Page 42 of The Hanging Dolls (Zoe Storm #1)
FORTY-ONE
Zoe was never the villain in anyone’s life.
She was fairly well-liked. That skip in her step, that endless positivity, the chirpy tilt of her voice and always armed with something sweet, she was nobody’s idea of what an FBI agent looked like.
She wasn’t jaded and weary like most of her coworkers.
It was an ardent effort to not have a chip on her shoulder.
But last night she had been the villain. To Nancy, her ex-boyfriend’s wife who he met years after their breakup. How was Zoe still a shadow looming over their marriage? She swiveled on her chair, capping and uncapping her pen, her mind ticking over Nancy’s spiteful words.
It gave birth to a nub of shame inside her. Did she still have feelings for Simon? Was Nancy picking up on something neither of them was brave nor astute enough to admit?
Lucy’s picture stared back at her, a haunting reminder. The weight of the investigation was pressing down on her, and she could feel the tension building in her shoulders. No other girl had gone missing. She was inclined to believe that Lucy had been taken by the killer they were hunting.
The news that Lucy Robinson was missing broke in the wee hours of the morning.
The news cycle was thrilled to find another enthralling story other than just the elections.
They not only regurgitated the fears of Harborwood and Zoe but also inflated them, painting a gruesome picture that made Zoe queasy.
Is Lucy hanging in the woods waiting to be discovered?
None of the victims had been founding hanging in the woods. But there had been nooses, and the press found it shockingly easy to mold them into a lie.
Zoe clicked her pen incessantly; the repetitive sound tethered her.
On the big television screen at the station, Mayor Hicks was being interviewed.
But the volume had been muted. Lucy had disappeared without a trace.
Despite the number of emails and phone calls from the sheriff’s office and WSP, they had no news.
The rangers had been tracking the woods but hadn’t discovered anything.
The hope of finding Lucy had been dwindling and so was that plucky positivity she carried through cases like this.
Zoe had barricaded herself at the station away from the chaos, swimming in thoughts of worst-case scenarios. Her eyes searched the office for Scott—she hadn’t heard from him since last night.
“Chief!” she called when Travis appeared around the corner, his phone pressed to his ear.
She approached him hurriedly but he raised a finger, gesturing her to keep quiet.
She rocked on her heels, waiting for his conversation to finish.
“Yes, yes, I’ll be there. Maybe tomorrow.
Okay.” He hung up. “Sorry, that was Hicks.”
“Where’s Detective Cohen? I haven’t heard from him.”
He winced. “You haven’t heard?”
“Heard what?” Her heartbeat slowed.
“My buddy saw Scott drinking at the bar. Said he got shit-faced drunk. I don’t know if you know about his past…” he added warily.
“I do.” Zoe looked down at her feet.
“He is too closely connected to the case and with him relapsing, I’m keeping him away. It’s an unofficial suspension. Excuse me, I got a few fires to put out.”
She nodded in understanding just as Aiden rounded the corner. “Did you hear? About Scott?”
“Yeah…” He pursed his lips in a thin line. “That’s where I was. Hunter wanted me in the room when he broke the news to Scott.”
“What happened?”
“He seemed to be in shock… like there were other things on his mind.” His eyes narrowed. “Do you know something?”
“He showed up at my room drunk and told me that Carly confessed to him that Lucy was his child.”
Aiden’s lips parted. “Interesting.”
She checked her phone again, hoping to hear something from Scott. But there were no notifications. New town, an unknown terrain, and a killer who was too good at leaving clean crime scenes.
“I’m working with Terri going through social media to see if there are any hints there. I think we might have something.” Aiden hitched his thumb over his shoulder.
She returned to her desk, trying to wrap her head around Scott’s suspension and the weight of it all resting on her shoulders.
The only relief she had was that she had finally figured out how to use the dated software at the station to analyze the CCTV footage found at the bakery.
Her eyes still ached from the hours she had spent glaring at it without any breaks.
The hustle and bustle of the station and the uneasy noise in her own head evaporated as she watched the video frame by frame.
Based on the dimensions of the counter, the height of the culprit was extrapolated to be between 1.
78 to 1.83 meters. It was an average height and someone that tall could very well have a shoe size of ten.
The display case was made of glass. She zoomed in and cleared the image, trying to capture a reflection of his face in the display case as he cleaned out desserts to feed his victims.
Her eyes narrowed, clicking the button again and again, but she was sure she could see a dark mark on the face. Irritation slashed through her. The killer was wearing a mask, hiding the lower part of his face. With his hoodie on, she couldn’t even capture the color of his hair.
But there had to be something. The need to salvage anything from the footage clawed at her.
And then she noticed it. In the reflection of his hoodie on the display case, there was something white. She focused on its shape—was it a logo? It was nothing familiar. Perhaps a local brand? But when she zoomed in on it, the shape of it was too haphazard with no definitive symbol or word on it.
A stain. That’s what it was, she concluded. Most likely bleach.
“A killer with a bleach-stained hoodie and a genetic disorder,” she repeated to herself. Outside the bright light weaved uninhibited through the branches crisscrossing the skies. Her mind drifted to Rachel, Keith, and the con that had changed everything.
The door to her office rattled open and Aiden popped his head in.
“Please give me some good news,” Zoe groaned, throwing her head back. “And get me some M&Ms from the vending machine so that I can think.”
“We found something.” He showed his laptop and placed it in front of Zoe, shoving hers aside with a sweep of an arm. “I had asked Terri to keep tabs and join those Facebook groups.”
With a few clicks, she opened a page of amateur sleuths in town discussing the case in a series of posts.
Detective Scott Cohen was drinking at a pub. He doesn’t care!
Lucy’s mother is a prostitute. I think she was abducted by the wife of some client she banged.
I made a map of where Lily’s and Tara’s bodies were found. I extrapolated where Lucy will be found and it forms an Illuminati symbol.
“This is a very active page.” Zoe kept scrolling over conspiracy theories that ranged from children being kidnapped for government experiments to blood sacrifice in the woods following some occult tradition.
“This is the most interesting thing to have happened to Harborwood. It’s a classic response to the traumatic breach of their sociocultural equilibrium caused by the violent crime, so the townspeople engage in collective projection and mass psychogenic hypervigilance.
They spin conspiracy theories and become amateur sleuths to alleviate cognitive dissonance and reassert control over their disrupted reality. ”
She stared at him blankly. “Was that in English?”
He bit his lip, hiding a smile, and highlighted a post. “We found this.”
As Zoe read the words, her blood curdled.
Anyone looking for pictures of Lily, Tara, and Lucy not known to public. Contact me.
Got unseen pictures of Lily, Tara, and Lucy. DM me for price.
“What the hell is this?” Zoe clicked on the name of the person who had made the post. Not only was the name John Doe, but there was no profile picture and the profile was locked.
“And this isn’t the only post he made.”
John Doe had posted on several groups all over social media offering to sell people “exclusive” pictures of the three girls. Two weeks ago, it was only of Lily but after Tara was found dead his list had grown. And now it included Lucy.
Zoe looked like she’d seen a ghost. “What does he mean by unseen and exclusive pictures?”
Her stomach roiled but she fought the urge to do more than just retch. “What does this mean, Aiden?”
He pinched the bridge of his nose, thinking hard. “Voyeurism, desensitization to violence, objectification of victims…” He placed his hands on the table, leaning forward. “The profile diverges from what we are looking at—someone who has a childhood regression and is recreating something.”
Her eyes widened. “But there’s a possibility of two killers. So this might be one of them. I’ll get the FBI to track down the IP address.”
“Think they’ll move fast?”
“Simon better.” She grabbed her keys, ignoring Aiden’s lingering gaze.