Chapter 16

Aiden pushed back from his desk, stood, pressed his hands on his aching lower back, and stretched. Unable to get the image of Candace’s pale, stricken face out of his mind, he hadn’t been able to sleep. He’d arrived at work well before dawn and had been hard at it for the past four hours.

After he’d left her place, he was jacked, certain Candace knew her attacker. Her reaction to the revelation that the perp was possibly connected to a veterinary clinic proved that. She may not realize it yet, but she knew the scum, all right. He’d stake his badge on that. Add in the fact the attacker called her by name, and it was a fricken’ certainty.

Candy Girl.

That was the name she said the perp had used; the name only her sister, who’d been abducted twenty-two years ago, had called her. That fact alone changed the dynamics of the case.

The assault on Candace in the faculty parking lot was a deliberate, premeditated act. The perp had followed her and attacked her when she was alone and vulnerable. Was it the same man who’d taken her sister and the other four girls so many years ago, the man they knew only as Isaiah? Was that even possible? Despite a nation-wide manhunt, Isaiah had eluded the police, and to this day, he was free. After all these years, why would he return? And why target Candace?

He rubbed the knot in the back of his neck. So many questions, and not an answer in sight. No wonder he hadn’t been able to sleep. On his first day on the job at the Briggston Police Department, he’d used his department-issue computer and downloaded the summary file of the Forgotten Five case. The rest of the files, the records of the hundreds of interviews, the countless crime tip call ins, and the results of the thousands of man hours of police work put on the case hadn’t been uploaded to the server and were stored in a basement somewhere upstate.

The Forgotten Five case was the biggest crime event the state had dealt with in the past fifty years. All levels of police were involved—federal, state, and local. Even the Briggston campus police helped with the search. All that policing created tons of paper. He’d been plowing through the investigation reports for hours, and he’d barely made a dent.

Four girls, all in their teens, went missing over a period of twenty-six months. The girls were from towns spread throughout the state, but the events surrounding their disappearances were eerily similar. They vanished from their bedrooms in the middle of the night, leaving no indications they were planning on running away or where they might have gone. At the time, the police assumed the girls were runaways, as in each case, there weren’t any witnesses or accounts of suspicious characters in the area, and no obvious signs of break-ins.

It wasn’t until Charlene Cooper, the fifth girl, disappeared under similar circumstances that the authorities began to suspect they were dealing with a serial abductor. The press had a heyday with the sensational story and dubbed the girls the Forgotten Five.

Charlene was fifteen when she vanished in the middle of the night from the bedroom she shared with her younger sister. Twelve-year-old Candace was asleep in a bed four feet from Charlene’s, but she hadn’t heard a thing. The parents didn’t know their daughter was missing until they went to waken their daughters for school, and Charlene was gone.

Candace slept through the entire abduction. No wonder she’d fought so hard to convince the cops to keep searching for her sister. The certainty that, but for the fact Charlene’s bed was closer to the bedroom door, Candace, and not her older sister, would have been the missing daughter must eat at her. Experts called it survivor’s guilt, and Candace had it in spades.

Investigators determined the perp gained access through the house’s unlocked front door. He’d ascended the stairs, crept into the girls’ bedroom, and stolen away with Charlene. The only signs of a struggle were the bedsheets tangled in a twisted heap on the floor.

The police had nothing to go on…no witnesses to the abduction, no DNA evidence left by the perp, no sightings of strange cars in the neighborhood…nothing, and the attending officer had written Charlene off as a probable runaway. The Amber Alert didn’t go out until the following day when the mother noticed blood spatter on her missing daughter’s pillow.

Valuable hours had been lost, but the alarm had been raised, and a manhunt began. Dozens of searchers spent hundreds of hours combing the nearby woods and fields, but there was no sign of the missing girl.

Three weeks later, acting on an anonymous tip phoned into the case hotline, the cops raided an isolated farm on the outskirts of Mitchell River, a town south of Briggston, and found four of the missing girls. They were locked inside a dilapidated shed behind the farmhouse, and each girl was chained by her ankle to a metal post cemented into the ground. They were filthy and emaciated, their bodies covered in multiple contusions.

Four girls were rescued that day. Charlene Cooper wasn’t one of them.

According to the rescued girls’ statements, Charlene had been held captive, chained to a post in the shed with them, but two hours before the police raid, Isaiah had taken her from the shed. They never saw him or Charlene again. None of the girls knew why he’d taken Charlene or where he’d gone.

Aiden slumped in his chair and rubbed the back of his neck. The case was disturbing. The sordid details of the brutalities Charlene and the other victims suffered at the hands of the beast who’d abducted them curdled his stomach.

While he read through the investigation notes, an idea niggled at the back of his mind, finally coalescing into a startling revelation. The similarities between the long-ago abductions of the five teenage girls to the Amanda Jacobs’s case were too many to ignore. The girls were of a similar age and build, all between fifteen and seventeen years of age. They had long black hair and light-blue eyes, and they’d vanished from their bedrooms in the middle of the night.

He dug the pads of his fingers into the knot of muscle in the back of his neck. He was reaching for the impossible. The abductions, separated by so many years, weren’t connected to Amanda Jacobs’s disappearance. There was no way on Earth that the man they called Isaiah had returned and restarted his kidnapping spree.

He thought back to his interview with Candace the previous day. She’d been shaken and traumatized when she recalled her attacker’s words. Candy Girl. The same pet name her sister, and only her sister, had called her.

She was even more upset when he mentioned his theory that her attacker could be a veterinarian. Hell, a strong breeze could have blown her over. He’d wanted to press her further, to drill down and find out why that fact was significant, but one look at her pale face, trembling body, and the raw fear in her eyes, and he didn’t have the heart to push. She’d been through a horrendous experience, and it was obvious she was still reeling from the effects of the drug.

Going against his better cop judgment, he’d left and given her the space and time she so obviously needed, but the second he was in his car, he regretted his decision. He needed to find the man who’d attacked her before he hurt someone else. Candace could know a clue that would help solve the case. He punched the steering wheel. Once again, he’d let his personal feelings for a subject get in the way of good, solid police work.

But he’d be back, and the next time he wouldn’t go so easy on her. The dirt bag who’d assaulted and drugged her would attack again. No question. The next victim might not be so lucky. The next victim could end up dead.

Aiden’s job was to find the perp and lock him up before he struck again. Candace was the key. He knew that with a visceral certainty. Grabbing his mug, he slugged back the cold dregs of bitter coffee.

His partner believed the footprints Candace saw in Creighton Springs State Park were left by an elk or some other wild animal.

Joe wasn’t alone. There was even a theory going around the precinct that the footprints were part of a college prank created by kids with too much time on their hands. Other cops were so overwhelmed by the sheer number of cases they were working they just didn’t give a damn. Bottom line—no one believed the tracks in the snow had any connection to Amanda Jacobs’s disappearance.

No one, but Aiden.

Deep in his gut festered the certainty that the snowy footprints and Amanda’s abduction were connected. Amanda Jacobs’s disappearance and Candace’s violent attack the other night somehow revolved around Creighton Springs State Park and a mysterious bearded man. Whether any of those events were connected to the Forgotten Five case was another scenario entirely—one he wasn’t about to put out there yet. Not until he had something more substantial than his gut to back up his theory.

He wove through the maze of dented metal desks, nodding good morning to the detectives who were straggling into the bullpen for the start of shift, as he headed to the break room. Focused on the coffee machine and his desperate desire for another hit of caffeine, he didn’t notice he wasn’t alone.

“How goes the battle?”

Aiden jumped at Joe’s gravelly voice, and hot coffee slopped out of his mug and spilled on his hand. Cursing, he set down the pot and his cup and turned on the tap and ran the back of his scalded hand under the cold water.

“What the hell, man? You’re as skittish as a nun in a whorehouse.” Joe chuckled and munched on a chocolate-covered doughnut.

Aiden turned off the water and dried his hands with a wad of paper towels. “You’re here early.” Joe usually shuffled into work a half hour, or more, late for the start of his shift. He had a dozen excuses—his car wouldn’t start, he had a flat tire, he ran into heavy traffic, he’d booked an early doctor’s appointment—but he was never early.

Never.

Aiden eyed his partner. Something was up. Something was definitely up. He grabbed his cup and slurped. The strong black coffee was bitter and thick as mud, just the way he liked it. He drank again.

“I could say the same about you. You look like hell. Been here all night?” Joe spoke through a mouthful of doughnut, spraying crumbs on his white shirt and the floor.

Aiden frowned and backed up a step. Although Joe’s interest seemed genuine, Aiden was too tired to care about whatever was going on with his taciturn partner. He drained his cup, poured more coffee, and slurped. The zing of caffeine zipped through his bloodstream, pushing aside the heavy weight of exhaustion. “It’s this damn case. I’ve spent the better part of the night researching cases of missing girls from across the country, trying to find any similarities to Amanda Jacobs.” He slugged back more coffee. “You wouldn’t believe how many young women are missing. The numbers are staggering.”

Joe shrugged. “Most of those girls are runaways. They’re probably living on the streets of Denver selling themselves for drugs. Sad, but there’s not much we can do to help them.” Joe swallowed the last bite of his doughnut and wiped his chin with the back of his hand. A smear of chocolate icing lingered at the corner of his mouth. “They don’t want to be found.”

Joe’s cynicism was almost too much to bear, though his partner was right. Lots of the missing cases involved young girls who’d left home of their own volition and vanished into the bowels of a big city, caught in the clutches of some pimp, and selling their bodies to support a drug habit.

But not all of them. Not Amanda Jacobs. He grabbed a paper napkin from the metal container on the counter and handed the napkin to Joe. “You got something…” He pointed at his own mouth.

Joe took the paper napkin and dabbed at his mouth. “Thanks.”

“About the Candace Cooper assault.” Aiden leaned his hips against the counter. “Did you get anywhere checking with local veterinarians? Any of them missing ketamine?”

Joe grimaced. “Do you have any idea how long that’s gonna take? There are a lot of vets in this town, let alone the entire state.” He picked a doughnut crumb from a crease in his white, collared shirt and popped the morsel in his mouth. “Besides, tracking down the ketamine’s a waste of time, if you ask me. No way the guy who attacked the Cooper woman is a veterinarian. This perp is smart. He knew we’d trace the drug to the veterinary market. It’s gotta be a false lead.” He smacked his lips.

Aiden bit back his irritation. “Not all criminals are geniuses. That’s why prisons are full. This case is important. A young girl is missing, and time is running out. We need to track down every lead.” Working with Joe was like going several rounds in the boxing ring. His crusty partner fought him every step of the way, resisting any suggestion that involved hard police work. “We need to stop this guy before he attacks someone else.”

Joe crumpled the greasy doughnut wrapper into a ball and tossed it into a dented metal garbage can. “I’m still not sure I believe Candace Cooper. I mean, you know her history, right? After what happened to her sister, she’s been a bug up our asses, always after us to keep looking for Charlene, even though everyone knows her sister’s probably long dead and buried somewhere in the mountains. We’ll never find her.” He shrugged. “Unless some hunter stumbles upon her bones.”

Aiden bit his lip to stop from snapping. “Really? So, because of what happened to her sister, you think Candace made up the attack?” He blew out a breath. “Did you read the medical report? She has a minor concussion, a slice on her neck from a sharp object, a puncture wound from a needle, and a body pumped full of high-test ketamine. You really think she did that to herself? Just so the cops will keep looking for her sister?”

Joe shrugged again. “Stranger things have happened.”

Before Aiden could blast his partner for his blockheadedness, the captain stuck her head in the door. “My office. Both of you. Now.”

Aiden set down his cup and met Joe’s raised eyebrows. He shrugged and strode out of the break room and through the maze of desks to the captain’s office.

Joe slouched behind.