Chapter Fifteen
Eric
After spending the day before spinning his wheels, Eric decided to start early, getting into the station before anybody else. Evidently Doc Wu and the criminalists in the lab got in earlier. Forensics had been waiting for him when he opened his email. The woman they’d pulled from the Red the night before had suffered the same knife wounds as the four previous unsolved homicides of the year, making her number five. The real surprise was that she’d only been in the river for a few hours before she was found. The coroner had also come back with an identification. River Jane Doe was, in fact, Marcus’s man’s cousin, Missy Wilson.
“Tell me about the cousin. The Warrior, not the dead one,” Eric ordered.
“Hunter Wilson. Goes by Hammer,” Adam read from his file.
“Why Hammer? As in ‘dumb as a bag of’?” Mackie asked.
“No, as in ‘hits like a’,” Adam said.
“Interesting. Any criminal history?” Eric asked.
“He was picked up a couple times for assault. Charges dropped.”
“Could he have taken out his cousin to stop her from talking to us?” Eric asked.
“We’ll check, but it’s unlikely. They brought her to us. If they wanted to make sure she didn’t talk, we never would have heard about her in the first place,” Adam said.
“I don’t like the fact that we have five dead women and nothing to show it,” Mackie said.
“I don’t like that our killer is off his schedule,” Eric said.
If they couldn’t count on a few weeks between murders to give them a chance to try to stop the killer, it was going to spiral into chaos when the press got hold of the story.
“I don’t like that he only had her for a day before he killed her,” Adam said.
As near as they could tell, the other women had been missing for at least three days before they were killed. If their unsub had picked up Missy the day before, murdered her, and dumped her body in a matter of hours, there was a good chance any control or stability the killer had was out the window.
“Why her? Because she fit the profile? Because she saw him before Jane Doe went missing? How would he even have known she was talking to us? If he was concerned, he would have taken her weeks ago,” Mackie mused. “What is the connection?”
“Between Missy and the killer?” Eric asked.
“Or Missy and the other victims,” Mackie said.
“There is one link,” Adam offered. He went on to explain that deeper digging revealed while Missy had a blood tie to Hammer Wilson of the Ice Road Warriors, the killer’s second victim had been the ex-wife of an incarcerated club member. After months of nothing, they’d finally discovered a commonality between the victims. Well, at least three of them. They were tied, however tenuously, to the same motorcycle club.
With that being their first real lead Eric and Adam had dived back into all the files while Mackie returned to his own unit to see if Jane Doe’s tattoos sparked any new information.
It took a full day of phone calls to bereaved family members who didn’t want to talk, but eventually Eric found a link with the fourth victim. Rayna Nash had dated a Warrior for a while several years prior. With four of the five dead women having direct ties to the Warriors, Adam was determined to dig deeper. If Jane Doe did as well, they might have an actual suspect pool of people wanting to hurt the motorcycle club. It would be a fucking big pool, but it was a start.
On the other hand, if Jane Doe did have a tie to the Ice Road Warriors, and one of them wanted to keep it quiet, they might have wanted to stop Missy coming in to help the investigation whether the club okayed it or not. Which meant they should be looking into the club, not outwards.
The problem was motive and opportunity weren’t co-operating. Adam’s meeting with Wilson had gone as well expected. Death notifications were the worst part of the job. Doing it to somebody who didn’t like the police in the first place was throwing a match into a vat of gasoline. Eric and Mackie had had to pull Wilson off Adam. Forrester didn’t step in until Wilson threatened to kill every cop in the room for letting his cousin get killed. Even then, it was a minimal effort.
“Do not go off half-cocked, Forrester,” Eric said. “We’ll get this guy. He tipped his cards when he went after Missy.”
“We can’t afford to wait for you. Besides, do you really think we trust you to do anything after this?”
“If you find him first, turn him over,” Eric insisted.
“How would you know if we did? Aside from the lack of new victims,” Forrester taunted. “He’s hit the Warriors twice now. Maybe when we find him we should point him towards some cops’ old ladies. I’m sure there’s at least one that fits the bill.”
“He’s not getting any more victims.”
Forrester caught his eye, and Eric knew he was thinking about Bree. “Nobody is going to get close to anybody’s women,” Eric specified.
Forrester laughed. It had an edge to it that said he wasn’t taking Eric seriously. “Let me know when we can pick up Missy. I’m taking Hammer home. We need to let the others know to keep an eye out, and who to watch out for.” Cops were obviously intended in thewho.
While Forrester led his still-cursing man out of the building, Eric, Mackie, and Adam shared a look. Forrester and his crew might have a more detailed description of Missy’s potential killer if she’d discussed it with them, but they weren’t about to share that information. More interesting was the fact Forrester said two women had ties to the Warriors. Eric and his unit knew it had been four. The club VP had been pissed off enough that his reaction was genuine; he hadn’t known the relationship between the other two victims and the club.
But the killer had.
