Page 24 of Three Girls Gone
“What did it say?” Trent rushed out.
She hadn’t felt brave enough to ask. Thenightmaremust reference the contents of this note.
Rideout exhaled so deeply that his nose whistled across the line. “It said, ‘For Katherine Graves. This girl’s your fault. Stop looking or there will be more.’”
“Thisgirl? What’s that supposed to mean? Are there more?” Trent looked over at her.
Stop looking…Amanda became cold. This could only refer to one thing. “Julie Gilbert,” she said in a whisper.
“That young girl who was assaulted, strangled, and murdered in New York twelve years ago? How could Hailey Tanner be linked to a cold case from two hundred and sixty miles away?”
Amanda couldn’t bring herself to respond.
After a long stretch of silence, Rideout stated, “I’ll leave you two to work on that. I’ll call if something else urgent comes up. Otherwise, watch out for my report.”
“Thank you,” Trent told him, and Rideout clicked off.
Amanda laid a hand over her stomach. “I’m going to be sick.” A niggling started the second Donnelly described Hailey as a child star. She just didn’t know why. And having been concerned about missing something, she’d focused her attention and suspicions on the wrong people. “There’s no way Mara Bennett, Nick Potter, or Susan Butters are behind this. Not knowing what we do now. I can’t see any of them assaulting that child. That is pushing it too far.”
Trent shook his head. “Me either. We can see if they have a link to NYC for due diligence though. But this person wants Katherine tostopinvestigating the Gilbert case. Is she still doing that?”
Trent knew about the case because when Katherine had been kidnapped about a year and a half ago, they investigated and had discovered a storage locker in her name. It housed Katherine’s research on Julie Gilbert, including a suspect board. Trent knew that Katherine had caught the case when she was working with the NYPD, but that’s where his knowledge ended. He didn’t know that Amanda was helping Katherine, off the books, whenever she had a spare moment. Which was all too infrequent, especially recently. He certainly didn’t know why the case was important to Katherine or her personal connection. That never made it to any official record. The only reason Amanda knew was because Katherine had confided in her.
“Amanda, please answer me.”
“Yes, she is, and I’ve been helping her a bit here and there.”
“Oh, no. You realize that a huge shitstorm is headed our way?”
She appreciated he included himself in this mess, but it wasn’t necessary. “This doesn’t involve you.”
“It does.” His two-word response was definitive, landing like a stake hammered into the ground. “This perv might not know about your involvement, but you and Katherine must be getting close. What recent leads have you been following?”
“That’s the thing, I haven’t been able to help for months.”
“Then Katherine’s gotten herself into a corner. And what’s to say this psycho won’t turn his attention on her? But if she was his target, he would have gone straight after her, don’t you think?”
“I don’t know about that. This guy seems to have a type.”
“Little girls,” they said in unison.
“And performers, possibly those who know ballet,” Amanda said. “Julie Gilbert performed a piece as her talent for beauty pageants. But where and when did he latch on to Hailey?” As she voiced the question, a fresh chill rolled over her from sheer overwhelm. “The Tanners told us that Hailey wasn’t in other performances or competitions. So has this guy been around since before Christmas?”
“Anything is possible.”
“It would give him time to plan her abduction. But this would mean he’s been in the area for months. Either way, we need to look further into this show and who was there.”
“We can see what we can find out, but it was open to the public.” Trent sighed.
“Surely, there was some security for the event, names collected or something?” She was grasping. Life experience hadn’t taught her to be this optimistic. Though in an ideal world, precautionary measures would have been taken. Especially for a show that paraded young kids across a stage.
“Okay, but if we’re right about this, that means this guy has been stalking Hailey since December.”
“Uh-huh. Which means we’d need to revisit some aspects ofthe Tanner case. The people at the dance school were asked if they saw anything strange on the Friday Hailey was taken. If this guy was around for months, someone could have seen something a while ago that was dismissed.”
“We need to start with Katherine, though, and find out what leads she’s been following in recent months. If we’re lucky, it will lead us straight to this person.”
At the mention of Katherine again, Amanda remembered she hadn’t seen her at the diner earlier. She might have been in the back. But the scary possibility existed that they were mistaken to assume the guy stuck to little girls. “Get us to the diner. I’m going to try Kat’s cell.”
