CHAPTER THIRTY TWO

"Are you sure you're okay? Because I can drive down there right now."

Jessie waited anxiously for the answer, hoping that she could read her sister's tone well enough over speakerphone to determine if she was being honest or just acting tough.

"No, Jessie, it's okay, I swear," Hannah told her. "I was kind of freaked out there for a while, I'll admit. But the guy is in custody now, and I've got a friend here with me. Besides, the police say they want to go over my statement again. I just thought you should know what was going on."

"I can't tell if you're just trying to make me feel better or if you're really all right," Jessie admitted.

"Listen, if you want to come visit once your case is resolved, I'm happy to have you," Hannah said. "But I'll be fine for now. I certainly don't want you to short-circuit a serial killer investigation just to hold my hand. Maybe bring me some ice cream when your case is over."

"Okay," Jessie said, still not entirely convinced that her sister was doing as well as she insisted, but not sensing a full-blown crisis, "but I'm going to be down there as soon as this is done."

"We both will," Ryan added.

"Thanks guys," Hannah replied, "now enough talking to me. Go catch this killer."

She hung up, leaving them to focus on the task at hand.

"You know," Jessie said to Ryan as they left the privacy of the small conference room that they'd been in and returned to the Research department, "I meant to mention this earlier and what Hannah said reminded me."

"What?" he asked.

"She called this a serial killer investigation but when I talked with Haddonfield earlier, he noted something that I'd been thinking about too. This case feels much more like a combination between a serial killer and a spree killer. Yes, we've had multiple victims over more than just one calendar day. But they've all been in the last twenty-four hours, and the frequency of the attacks seems to be escalating. And maybe more crucially, he pointed out that they lack the cold, methodical nature of a lot of serial killers. They're more intimate than that. They feel personal."

"Okay, so where does that leave us?" Ryan asked as they walked into Research, where both Jamil and Beth looked up from their keyboards.

"I think we should focus less on the UHNW element here and more on what set our killer off in the first place," she said, addressing all of them. "Haddonfield was right when he said these people have been rich for a while. That didn't change recently, but something about our killer's connection to them did. Something made them snap. I think we should go back to the first murder again. I have to believe that something about Chloe Baptiste's death is the key here. What if she wronged someone in an irreparable way?"

"We can look again," Beth said, "but we already eliminated all of the gallery owners and artists that she alienated. They each either had alibis or nowhere near enough motive."

"Right," Jamil added. "And our analysis of the security footage in the gallery parking lot didn't reveal anything more about the size, age, or gender of the killer than Sergeant Delco's people originally provided to us."

"Let's try it from a different angle," Jessie suggested, "for our purposes, maybe treat Baptiste like a suspect more than a victim. Jamil, didn't you say you were going to look into her finances independent of her husband's?"

"Yes," he said, "but that kind of fell by the wayside once we got more victims and suspects. I can go back to it now."

"Please do," she said.

"Sorry to interrupt," Beth said anxiously, "but there's something here you guys need to see."

"What is it?" Ryan asked as they approached her screen and looked over her shoulder.

"I monitor all kinds of internet traffic, and this just had a massive spike," Beth said. "Let me play it back."

She pulled up what looked like a clip from a livestream for something called Lila's Lounge. Onscreen, an attractive raven-haired woman that Jessie assumed was Lila, likely in her mid-twenties, was holding court about some big announcement she had to make before diverting into a commercial for some kind of snack.

"I don't get it," Ryan said. "Why is this such a big deal? "

"Hold on," Beth said. "It's coming."

"So I was saying," Lila blathered on, "we hate the empty calories right, which is why—."

Suddenly, Lila looked offscreen and began screaming in terror. A moment later, a gloved hand grabbed at her top. Lila tried to pull away, but a voice hissed, "move and I'll gut you."

Lila stopped moving. The person wearing the glove appeared in the frame, pulling the young woman to her feet. They were wearing all black, including a ski mask. In their right hand was a long hunting knife.

"Let's go," they growled. A moment later both of them were gone, leaving the livestream running but no one onscreen. Then it cut abruptly to black.

"How long ago is this from?" Jessie demanded before noticing the timestamp in the top right corner of the screen. It read: 7:10 p.m. Jessie looked at her phone. It was 7:16 right now.

"Do we know who this Lila is and where she was recording from?" Ryan asked.

"I know who she is," Beth said as Jamil's fingers began flying across his keyboard. "She's an influencer named Lila Warwick. She's gotten hugely popular in the last year, although she was already well-known before that."

"Why?" Jessie asked, though she had a sneaking suspicion.

"Her family owns Bubblicious Soda," Beth said. "They're massively rich. Plus, her siblings are always on the gossip sites because of their antics."

"I can tell you where she recorded from," Jamil said, jumping in. "Lila does most of her livestreams from her home studio at her house in Silver Lake."

"I'll get units there now," Ryan said. "Jamil, see about getting an emergency order to access Lila's phone GPS in case the killer took it too."

"While they're doing that," Jessie said, "Beth, can you freeze on the clearest image of the killer from the livestream?"

Beth did as she was asked, but the results were disappointing.

"There's no way to identify them based on this, or even get an accurate height or weight," Jessie said.

"I can try to isolate the voice," Beth suggested. "It might not help much because they weren't speaking normally, but it's worth a shot. "

Ryan's phone rang but he was still talking on Jamil's landline to Northeast station—which was responsible for the Silver Lake area—giving dispatch Lila Warwick's address, so he handed it over to Jessie. The caller ID showed that the call was from Captain Parker.

"Hey Captain," she said. "Ryan's on another call. This is Jessie."

"Hunt," Parker said urgently. "There's been another attack, only this time it's an abduction."

"We know, Captain," she said. "We're all over it already. I've got to go."

She hung up, feeling a small twinge of satisfaction, and returned her attention to the people in the room with her.

"We have to find this girl," she said, knowing it wasn't necessary. "No more victims today."

She could only hope it wasn't too late.