We’d left the home of Rebecca Nelson twenty minutes earlier, the mother refusing a ride from us or a local cop to go to see her daughter’s remains.
I studied Cassie, noticing small streaks in her eye makeup.
“You didn’t need to use the bathroom, did you?” I asked.
“Jesus, Gardner,” she huffed, and I estimated the chances were 82 percent that Cassie had used the gas station’s facilities to cry, then reapply her mascara.
“It’s okay,” I said, the words coming out mechanically. “To feel sad about this case.”
I had the passenger door to the rental car open and was staring at two files while Cassie paced along the roadside, the paper coffee cup in her hand.
“What are you looking at anyway?” she said finally, a frustrated tone in her voice.
I held up the files, which I’d grabbed from Richie in the morning and had been studying while Cassie drove.
One was thick and belonged to Susan Jones, the hotel manager found when the construction project unearthed the first three bodies. The other was a missing person’s file on Neta Garcia, a taxi driver who had disappeared in October of 2020.
“All these missing women,” I said. “They’re marginalized in some way. But not these two.”
Cassie came closer to me.
“You don’t think a taxi driver is marginalized?” she asked, motioning at Neta Garcia’s paperwork.
I looked back at the list of victims we knew, as well as the missing persons list that Detective Quinones had provided us. “One woman is a sex worker,” I said. “Another an exotic dancer. Three are single moms. One undocumented woman. If our killer was picking off easy targets, these two are not as easy. Neta Garcia,” I said, referring to the taxi driver. “She worked for nine years in an industry dominated by men and immigrants. She filed tax returns. Has a credit history. The motel manager.” I pointed to the second file. “She owned a gun.”
“You wanna re-canvass these two?”
I nodded, and Cassie spilled the contents of her coffee in the ditch. We got back in the car, and I fed the address of the hotel manager’s ex-husband into my GPS.
We got back on the highway toward Shilo, then veered north into a more rural area. The road got smaller, and all around us, bald cypress towered out of the wetlands. In between were banks of dogwood, with clusters of white flowers spreading atop their canopies.
Cassie got a call from Shooter and put it on speaker.
While we met with Melanie Nelson’s mother, Richie and Shooter had gone to see the family of Araceli Alvarez, the other body that had been identified yesterday.
“You get anything?” Cassie asked.
“Not much,” Shooter said. “But something odd came up. Not sure what to make of it.”
“What is it?” I asked.
“I talked to Araceli’s mother. Ran through the last day she saw her daughter and what the girl’s state of mind was. Richie pulled aside her sister at the same time. They each mentioned Araceli was depressed. Wasn’t happy with her nose. I guess it kinda hooked unnaturally to the left?”
“Is this a joke?” I asked, knowing Shooter’s penchant for humor.
“No joke,” she said. “I had Richie call it into Santos Santos, you know, just in case… I don’t know… something popped.”
“And?”
“The ME examined the dead girl’s skull in that area,” Richie said. “Saw a nick in the bone of her face. In between the woman’s nose and her infraorbital foramen.”
“I’m not following,” I said. “This was a natural abnormality?”
“No,” Shooter said. “Santos thought it looked like something from an autopsy. Someone with unsteady hands. They slipped and nicked her bone.”
Except none of these womenhad beenautopsied. The ME was looking at the bodies for the first time.
“A previous plastic surgery?” Cassie asked.
