Page 2 of Cooper’s Passion

“Anita, it’s for your own good, and deep down you know it.”

She didn’t acknowledge his words, and instead slammed the door shut behind her. In the open-plan station, she noticed that several of her colleagues turned their heads to her. She ignored them too, snatched her uniform jacket and her bag, and stormed out of the building.

When she reached her house in the outskirts of Elko, she was still seething. She got out of the car and looked at the house. Her father had bought it shortly after her mother’s disappearance. Before that, they’d lived in Reno. José Diaz had insisted on moving away, claiming their old house held too many memories. As a nine-year-old, Anita hadn’t had a say in the matter, even though she’d wanted to stay where she felt closest to her mother. The sale of the house and the move to Elko had driven a wedge between her and her father.

When he’d married a widow after being granted a divorce in absentia from Anita’s mother, Anita had felt betrayed. But deep down, she couldn’t blame him. He was still a young man, virile, and handsome. Why wouldn’t he start a new family? When his new wife had given birth to two strapping boys within three years, the house had become too small for the growing family. They’d moved, and Anita, now a young adult, had agreed to her father’s suggestion that she stay in the house, and he and his new family moved to a larger one in the city. It gave them the physical distance they needed. Slowly, their relationship had improved.

Until today.

Anita locked the car and went inside. She was glad she lived alone now and only saw her father at the station or at his house, because it meant she didn’t have to explain why one entire wall in her living room was covered with maps, photos, printouts, and post-it notes. The map spanned five states: Nevada, California, Oregon, Washington, and Idaho. Blue and red dots were marked on the map. The blue ones indicated the disappearance of a woman, and the red ones stood for women who’d been found dead. Flanking the map on all sides were photos of women as well as information on where they were last seen and where they finally turned up dead.

Her father was right: she had indeed used department resources to look into the disappearances and murders of young women not just in Nevada, but also in the surrounding states. She’d realized very quickly that none of the women she’d identified were found in the same state from which they disappeared. When she’d made that connection, she’d realized she was onto something: the killer was travelling through these states, picking up women on his way, then killing and dumping them in another state. She guessed that this was by design to make it harder for local police and sheriff’s departments to connect the dots.

A Jane Doe in Nevada wouldn’t immediately be matched up with a missing person in Idaho. In addition, in the six years that Anita had found data for, the perpetrator had never abducted anyone from the same town twice. The same went for the dead bodies: each and every single one had been found in a different city. Yet, two things remained a constant, and therefore pointed to a serial killer. He only killed tall, blonde women aged between 30 and 45, and the cause of death was always the same: exsanguination.

Yet one thing gave her hope that Janet Fillmore from Elko was still alive. The serial killer kept his victims alive for six to eight weeks. The bodies that had been found in all five states had been dead for less than twenty-four hours. Janet Fillmore had disappeared five weeks earlier. She was still alive—somewhere.

Anita scrutinized the map again. If her theory was correct, the serial killer was traveling in a clockwise pattern, which meant that the missing woman from Elko would show up somewhere in Northern California. The previous year, a missing woman from Las Vegas had shown up in Oakland, California. Before that, it had been Sacramento, and before that Santa Rosa.

“Where did you go this time?” she murmured to herself and looked at the post-it notes she’d placed around Janet’s photo.

White van, it said on one. License plate: couldn’t read it; dirty. Time: 12:25 am.

She stepped closer to look at Janet’s face again. She was thirty-seven, blonde and tall. Her driver’s license had indicated that she was five foot eight, an inch shorter than Anita. Janet ran a successful business in Elko, a furniture store. She’d inherited the business from her parents, and she’d improved it to make it into a very profitable enterprise. Anita was certain that having put all this hard work into her business, she wouldn’t just leave without a word. No, Janet had been abducted. Anita removed a post-it note that said left voluntarily? and discovered another note beneath it. She’d almost forgotten about it. There’d been a sticker on the white van in which Janet had disappeared.

Sticker on van: two letters intertwined. S, F?

It had to be a logo. Maybe that of a company?

Janet sat down at her laptop and booted it up. Moments later, she did a search for logos with S and F. There were a multitude of hits. She clicked on Images. Various images all depicting the letters S and F in different fonts, colors, and configurations appeared on the screen. She started scrolling, when she stopped abruptly. The orange on the screen popped, drawing her eyes to it. This was it! This was the sticker she’d seen on the van. She clicked on it.

San Francisco Giants logo, was written below it.

Whoever had taken Janet had a connection to San Francisco. She glanced back at the map. So far, the killer had never dumped a body in San Francisco, nor had he kidnapped anybody from there either. At least not anybody who fit the profile she’d developed.

Anita knew it was a long shot, but by her estimate, Janet only had one to three weeks left, before she would show up too, dead by exsanguination. Sick bastard! This time, she had to stop him. She had to get there before he could kill her, and stop him once and for all.

And maybe then she could prove that he was the one who’d taken her mother twenty-one years earlier, and find out where he’d dumped her body. Then her father would finally have to acknowledge that her mother had loved them both and hadn’t left them like a thief in the night. It hadn’t been her choice. She’d been forced.