“That’s an heirloom pepper,” I said, opening my laptop and grabbing a chair. “It’s grown in St. Augustine and belongs to the same species as capsicum, which is used in pepper spray.”
“So youdoknow everything,” Shooter said.
On another day, this would’ve gotten laughs, but the case had everyone focused. I opened my container and blew on the chowder. Across the surface, carrots and diced potatoes floated in a red liquid, along with flakes of oregano and rosemary.
“Do we have a whiteboard?” I asked Richie.
He put down his soup and hopped up. “There’s a portable one outside. Let me grab it.”
I turned to Shooter. She would be the senior agent once I left with Cassie for Miami. “I suggest we write out all the victims’ names. Begin with a list. Then populate missing dates on a timeline. You okay with that?”
“Absolutely,” she said.
Richie rolled the board into the room and closed the door behind him.
“We’ve got nine known victims, right?”
“Check,” Shooter said. “Presuming we’re counting the three women that Offerman and Quinones looked into a few years ago.”
Richie jotted their names on the board.
“The first three were Maria Elisandro, Rana Delgado, and Susan Jones,” he said. “Those were the ones Offerman documented.”
Out the glass of the conference room, a sheriff in an olive uniform stepped off the elevator and headed toward Quinones’s office.
“Then there’s the six we uncovered four days ago,” Cassie said.
Melanie Nelson was the one whose mother Cassie and I had spoken to in the mobile home park. Araceli Alvarez was the young lady whose family Richie and Shooter had talked to at the same time.
“Today we identified two more,” Shooter said as Richie added those names to the board. “Mavreen Isiah. She was the woman we ID’d off the pin in her leg.”
“And Julie Gilliam,” I said, “whose father we spoke to on the way here.”
Richie put up his index finger. “Our reconstruction artist is now almost certain one of the victims could be a man. More specifically, Thomas ‘Dog’ Herrera, who was the boyfriend of Melanie Nelson.”
“So where does that leave us?” Shooter asked.
“If Dog is one of them,” Richie tapped on the board, “we’ve got only one unknown. I’m still wading through messages and calls along with Detective Quinones.”
“And these folks are all locals, correct?” Cassie asked.
“All within thirty miles,” Richie said. “But to be clear, not all in the Shilo jurisdiction.”
I stood up, walking over to the board as I spoke. “Let’s beginwith Mavreen Isiah. She worked as a certified nursing assistant in some sort of medical plaza. It’s possible Mavreen workedwithour man in the sketch. Which made us wonder if he was in the medical field.”
“Amber, her sister, seemed to think no,” Shooter jumped in. “But we met with Bud Gilliam, the father of Julie Gilliam, and on the way out, Gardner noticed something.”
“His daughter had a cleft lip,” I said, opening a pack of saltines and placing the crackers beside my soup. “It was corrected at birth but done poorly. The surgery left a gap that could be fixed as an adult with minimal scarring.”
“According to her dad,” Shooter said, “some mystery guy talked to Julie about fixing it the night before she went missing.”
“And the pattern?” Cassie asked.
“Maybe there isn’t any,” I said. “Or maybe we just can’t see it yet. But one victim, Araceli Alvarez—” I pointed at her name.
“She didn’t like her nose,” Richie jumped in. “She was the one where the ME found the nick on her infraorbital foramen.”
“That seemed like an odd detail,” I continued, “until we saw the cleft lip in Julie Gilliam’s photo. After I left Gilliam’s, I reached out to the sketch artist we interviewed this morning.”
