“That sounds awfully cold,” I said uneasily.
“I’m being professional, Kay. When you talk professionally, sometimes you sound cold, too.”
I had talked to Abby directly after the body of her murdered sister was discovered. If I hadn’t sounded cold on that horrible occasion, at best I had come across as clinical.
“I need your help with something,” I said. “Eight years ago, two women were murdered very close to here. Elizabeth Mott and Jill Harrington.”
She looked curiously at me. “You don’t think – ”
“I’m not sure what I’m thinking,” I interrupted. “But I need to know the details of the cases. There’s very little in my office reports. I wasn’t in Virginia then. But there are news clips in the files. Several of them have your byline.”
“It’s hard for me to imagine that what happened to Jill and Elizabeth is connected to the other cases.’ “So you remember them,” I said, relieved.
“I will never forget them. It was one of the few times working on something actually gave me nightmares.”
“Why is it hard for you to imagine a connection?”
“A number of reasons. There was no jack of hearts found. The car wasn’t found abandoned on a roadside, but in a motel parking lot, and the bodies didn’t turn up weeks or months after the fact decomposing in the woods. They were found within twenty-four hours. Both victims were women, and they were in their twenties, not teenagers. And why would the killer strike and then not do it again until some five years later?”
“I agree,” I said. “The timing doesn’t fit with the profile of your typical serial killer. And the MO seems inconsistent with the others. The victim selection seems inconsistent as well.”
“Then why are you so interested?”
She sipped her drink.
“I’m groping, and I’m troubled by their cases, which were never solved,” I admitted. “It’s unusual for two people to be abducted and murdered. There was no evidence of sexual assault. The women were killed around here, in the same area where the other murders have occurred.”
“And a gun and a knife were used,” Abby mused.
She knew about Deborah Harvey, then.
“There are some parallels,” I said evasively.
Abby looked unconvinced but interested.
“What do you want to know, Kay?”
“Anything you might remember about them. Anything at all.”
She thought for along moment, toying with her drink.
“Elizabeth was working in sales for a local computer company and doing extremely well,” she said. “Jill had just finished law school at William and Mary and had gone to work with a small firm in Williamsburg. I never did buy the notion that they went off to a motel to have sex with some creep they met in a bar. Neither of the women struck me as the type. And two of them with one man? I always thought it was strange. Also, there was blood in the backseat of their car. It didn’t match either Jill’s or Elizabeth’s blood types.”
Abby’s resourcefulness never ceased to amaze me. Somehow she had gotten hold of the serology results.
“I assume the blood belonged to the killer. There was a lot of it, Kay. I saw the car. It looked as if someone had been stabbed or cut in the backseat. Possibly, this would place the killer there, but it was hard to come up with a good interpretation of what might have occurred. The police were of the opinion the women met up with this animal in the Anchor Bar and Grill. But if he rode off with them in their car and was planning to kill them, then how was he going to get back to his car later on?”
“Depends on how far the motel is from the bar. He could have walked back to his car after the murders.”
“The motel is a good four or five miles from the Anchor Bar, which isn’t around anymore, by the way. The women were last seen inside the bar at around ten P.M. If the killer had left his car there, it probably would have been the only one in the lot by the time he got back to it, and that wouldn’t have been very bright. A cop might have noticed the car, or at least the night manager would have as he was locking up to go home.”