Chapter 6:

Rita tried to get excited about the new information, but Tina's inability to remember—or unwillingness to reveal—any specific details wasn't giving her much with which to buoy her spirits. In the squad room the next morning she, Chris, and Devon were updating the Cap.

'Okay, Rita," the Cap said, "let's review where we are. You said you got some new info at your teen centre last night."

"Yeah, Cap. For what it's worth. Our first girl, Jenn, had apparently split up from her friends and was walking down North Flagler on her own. But our guy approached her before she was completely out of her friend Tina's sight, so we might have a witness."

"And we're just hearing about this now why, exactly?" Lipschitz was incredulous.

"These kids don't trust cops, Cap," Chris offered, trying to buffer Rita from the Captain's irritation. "We couldn't track down Jenn's last steps, so we didn't know where she'd been picked up by the perp. If these kids aren't willing to come forward on their own, we can't always find them."

Lipschitz looked thoroughly unimpressed at this excuse. He stood, arms crossed, glaring over the top of his glasses at his detectives, waiting for them to hurry up and offer something more useful at this briefing. Devon sat off to the side trying to stay invisible, quite happy not to be a target of his exasperation.

Rita picked up where Harry had interrupted her. "Tina says Jenn got into a black car. She described it as 'fancy,' maybe a Beamer. But she couldn't be very specific. A man called out to Jenn—Tina thinks he was soliciting her—and she got into the car with him.

"So we're back to our theory that this guy is a 'bad trick,' or has some grudge against prostitutes, or girls he thinks are prostitutes," Harry surmised.

"Maybe, Cap," Chris said. "Or maybe he just likes hurting girls, and he lured her to the car by offering her a ride or a place to stay. The 'bad john' angle just doesn't feel right on this one."

"Well, Lorenzo, you're going to have to bring me something more than a feeling if we're going to clear this case." Harry trusted Chris's instincts completely. But he was also getting impatient.

Chris winced, but he kept his mouth shut. He knew the Cap was frustrated. He was, too. He decided to let it slide. Rita didn't.

"That's not fair, Cap…."

Harry cut her off. "Look Rita, I trust his intuition. And yours. But we need more than a gut instinct to find this guy. We do still think that it's just one guy? Or has more new information come in that no one's bothered to share with little old me?"

Rita sighed. "Yeah. Tina mentioned one man. When we pressed her on it a bit later, she said she didn't see anyone else. Doesn't mean there wasn't…"

"…but serial killers usually work alone." Devon had decided now was the time to speak up.

Harry rolled his eyes heavenward. "For this, we need the FBI?"

The three detectives looked at each other, and seemed to come to some silent agreement that Harry's mood probably had as much to do with his still aching back—and having to spend every day smelling those awful herbs Frannie was still making him use—as it did with them and the case. They ignored the comment.

Chris cut to the chase. "One guy. Probably white, maybe Hispanic. Based on the angle of entry of the knife wounds, Keisha thinks he's about 6 foot, maybe 6'1. And he's cocky or excited enough to be getting sloppy."

As if on cue, a uniformed officer knocked on Lipshitz's door. Harry waved her in. "The M.E. just sent up this report; said to get it to Lance and Lorenzo right away."

"Thanks, Waterson," Chris said to the woman as he grabbed the file from her. He opened the report quickly as Officer Waterson turned and left them alone again.

A small smile cracked his lips as he started nodding his head. "Yes. All right. Now we're getting somewhere." His voice was rising with excitement. "The fibers Keisha pulled from Chloe match the carpeting used in late model BMWs and Audis. In fact they just started using it in the last two years." The tension in the room eased a bit, and the other three started to nod as well.

"Okay, good. That's good." Harry was trying to be encouraging while also rubbing his back.

"And we're getting a pattern," Devon decided to try again with the Captain. Based on the time of death, all of the girls seem to have been abducted at the beginning of a weekend. So maybe he's out of town during the week? Or maybe he's employed and this is how he lets off steam over the weekend. If he's driving a new BMW or Audi, he must have money somehow, unless the cars are stolen."

"We'll run it through property crimes, but let's assume for now the car's his" Harry said.

"Right," Devon was nodding. A stolen car would attract more attention than their perp would want, she guessed. "So the two girls in Miami were killed over the first and third weekend of one month. Then three months goes by, and nothing. Now he's back. And there are two weeks between Jenn's and Mirabella's murders, like before. But then only one week between Mirabella's and Chloe's. So why the speed-up? Is this—Lord help us—a new pattern? And what happened between Miami and Palm Beach?"

"And where's he going in between picking up the girls and dropping them after he's finished with them?" Chris asked.

Rita continued his train of thought without missing a beat. "Even if he picked Jenn up at the northernmost end of North Flagler Drive, that's still a good three miles from where she was found on Riviera Beach. Did he drive straight there? Or did he kill her somewhere else?"

"And Pinewood, where we found Chloe, is about half-way in between." Chris, still excited at the clues, finished Rita's thought for her.

While they were talking, they had gravitated toward a map of Palm Beach that Harry kept beside his desk. Lipshitz took a pencil and outlined a 3.5 square mile area. "Here," he said. "We go back and turn over every rock and blade of grass here. Talk to everyone. And then talk to them again. Anybody who's even thought about driving through this part of town, we talk to them." Harry was practically yelling now. But it was his excited yell, not the angry one. "Go. Go!" He shouted and shooed them out of his office.

As the three investigators were walking out the door, Harry grabbed his back with one hand. Bending over his desk, he reached with his free hand for the bottle of fresh herbal potion Frannie had cooked up this morning. He picked it up, looked at it for a few seconds and grimaced. After glancing furtively out his office windows to make sure the coast was clear, he dropped the bottle into the trash can and eased his way carefully into his chair.

…

Despite the initial excitement about their break in the case, canvassing a 3-plus square mile area was slow business. There are a lot of black Audis and BMWs in Palm Beach. People saw them all the time, and none really stood out to anybody. And they couldn't find any street kids—or anyone else for that matter—who remembered seeing Mirabella or Chloe getting into a black car. They kept at the interviewing and chased down the few tenuous leads they found, but after a few days of knocking on doors and talking to anyone who might have seen anything, they felt like they were back where they had started.

Near the end of the week, Devon and Chris met before work at a coffee shop just down the street from the station. Things were going well enough with Misty that Chris decided against inviting Devon to drinks or dinner, worrying that such an invitation might send the wrong impression to both Misty and Devon. That said, Chris did find Devon attractive, and he didn't mind the chance to spend some time just the two of them. But the main reason he'd asked her to breakfast was to chat about Rita. He was worried about her.

"These are the hardest cases for Rita," Chris said in between bites of donut. "She's as strong as they come, but cases with kids get under her armor."

"She's been laser-focused," Devon observed, touched again by the emotional care Chris and Rita doted on each other. "Do you think she's allowing herself to deal with her grief, or using work to avoid it? These particular kids weren't strangers to her."

"I hope she's dealing with it, but I know she's also using the job as a shield," Chris said, replaying in his mind his conversation with Rita last night. He'd showed up at her door with Chinese takeout in hand and insisted that they watch some I Love Lucy reruns to lighten her mood. Before he left, they had talked about the case, of course, largely at Chris's insistence. Rita said she'd been having a few nightmares, but otherwise, she was fine. She just wanted to catch this monster.

Chris could read Rita better than anyone, and he knew she was putting on a brave face for him. But he also knew that when she did that, she needed space. She wasn't pushing him away, but there was only so far she could only let him see into her fears and anger, at least until she had worked through some of her feelings on her own. He'd done what he could: he'd made sure she was eating. He'd rubbed her feet. And he'd held her close for an extra long hug before kissing her forehead and sending her off to bed.

Now, before he could answer Devon's questions more thoroughly, he noticed Rita driving by the coffee shop on her way to the station. He and Devon grabbed their to-go cups and walked the long block to police headquarters to join Rita at work. It took Rita a few minutes to find parking, which meant they reached the front door of the station before she did.

For her part, as she walked from her car to the building, Rita saw the other two heading in together, chatting and carrying their coffees. She caught up with them and then let Devon get a few steps ahead, pulling Chris aside before he could enter the squad room after the federal agent.

"Breakfast date?" She asked playfully, bumping her shoulder against his arm.

"I guess you could call it that," Chris said, grinning widely.

"Anything I should know about, partner?" Rita took a step back, giving him an appraising look.

Chris has a number of different kinds of smiles. Rita has catalogued them all and can usually hone in on at least the general source of his glee based on the intensity of the grin and how much blushing and shoulder shrugging accompany it. On this particular occasion, he had just broken into the one so devilish that it makes his eyes dance. More often than not, this is the smile evoked by particularly happy times with a sexy woman.

"Well, Sam, there is one thing you should probably know. Yeah…" he said, not finishing the thought, but grinning even wider now, just looking at her, stepping closer to fill the gap between them that Rita had just created.

Rita's eyes went wide. Chris was clearly intimating that this "breakfast date" had started as a "dinner date" the previous evening. As she looked at the squad room doors, and then back at him, trying to decide whether to scold or congratulate him, he leaned his head toward hers conspiratorially and whispered, "I was ten minutes late to breakfast this morning." He paused, enjoying Rita's confused expression. "Things are going, uh, very well with Misty." He played with his collar and gave Rita the simultaneously coy and self-satisfied head tilt that accompanied any talk of his romantic conquests.

"Christopher Lorenzo!" Rita said it as his mother might have when scolding him for taking too many cookies from the cookie jar. And then she smacked him on the arm for good measure. Chris just laughed. "What Sammy? Wait. You thought.. me" he points to his chest, "and her," he points to the squad room. "No." There was that grin again. "I mean, she's, um, she's"

"Your type?" Rita interjected helpfully.

"Well," Chris offered a shrug of false modesty, "I'd like to think so." At this Rita just rolled her eyes at him. "But I'm a one woman at a time kind of man, Sammy. And Misty…" he whistled and let the sentence trail off.

Rita shook her head and grabbed him by the arm, dragging him into the squad room.

An hour later, a call came over the scanner. A body had just been discovered near the public boat launch at South Lake Drive. It was a few miles south of the area they'd been canvassing. Still Chris, Rita, and Devon grabbed their coats and guns and took off running.

What they found when they arrived made it clear that their perp was in a new, more frequent, killing cycle, and didn't give a damn about the map they'd honed in on this week. There was Liz, Lacey's quieter friend from the other night, in a condition you wouldn't wish on your worst enemy. This made four girls. In six weeks. And they clearly were no closer to understanding or catching him than they'd been when Devon arrived in town.

As they were interviewing by-standers and taking stock of every detail they could absorb, they heard a couple of kids cry out. Looking up, they saw Lacey and Tina and a few teens they didn't recognize standing next to the yellow crime scene tape with which the uniformed officers had cordoned off the area. Rita and Devon went over to talk to the girls while Chris and Keisha conferred over Liz's body.

When the two detectives confirmed for the girls that yes, it was Liz lying next to the pier, Lacey completely lost it. Rita put her arm around the girl and consoled her as she cried into Rita's shoulder. "It's going to be okay, Lacey," she sang softly, looking over the girl's head and meeting Chris's gaze. He'd looked over to her to make sure she didn't need him there yet. But Rita was a rock. She'd been the one close to losing it when they'd found Chloe, but here, taking care of Lacey and seeing yet one more murdered girl, a steely resolve took over. They were going to find him. This was going to end. She and Chris would make it happen. No one in their squad room was going to sleep until they found this bastard.

As Rita was comforting Lacey, Devon was talking to Tina. "So you are cops," Tina was saying, sounding betrayed.

"Yeah, we're cops. I'm FBI, and Rita is Palm Beach PD. What that means is we need you to talk to us so we can get this guy, Tina. Do you understand me?" Devon's tone was stone cold, and the look she gave Tina brokered no back talk.

"You could have told us the other night. You could try a little honesty," Tina was scared and trying to sound more confident than she felt. Two of her friends had been killed in the last two weeks, and she couldn't be sure the guy who did it hadn't seen her that night on North Flagler. She'd been high. It's why she and Chloe had fought. Chloe got mad at her whenever she smoked up. All Tina could remember was that that black car had been awfully flash; she didn't trust men who drove cars that nice but picked up girls from the street. They could afford high-rent escorts. Why were they slumming it? She'd learned it was usually for no good reason.

"The fact that we're cops wasn't important then. It's important now. So if you want to get high and mighty about honesty, why don't you start by telling us what else you know about Chloe. And Liz." Devon knew she should be gentler with the girl. Tina was young, and she'd just lost her friend. But she also thought Tina had made it clear that she only responded to bluntness. She was too street hardened to give in to people who tried to sweet talk her.

Rita pulled the two girls into the area inside the crime scene tape so they could talk away from the crowd that was gathering while Chris walked up to join them. Tina told them that she and Liz had gone off in search of food around 10 the previous night and were supposed to meet in front of a convenience store on Northwood Road at 11. Liz never showed.

"Was she alone when you left her, or did she go off with someone else?" Chris asked.

"She was alone."

"And no one saw her after that?"

"Not that I know of."

"Tina, if you hear anything from any of your friends, call us right away, okay? It's important. You still have my number?" Rita asked.

Tina just made a small nod. She wanted to say something bratty, but she had glanced over to where the M.E. was putting Liz in a body bag, and she just didn't have the energy.

Devon handed Tina and Lacey each a card. "And now you have my number, too. So no excuses." Underneath each business card Devon had placed four twenty dollar bills. "Stay off the streets," she said. "Call me if you hear anything, or need anything." Devon was trying to keep her voice even. Up until now, she and Chris have been bolstering up Rita. But Rita was holding it together like a champ. Today it was Devon who felt like she'd had all the air punched out of her.

Keisha's team was taking Liz away, and the uniforms had everything else under control. The three detectives turned to leave the scene, walking in silence for the full two minutes it took to get back to their car. Once there, Devon turned to the other two and said with an sharp edge in her voice, "Let's go to the range."

Chris and Rita looked at her a bit quizzically.

"I need to shoot something."

Chris and Rita just nodded.

The trio drove to the PBPD shooting range and spent the next 90 minutes unloading cartridge after cartridge into paper targets who had to stand in for the psycho they desperately wanted to put away. For good.