Free Sense of Evil by Kay Hooper Page B

professional as she could, even though she was nervous and knew it showed. “He didn’t see her that afternoon, and with two cows calving he was out in his barns all night. He says it could have been Tuesday; that’s when he realized she wasn’t in the house. He thought she’d gone to visit a friend in town, since it’s something she often does, but when she didn’t come home, he checked. She wasn’t there. Isn’t anywhere he could think to check. I think it only slowly dawned on him that maybe he should be worried.”
    “Yeah,” Rafe muttered, “Tim Helton isn’t the sharpest pencil in the box.”
    “Understatement,” Mallory offered. “The way I heard it, he once decided that moonshine would work just as well as fuel in his tractor. Dunno if he got a bad batch or what, but it blew the sucker all to hell and nearly took him with it.”
    “Moonshine?” Isabel asked curiously. “They still make that stuff?”
    “Believe it or not. We’ve had the ATF out here a few times over the years because of illegal brew. Seems like a lot of trouble to go to, if you ask me, but the bootleggers seem to feel it’s worth it. Either that or they just don’t want to pay The Government a cent more than they have to.”
    Rafe said, “And there’s at least one survivalist group in the area. They consider it the norm to make everything they need themselves. Including booze.” He made a note on the pad before him, then handed the message slip back to his officer. “Okay, standard procedure, Ginny. I want a detective out there to talk to Tim, and let’s get a list of places she might possibly be. Friends, relatives, anybody she might be visiting. From now on, we treat every missing person, man or woman, as if he or she could be a murder victim.”
    “Yes, sir.”
    When the young officer had hurried from the room, Isabel said, “Is this people starting to panic? I mean, is this an unusual increase in women reported missing?”
    He nodded. “Oh, yeah. In the past three weeks, we’ve seen the reports jump tenfold. Most come home within twenty-four hours or are discovered visiting relatives or talking to divorce attorneys, or just at the grocery store.”
    “Most. But not all.”
    “We still have a few missing in the general area, but we haven’t yet been able to rule out a voluntary absence in any of the cases.”
    “We’ll probably see even more of this,” Isabel commented.
    “Problem is,” Mallory said, “we have to treat every report seriously, just as Rafe said. So we’ll waste a lot of manpower searching for women who aren’t really missing or who ran off and don’t want to be found. Lady last week cussed me out good for
finding
her.”
    “Motel?” Isabel inquired sapiently.
    “Uh-huh. Not alone, needless to say.”
    “Still, we have to look for them,” Hollis said.
    Rafe nodded. “No question. I’m just hoping it won’t muddy the water too much. Or deplete resources needed elsewhere.”
    “In the meantime,” Isabel said, “those of us in this room at least have to focus on what we know we’ve got. Three murdered women.”
    Rafe said, “You told me there’s always a trigger. Always something specific that sets him off.”
    “There has to be,” Isabel responded. “You said yourself that five years is a hell of a long cooling-off period for a serial killer; it is, especially after a fairly frenzied six-week killing spree. A gap that long usually means either that murders in another location have gone unnoticed or at least weren’t connected to him, or that he’s in prison somewhere or otherwise unable to keep killing.”
    “I gather you’re certain that isn’t the case here.”
    “When he hit in Alabama five years ago, we combed through police files of unsolved murders from coast to coast. Nothing matched his M.O. except for the series of murders five years before that. We were convinced he had been inactive during that five-year gap, yet there was also no even remotely likely suspect