Second Honeymoon

Chapter 26

THE WORDS PLAYED over and over in the head of a special agent named Sarah Brubaker. “There’s one more out there, and you’ll never find her,” the sick bastard had said. “That poor, poor little girl, she won’t last much longer. She’ll be dead and gone like all the others. She’s probably dead already.”

Agent Brubaker reached up beneath her sweat-soaked blouse. She sliced the straps of her bra with the blade of a Swiss army knife. Unhooking the front clasp, she then pulled the bra out from the bottom of her blouse. She stuffed it in her slacks along with the knife.

“What the hell are you doing?” asked Doug Trout, chief of the Tallahassee police department.

“Please get me two rubber bands,” Sarah said, ignoring his question, not to mention his quick peek at the way her blouse hugged the shape of her breasts.

Yep. She knew exactly what she was doing.

Trout disappeared into a supply room a few feet away while Sarah gathered up her shoulder-length auburn hair. She could hear the seconds ticking away in her head.

Except for the two cops stationed at either end of the hallway, the operations department above the main terminal of the Tallahassee Regional Airport had been cleared out. It was strictly NPO. Necessary personnel only.

As for the only nonpersonnel individual on the premises, his feet and hands were cuffed to a chair and table on the other side of the closed door behind her. A small, windowless conference room. A temporary jail cell.

For the past seven months, a real bastard named Travis Kingslip had terrorized the Florida Panhandle, kidnapping, raping, and murdering five young girls within a hundred-mile radius of Tallahassee.

Assigned to the case after the fourth girl went missing, Sarah had spent every waking moment trying to figure out who he was—and hoping that somewhere along the line he’d slip up and make a mistake. He never did.

Instead, some buffoon of a thief did it for him. A druggie.

A neighbor had called the police after spotting a man climbing through the basement window of Kingslip’s two-bedroom ranch house in the small town of Lamont, about thirty miles from the airport.

When officers arrived at the house, they not only caught the thief but they also caught a major break in the murder case.

Papered all over Kingslip’s bedroom were close-up photos of the breasts of underage girls—homemade digital prints—taken from every conceivable angle and cropped in a way that never revealed a face. It was like trying to identify a mannequin.

At the very least, they had a child pornographer on their hands. But then Sarah arrived and noticed the kidney-bean-shaped mole in one of the pictures. It matched the description given to her by the parents of one of the missing girls.

Within an hour, Sarah and half the Tallahassee police force were storming the tarmac at the airport in 102-degree heat. Kingslip, a baggage handler, confessed on the spot. “All you had to do was ask,” he’d said.

Then, immediately after he was read his Miranda warnings, he started to laugh. It was the kind of twisted and demented laugh that Sarah had heard too many times in her career chasing serial killers.

Kingslip’s laugh may have been the worst of them all.

“There’s one more out there, and you’ll never find her,” he had said. “That poor, poor little girl, she won’t last much longer. She’ll be dead and gone like all the others. She’s probably dead already.”

Police chief Trout reappeared with two rubber bands and a puzzled look on his face. “Here,” he said.

Sarah took the rubber bands and quickly used them to tie her hair into two pigtails behind her ears. Trout watched her and nodded. He got it now.

“I’m not going in there with you, am I?” he asked.

Only he wasn’t really asking. It was a rhetorical question. He’d gotten to know Sarah a little bit since she’d arrived from Quantico—enough to be sure of one thing. Two things, actually.

Sarah Brubaker was as determined as anyone he’d ever met.

And Travis Kingslip was all hers.