Page 44 of Nothing Hiding

Sierra looked up. "I'm checking the bus timetable here, and it seems like this bus stop is not in operation on a Sunday. It's a weekday stop, and on weekends, they do Saturday mornings only, and today’s Sunday. So, if she was positioned here, she might have been in place a long time."

Juliette felt grateful for the information. It was an explanation, at least, for why she hadn't been discovered. Dumping a body at a bus stop that was not in use was a whole lot easier, and again, that wheelchair theory or the van theory came back to her as a possible way that he might have brought her here.

"Someone knows London well," she said. "He researched this bus stop. He knew that the buses were not running today, and that this was a good place to leave her. He is doing this meticulously. Scouting out places that are public, where the bodies will be seen and cause a stir."

"Cause fear? Cause attention?" Samantha nodded, and Juliette felt briefly startled that they were thinking so much along the same lines. It was good but unexpected.

"He wants to show the world what he's doing. But what message is he sending?" she asked.

Wyatt furrowed his brow. "It could be a power play. Showing that he has control over life and death, that he can leave a victim in the most public of places and still not get caught."

"Or he could be mocking people that life can end at any moment," Sierra theorized.

Black nodded. "Leaving the body at a bus stop, where people come and go, might be a reminder that our lives can be snuffed out in an instant."

Juliette nodded, impressed with the insight of the team. All the theories were valid, and all of them gave a possible insight into the killer's mind.

There must be a significance to the placing of the bodies. There had to be a reason. But they felt so far behind.

"We must check the footage," she said.

"I'll do that," Sierra offered.

"We can ask the people in the surrounding stores if they saw anything," she then suggested.

"I'll get onto that," Black said decisively. "Get an eyewitness account, and it might get us far. Harris, shall we go door to door?"

"What are you going to do?" Wyatt asked her as the two Scotland Yard detectives strode away. “There’s a police station down the road, so we’re going to head there when we’re done.”

"I don’t want to look at the logistics or the evidence. I want to look for the common threads," she said. "There must be some. This killer is working according to his own logic if he's choosing them in this way and placing them in these areas. We need to find out what it is." She paused. “I’m going to take a walk. You drive there. I’ll meet you. I need to think.”

Juliette knew that this race against time would take her into dark territory, a place she was dreading—the killer's mind.

She needed to focus on it, because it was a topic that she hadn't yet explored enough. The workings of his logic could lead them to him. And she knew there must be logic. Flawed and deadly, yes. But also, a process that made sense to him.

She just had to find it.

CHAPTER TWENTY FIVE

"Three women," Juliette said aloud. She was standing on the sidewalk of Oxford Street. Thinking fast, she began walking down the paving, trying to gather the threads together in her mind.

She knew they were significant and deeply so. To him.

And if they didn't stop him, he would kill again. She had enough experience to know this.

The problem was that she couldn't work out why he'd chosen those three and left them where he had.

"Three women. All similar ages, all beautiful, all left in a very stylized pose. Why is he covering their faces in wax? What does it mean? Why that eyeshadow when it looks so weird? And why those poses?"

She strode along, tuning out the happy sounds of the conversations she passed, which were turning to comments of alarm and concern as they saw the police crime scene tape ahead. She tuned out the shouts and engine noises as traffic was rerouted away from the scene. Juliette paid no attention to the shop fronts she passed, each one an exquisite work of art with the merchandise enticingly displayed. No better place to attract customers than on London’s high streets. London’s shopping district was legendary.

With an uncomfortable shiver, thinking of legends and death, she found herself remembering words her father had once told her. Perhaps it was because he was so much in her mind at the moment. For all the wrong reasons, and with unhappy, guilty associations now festering. But even so, perhaps that was why she remembered his words.

"People like the feeling that something will last forever," he said. "They have a need to preserve things, to feel that they would be immortal."

"Really, dad?” she'd asked, feeling a tingle down her spine at the thought. “That's creepy."

"It's to do with the fear of death, trying to explain it, believing that there's something more ahead but also wanting to leave something behind that can endure. Very complex," he'd tried to explain. Being eight at the time, Juliette had been fascinated, even though she hadn't fully understood the nuances of what he'd said.

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