.” Beck pointed to the porch where a well-dressed man stood watching. “Daniel Sinclair the…I don’t know, eighth? Tenth?”

“Come on.” She laughed.

“No, seriously. The house has been in the same family since it was built.”

“That’s crazy.”

“Crazy but true. The guy who owns this place is a direct descendant of the one who built it.”

She parked in front of one of the outbuildings and turned off the engine.

“That’s the river? Or the Chesapeake?” She pointed to the water flowing beyond the rear of the grounds.

“The bay. Most people are surprised when they realize how wide it is.”

“I live almost directly on the opposite Shore,” she said as she opened the door and got out of the car. “No surprise here.”

“Chief Beck.” The man who’d stood on the porch now strode across the well-tended lawn. “Thanks for coming out right away.”

“That’s what we’re here for.” The two men shook hands, then Beck introduced Mia. “Dan, this is Special Agent Mia Shields from the FBI.”

“Called in the big guns, did you?” Daniel Sinclair then offered a smile and a hand to Mia. “Good to meet you, Agent Shields. Glad to know I live in a town where the police aren’t afraid to ask for help when they need it. I have to admit I’m surprised that neither Cameron nor Ballard had the sense to call in the feds.”

“Well, I’m sure the cases are going to overlap,” Mia told him. “We’ll certainly share whatever information we feel is relevant to their respective cases.”

“Good, good.” Sinclair nodded agreeably. “The sooner this bastard is locked up, the better off we’ll all be.”

“Dan, why don’t you tell us about your missing employee?” Beck prompted.

“Holly Sheridan. As I told you on the phone, she asked if she could take a little time off to attend a family wedding in Colorado. At the time, I understood her to mean a long weekend, as in Thursday night through Monday. Of course I said yes. When Wednesday arrived and she did not, I figured I’d misunderstood how much time she’d asked for. When this past Monday came and I hadn’t heard from her, I was getting a little pissed off.”

“You tried her cell phone?” Mia asked.

“Yes, but it always went straight to voice mail. Finally, I figured, enough already. A family wedding’s one thing, but we’d gone beyond the amount of time I felt was reasonable. So I called her parents-we have everyone’s next of kin on file here-but they were as surprised as I was that she wasn’t here. More, maybe, because they’d seen her off the day she left to drive back here.”