Cereal Killer

said. “She was carrying it at the shoot.”
    “You mean like a tool kit?”
    “Pretty much the same, except with mascara instead of a flathead screwdriver.” She rifled through the contents. “Her address book is in here,” she said, “and her cell phone.”
    “Here’s her pocketbook,” Dirk said, lifting a leather bag from the floorboard behind the driver’s seat. “If that ain’t a sign of kidnapping, nothing is.”
    “That’s for sure. Women won’t leave a burning plane without their purses.” Savannah looked over the seat into the front of the car. “No signs of violence, though,” she added.
    ‘Yeah, famous last words. Isn’t that what you said back at her apartment just before you found the blood on the sofa?”
    “And speaking of... what did Dr. Liu say about the blood? Is it hers?”
    “It’s A-negative. That’s as far as she got. We put a call in to that Dr. Pappas guy to see what her type is. If his office doesn’t get back to us by noon, I’m gonna go over there and rattle that nurse’s cage.”
    Savannah recalled the receptionist’s less-than-warm-and-fuzzy demeanor and grinned. The thought of anybody rattling her cage—or any other part of her for that matter—struck Savannah as an entertaining prospect.
    “If you have to do that, take me with you,” she told him. “I want to watch.”
    Dirk stepped back from the car and closed the door.
    “I’ll get the CSU over here to process this thing,” he said. “Maybe they can find something else.”
    “Although,” Savannah added, “if Tumblety’s telling the truth and the guy just grabbed her and yanked her into his van, there probably won’t be any perpetrator prints.”
    “That’s a big if, if you ask me. It’s probably got his mitt prints all over it and who knows what else.”
    Savannah closed her door and walked around the back of the car to stand beside him. “You really want it to be Tumblety, don’t you?”
    “Sure I do. I’ve never liked dicky-wavers; you know that. Besides, if it’s him, I’ve got him and he won’t be hurting anybody else. Not to mention that I can sew this case up. Don’t you hope it’s him?”
    “He’s pretty mangy, all right. Society would probably be better off without him....”
    Her words faded as she knelt beside the driver’s side of the car and squinted at something just behind the front tire. “Have you got your penlight with you?” she asked him.
    He handed her the miniature flashlight, and she shined the beam at the object that had caught her eye. She started to reach for it, then withdrew her hand. “What is it?” he asked.
    “A set of keys,” she replied. “We’d better leave them there. The CSU will want to mark the spot and take a picture.”
    “She probably dropped them when Tumblety grabbed her,” Dirk said as he took the flashlight from her and looked at the keys himself.
    “Or when the guy that Tumblety saw grabbed her.”
    As they left the car and walked back to Dirk’s Buick, he used his cell phone to call the Crime Scene Unit. Savannah tuned him out as he gave them the specifics, her mind returning to Tesla Montoya’s apartment.
    When he was finished with the call, he gave her a curious, searching look. “What is it?” he asked. “What’re you thinking?”
    “I’m just wondering... if Tesla was taken from this parking lot... why was her place such a mess and why was there blood on the couch?”
    Dirk shrugged. “I dunno. Unless they grabbed her here, then took her home.”
    “Exactly what I was thinking. He snatched her here, then took her back to her place. Why?”
    They stared at each other for a long moment. Finally Dirk said, “When we figure that out, maybe we’ll know what happened to her.”
    Savannah thought of the beautiful model with her large, childlike eyes and sad, sweet smile. She thought of Cait Connor’s lifeless body on the bathroom floor, and Kameeka Wills lying on the side of the road. “I’m not sure I even want to know what’s happened to Tesla,” she said. Dirk gave a heavy sigh. “I hear you.”
     
    By the time Savannah finally returned home, it was past three in the morning. She had long passed the state of just being tired and was—as Granny Reid would say—“running on raw nerves.”
    She crept into the hallway and, being careful not to wake her sister upstairs, quietly put away her purse and gun. But when she glanced toward the living room, she saw a sickly green light glowing—the computer