Read Once Gone for Free Online Page B

spirit of things, and she felt the same old dark obsession growing inside her. Pretty soon there’d be no turning back.
    But was that a good thing or a bad thing?
    “What’s with Frye’s eyes?” she asked, pointing to a photo. “That blue doesn’t look real.”
    “Contacts,” Bill answered.
    The tingle in Riley’s spine grew stronger. Eileen Rogers’s corpse hadn’t had contact lenses. It was an important difference.
    “And the shine on her skin?” she asked.
    “Vaseline,” Bill said.
    Another important difference. She felt her ideas snapping into place with breathtaking speed.
    “What has forensics found out about the wig?” she asked Bill.
    “Nothing yet, except that it was pieced together out of pieces of cheap wigs.”
    Riley’s excitement grew. For the last murder, the killer had used a simple, whole wig, not something patched together. Like the rose, it had been so cheap that forensics couldn’t trace it. Riley felt parts of the puzzle coming together—not the whole puzzle, but a big chunk of it.
    “What does forensics plan to do about this wig?” she asked.
    “The same as last time—run a search of its fibers, try to track it down through hairpiece outlets.”
    Startled by the fierce certainty in her own voice, Riley said: “They’re wasting their time.”
    Bill looked at her, clearly caught off guard.
    “Why?”
    She felt a familiar impatience with Bill, one she felt when she always found herself thinking a step or two ahead of him.
    “Look at the picture he’s trying to show us. Blue contacts to make the eyes look like they’re not real. Eyelids stitched so the eyes stay wide open. The body propped up, legs splayed out freakishly. Vaseline to make the skin look like plastic. A wig pieced together out of pieces of little wigs—not human wigs, doll’s wigs. He wanted both victims to look like dolls —like naked dolls on display.”
    “Jesus,” Bill said, feverishly taking notes. “Why didn’t we see this last time, back in Daggett?”
    The answer seemed so obvious to Riley that she stifled an impatient groan.
    “He wasn’t good enough at it yet,” she said. “He was still figuring out how to send the message. He’s learning as he goes.”
    Bill looked up from his notepad and shook his head admiringly.
    “Damn, I’ve missed you.”
    As much as she appreciated the compliment, Riley knew that an even bigger realization was on its way. And she knew from years of experience that there was no forcing it. She simply had to relax and let it come to her unbidden. She crouched on the boulder silently, waiting for it happen. As she waited, she picked idly at the burrs on her pants legs.
    What a damned nuisance, she thought.
    Suddenly her eyes fell on the stone surface under her feet. Other little burrs, some of them whole, others broken into fragments, were lying amid the burrs she was plucking off now.
    “Bill,” she said, her voice quavering with excitement, “were these little burrs here when you found the body?”
    Bill shrugged. “I don’t know.”
    Her hands shaking and sweating more than ever, she grabbed a bunch of pictures and rifled through them until she found a front view of the corpse. There, between her splayed legs right around the rose, was a group of little smudges. Those were the burrs—the very burrs she had just found. But nobody had thought they were important. Nobody had bothered to take a sharper, closer picture of them. And nobody had even bothered to sweep them away when the crime scene was cleaned up.
    Riley closed her eyes, bringing her imagination fully into play. She felt lightheaded, even dizzy. It was a sensation that she knew all too well—a feeling of falling into an abyss, into a terrible black void, into the killer’s evil mind. She was stepping into his shoes, into his experience. It was a dangerous and terrifying place to be. But it was where she belonged, at least right now. She embraced it.
    She felt the killer’s confidence as he lugged