The Surviving Girls Read online

  “No-carb diets are torture. I’m done with it.”

  Good. In Lei’s opinion, Emma’s insistence on ping-ponging from diet to diet, each more extreme than the next, was survivor guilt in the form of self-punishment. But what did she know? She wasn’t a shrink, and Lei had fired every one she’d had.

  None of that changed the fact that something was most definitely wrong. “While we’re in agreement about the diet, you haven’t looked at me once since I got home. What’s wrong?” She thought hard. It was the wrong time of year for the holiday-card Christmas spiral—nothing like seeing her family move on with life without missing a beat to really kick Emma in the teeth—but there might have been a birthday Lei forgot about. Emma’s mother might have been happy her messy daughter moved away, but she still twisted the knife every chance she got.

  Bitch.

  Lei didn’t let any of it show on her face. She just waited her friend out.

  Emma sighed, her bottom lip quivering. Her long blonde hair was pulled back into a messy bun, and she wore yoga pants and a flowing shirt with thick wool socks to combat the relative chill of the house. She was always cold, no matter that the temperature of this old house never dropped below seventy-one.

  Thankfully, her friend didn’t make her wait long. “We got a package this afternoon. No return address.”

  Not from her family, then—they never send anything other than a card. Lei pushed off the doorframe. “Where?”

  “Front table.”

  She must be more tired than she realized if she’d walked right past it without seeing it. Lei turned on her heel and marched back down the hall. Saul’s nails clicked on the hardwood as he followed. He always knew when something was wrong—or about to go wrong.

  Lei picked up the box. It was a standard priority flat-rate box. The only real thing of note was the lack of return address on the label—and that it’d been addressed to both her and Emma. Goddamn fan mail.

  More than a decade later, one would think the true-crime groupies would have found someone more interesting to send shit to. Lei and Emma weren’t exactly hiding, but they also didn’t advertise their presence. Most of the people who lived in Stillwater knew who they were, but they didn’t bring the incident up.

  Or at least most of them didn’t.

  Lei pulled her knife from her boot and cut open the thick packaging tape. The box was light enough that she had half a second wondering if it was empty.

  But when she dumped its contents onto the small square table next to the door, two things fell out. One was a postcard for the University of Washington, showcasing a bookstore with a jaunty font proclaiming it was located in Seattle. She flipped it over, finding a carefully printed note in block lettering. SEE YOU SOON.

  “What the fuck?” The second item was a square cardboard box that looked like something that would house cheap jewelry. She opened it, and all the breath rushed out of her lungs. “Shit.”

  “What is it?” Emma’s voice seemed to come from the other side of a long tunnel. Saul barked once, a warning that something was wrong, and her voice went panicky. “Lei, talk to me.”

  She turned to face Emma, her hand spasming from how tightly she held the box. “It’s hair.” Three little bundles of hair that looked like they’d been clipped off the end of a ponytail, each tied neatly with a red ribbon. Blonde, brunette, black hair.

  Just like the little clippings that had been found in Travis’s apartment when he was finally arrested.

  Saul barked again, quickly echoed by Prince. “It’s okay.” She spoke through numb lips, but the alternative was not speaking at all and having Emma lose her shit. Lei forced herself to move. She set the box back on the table and carefully replaced the lid. Her knees gave out and she sank to the floor. Saul was instantly there, nudging closer until she wrapped her arms around him and buried her face in his shoulder.

  Emma walked around her, and she listened to her friend look in the box, gasp, and set it back down. “It’s him.”

  “It’s not him.” She spoke without looking up. “He’s still in prison.” She knew because Emma called once a month to check, a compulsion she couldn’t seem to stop. Lei let herself hold Saul for three more seconds, and then she lifted her head. “His last appeal was denied.”

  It wouldn’t stop Travis from appealing again. His family had the money and the influence to keep hiring lawyers to try to change the guilty verdict, which meant that once every few years, she and Emma would be dragged before a new judge in a dog and pony show. So far, every appeal had been denied, but in the darkest part of her soul, she didn’t think they’d win forever.

  And when Travis walked free again, he’d be coming for her and Emma. She knew it, and Emma knew it.

  They’d done everything in their power to ensure they were ready when that time finally came. Their house had top-of-the-line security and two safe rooms, one on each level. They had cameras set up across their property so no one could approach without being seen. And they’d both taken a multitude of self-defense courses and were damn good with the handguns they had stashed around the house. Short of purchasing a tank, they were as prepared as they could be.

  “I need my phone.” She climbed to her feet while Emma retrieved it. It took a few seconds to find his number, but she didn’t hesitate to call. This wasn’t the time to talk herself out of how serious this was. If they were getting some kind of message, Britton Washburne needed to know about it.

  He answered his phone, just like he had every time she’d called over the years. “Lei, how are you?”

  For the first time in ten years, she didn’t have her normal answer. “I think we got a calling card or a threat or something.”

  “Slow down.” His voice was deep and low and designed to calm. “Start from the beginning and tell me everything.”

  Lei took a breath and then another. She gave in to the need to sit on the floor and lean against Saul. There was a time for strength, and now wasn’t it. No one could see her except Emma, and she and Emma had already seen each other at their worst.

  This wasn’t even close.

  “I got back from a job tonight. Checked the inner perimeter. Sometime this evening, a package was delivered—flat-rate box, no return address. It’s got a postcard from UDub Seattle with a note written on the back that says ‘See you soon’ in block lettering. And a box with three things of hair, all tied with red ribbon.”

  “Blonde, brunette, and black hair?”

  Her heartbeat kicked up a notch. “Yes.” She didn’t ask how he knew, and he didn’t make her wait to answer the unspoken question.

  “There’s been an incident in Seattle. I have two of my people on the ground there currently.”

  It couldn’t be Travis. As she’d just told Emma, he was in prison and would remain there. Even as rich as his family was, his reach only went so far.

  Which left two options. “Copycat or fan?” A copycat would retrace his steps. A fan, on the other hand, would be trying to get Travis’s attention directly with the murders. Two sides to the same coin, perhaps, but the distinction was important.

  Britton hesitated. “We think the latter, though it may be too soon to tell.”

  Lei dropped her forehead to rest against Saul. “He killed three girls.” That was what the hair meant—three lives taken. And the sick bastard had sent them to this house. To Lei and Emma. She lifted her head. “One minute.”

  She pressed the phone to her shoulder and met Emma’s blue gaze. “Check the security cameras while I get my gun. We’re sweeping the house.”

  Emma flinched, but nodded. “Prince, come.” The Golden Retriever followed at her heels as she hurried to the office they had set up on the main floor.

  Lei put the phone back to her ear as she followed her friend. “We need to clear the house. If he sent a package here, he knows where we live.” If he was a fan, like Britton suspected, then at some point he’d take a shot at them. The surviving girls. The ones who got away.

  To his cre
dit, Britton didn’t tell her that she was being paranoid. He knew better. “Call me as soon as you’re finished. I’ll send the local PD to you in the meantime.”

  Lei didn’t know what Isaac was going to do, but he was the local sheriff, so calling him in was the right step to take. “Okay. I’ll call soon.” She hoped.

  She hung up as she reached her room. She’d left her gun there for the search, just like she always did. Technically, she was licensed to carry, but Lei didn’t make a habit of bringing her gun on searches. It made the cops edgy, and edgy cops tended to be assholes and make her job harder. She paused to check to make sure it was loaded and the safety was on.

  No more weakness. Emma could defend herself in a pinch, but this was Lei’s home, and whoever this bastard was had infiltrated it—even if the package was only the first step.

  Back downstairs, Emma met her at the office door. “Security cams are clear. The motion-sensor cameras have been going nuts all day, which makes it impossible to track them one hundred percent, but it’s that time of year with all the animal traffic through our property. Nothing popped except your circuit around the lawn when you got home, and the mail guy. And before you ask, the mail guy was our regular one. I didn’t answer the door, but I still checked.”

  Just because he was the regular guy and had lived in Stillwater his entire life—they’d checked that, too, when they moved in—didn’t mean the mail guy wasn’t a psycho. Better to be safe than sorry, which was why Emma didn’t open the door for anyone. Ever.

  Stop it. You’re being paranoid.

  Damn right I am.

  “Okay, so he’s probably not in the house.” She double-checked the gun to ensure that the clip was in and there was a bullet in the chamber. “Stay in here and keep watch on the monitors.”

  “I will.” Emma touched Prince’s head. “Prince, protect.” The dog moved with her into the room and set himself up watching the door while Emma took her chair in front of the half a dozen monitors set up on the wall above the desk.

  Lei shut the door behind her and then looked down the hall. Saul remained at her side, alert and ready to do whatever she asked of him. They’d done this drill more times than she could count. She was an imperfect searcher, but nothing would get past Saul’s nose. Not the dead, and certainly not the living. If there was someone here, her dog would find him.

  “Saul, search.”

  CHAPTER THREE

  “I need you to go to Stillwater.”

  Dante blinked sleep from his eyes and checked the clock. Five in the morning. He fumbled the phone as he sat up and had to make a fast grab before it hit the floor. “Now?”

  “Yes. Immediately.”

  What the fuck? Anything that put that tone of worry in Britton Washburne’s voice was enough to have him dropping everything. “What’s going on?” Dante grabbed his clothes and pulled them on without missing a beat. He’d barely had a chance to unpack, so it was just a matter of throwing a toothbrush and razor in the beat-up old bag.

  “You linked the Seattle murders to Travis Berkley.”

  “I haven’t had a chance to report that to you yet.”

  “I know the bare details, courtesy of Detective Smith’s request for assistance.”

  “Then how did you make that jump? I had to see the scene before I put two and two together.” And he hadn’t had a chance to report his findings yet. Dante double-checked to make sure he hadn’t forgotten anything and walked out the door and down to the room where Clarke was. He knocked on her door.

  “Stillwater is approximately three hours from you. Lei Zhang and Emma Nilsson are there. I’ll text you the address.”

  “The same Lei and Emma who were the only surviving women of the Sorority Row Murders?” He didn’t ask how Britton knew their address. Britton seemed to know a whole lot of shit that he shouldn’t. It had awed Dante when he was a rookie. These days, he just took it for what it was—an edge.

  “Yes. They received a gift last night, likely from your unsub. I need you to talk to them, get a feel for how much immediate danger they’re in, and then proceed accordingly.”

  Clarke opened the door and turned back into her room without saying anything. Dante walked inside and faced the window while she put on pants. “We’re not babysitters, Britton. This guy is going to move again. We don’t know a damn thing about what his cooling-off period might look like, because even if he’s mimicking Berkley, that was a one-off, so to speak.”

  “Correct. But you’re going to have to leave anyway to talk to Travis Berkley. You want to see the girls before you do.” This wasn’t a suggestion—it was an order.

  He considered that. Britton had a point. If this unsub was a devoted fan, he was obsessed with Travis Berkley’s previous murder spree. Those girls knew Berkley better than anyone, and not just because one of them had dated him prior to the murders.

  That didn’t mean he wanted to drive three hours to talk to women who no doubt wanted to do anything but have a walk down memory lane, where Berkley had stalked the Omega Delta Lambda halls. “We’re leaving in thirty.”

  “Good. Fill me in afterward.”

  “Will do.” Dante hung up and cursed. “We don’t have time for this.”

  “For what?” Clarke took in his suitcase at a glance and quickly packed her own. “We’re leaving already?”

  “Apparently the two sorority girls who survived Travis Berkley live three hours from here.” Hard to think of that as a coincidence. He used his phone to do a quick search on Stillwater, Washington. Ten thousand people, if that. Just big enough to have a couple of little stores and a single stoplight.

  Exactly the town where a person would settle if they wanted to fly under the radar.

  A place equally difficult to produce a sorority, since it didn’t even have a high school, let alone a college.

  Clarke took the phone out of his hands and eyed it. “Seattle is about as close as you can get and still follow Berkley’s MO.”

  “That’s what I was thinking.” Dante shook his head, trying to chase away the last bit of sleep clinging. “Fuck. Britton is right. We need to talk to them before we do anything else.” The victims here mattered, but if this was all some kind of love note to Berkley, then the case would hinge on Lei Zhang and Emma Nilsson.

  They were at the center of this, whether they wanted to be or not.

  “Be pretty shitty to think you got out and survived and then have some fanboy hunting you down to finish the job.”

  “I don’t think ‘shitty’ begins to cover it.” He led the way down to their rental and held the door for Clarke. She rolled her eyes, but after seven years as partners, she didn’t waste the breath to bicker about it. Dante got in the driver’s seat, plugged the address Britton had texted him into the GPS, and started the long process of escaping Seattle’s city limits.

  Clarke typed away on her phone, her brows drawn. He let her have the uninterrupted silence to do whatever research she’d set her sights on. It was too fucking early to hold down much in the way of conversation anyway. Thirty minutes and a large coffee later, Clarke set her phone down and twisted in her seat to face him.

  Dante glanced at her. “What did you find?”

  “Lei Zhang and Emma Nilsson both graduated UCLA after a year’s sabbatical—during which there isn’t much information at all, so I’d guess it included a whole lot of therapy and antidepressants—and went on to form their own business. They train cadaver dogs and contract out to find bodies—both for government agencies and private parties.”

  “No shit?” If someone had asked him to make a list of what he thought their jobs would be, cadaver dogs wouldn’t have been on it.

  “Well, Lei contracts out. Emma is a tech geek who invented some kind of program where you can plug in the evidence about a potential burial site and it spits out a grid of the most likely locations. She patented it a few years ago but hasn’t offered it for sale despite rumors of the government offering a significant amount of money for the program.”
Clarke propped her feet on the dashboard. “Lei handles the dog and the actual feet-on-ground part of the search. She’s got an eighty percent success rate, which is pretty damn impressive. Not too shabby for sorority girls, huh?”

  “You do realize that sororities are more than what you see in the movies, right?”

  “How would I know that?” Clarke propped her hands behind her head. “I’m not the one with a rich daddy and society-darling mommy.”

  FBI agents came from a variety of backgrounds, but his and Clarke’s were a study in opposites. She’d come up in foster care and managed to beat the odds stacked against her as a result. Dante had gone the other way. His parents were good people, and all they’d wanted was for him to follow in their footsteps. College, either med or law school, and a career helping people—and making bank while doing it.

  He preferred to help people without a price tag attached.

  “And miss out on giving you shit for being born with a silver spoon in that pretty mouth of yours? Never.” She closed her eyes, basking in the pale morning sun like a cat. “I’ll admit that sororities aren’t all fluff. Those girls wouldn’t have survived the night, let alone be showing signs of flourishing, if they didn’t have a core of steel.”

  “Indeed.” He didn’t bring up the fact that pledging Omega Delta Lambda hadn’t helped their sorority sisters. Twenty-one killed, and they didn’t go easily. They’d all suffered horribly. He’d done some reading last night to refresh his memory of the case, and it was worse than he’d remembered. Berkley made their current unsub look like an amateur. That alone seemed to indicate Berkley had killed before the night of the murders, though no evidence had been found to support that theory.

  Their current unsub didn’t have quite the same finesse, so there was hope he’d left behind trace evidence that would lead them straight to him.