“They want a statement?” Kovac asked, feigning shock. “It’s a clusterfuck. That’s my statement. They want a statement, they can pull one out of my ass. I just got here. I don’t even know yet what young Dickhead here has managed to fuck up in my absence.”

Dickson waved him off. “Fuck you, Kojak.”

Kovac turned and looked at the center of their crime scene: a dark green Mini, parked near the security light. Dana Nolan had parked exactly where young women were supposed to park their cars for safety—under a pool of light where they would be able to see danger coming.

Nothing good ever happened in a parking lot after midnight. It was unlikely there had been any witnesses. This was a quiet residential neighborhood. Dana Nolan’s belongings still lay on the ground where she had dropped them. She probably had seen danger coming. There just hadn’t been a damn thing she could do about it.

Kovac walked over to the car and squatted down for a closer look at Dana Nolan’s abandoned belongings. A purse. A makeup bag. A tote bag with papers spilling out of it. He picked one of the papers out and frowned as he looked at it—the missing girl poster of Penny Gray.

He stood up and looked at Nolan’s car, at the piece of paper tucked under the windshield wiper. A sick feeling began to stir like a snake waking in his belly.

Careful to touch just the edges of the page, he took it from under the blade and looked at it.

HAVE YOU SEEN THIS GIRL?

Penny Gray looked at him over her shoulder. The photo he had gotten from Brittany Lawler.

At the bottom of the page scrawled in black magic marker were two words and a smiley face.

HAPPY HOLIDAY.

37

“That’s not his MO,” Liska said.

“It is now.”

John Quinn stared at the photocopy of the note left on Dana Nolan’s windshield, frowning darkly. He needed a shave. Kovac had called him from the scene and asked to meet him downtown. Quinn had thrown on jeans and a sweater and drove in from his cozy home in the suburbs to join the madness.

Kovac didn’t want the press seeing Quinn at the scene. Or, more to the point, he didn’t want Quinn being seen on the news. Speculation would come quickly as it was. He didn’t want to pour fuel on the fire. Doc Holiday was sure to be watching the news. He hadn’t chosen Dana Nolan by accident. Kovac wanted as much control as possible over what went out over the airwaves. If Quinn thought it would be useful to include his name, that was what would happen. If he thought it was better to stay out of the spotlight, then so be it.

“I guess it’s safe to say he’s liking the attention,” Kovac said.

“Loving it,” Quinn replied.

They sat in the war room, surrounded by everything to do with Penny Gray’s case. They were going to need another room dedicated to Dana Nolan. They would have to reassign the manpower to divide their efforts between the two cases. Penny Gray was dead. To the best of their knowledge, Dana Nolan was still alive. There was a chance they were dealing with the same perp. If so, then one effort benefited both cases. They would have to shift the manpower to benefit the victim who was potentially still alive.

Quinn sat back against the table and crossed his arms over his chest. “He’s taking it to a whole new level. With the others it was enough to dump the victim and then read about it in the paper. Now he’s getting cocky. The media has given him a name. He wants to be a star.”

“This is why I didn’t want to challenge him,” Kovac said. “I was afraid he would take me up on it.”

“What do we do now? Do we acknowledge him?” Kasselmann asked. He looked harried for the first time in all of this. “Do we keep the note to ourselves? If we let the media run with this, they’ll have the public in a panic. I can’t have that, and I guarantee that’s not going to fly upstairs.”

“It’s going to be bad enough as it is,” Liska said. “First we’ve got a dead zombie, then a missing girl, now this. One of their own snatched out from under our noses. The news media is going to connect the dots and come up with Doc Holiday anyway. They already have. They don’t need to see the note for that.”

“If you don’t acknowledge him, he’s going to get frustrated,” Quinn said. “Frustrated could be good.”

“Not for Dana Nolan,” Liska pointed out.

“Dana Nolan is dead,” Quinn said bluntly. “I don’t mean to be a pessimist here, but that’s a foregone conclusion. Unless you can find her within the next twenty-four hours or so, she’s dead. He kidnapped her to kill her. That’s what he’ll do. That’s where the payout is for him. The buildup is just foreplay.

“He might drag it out longer this time because he has a stage,” he said. “That’s the best you can hope for.”

“That’s a hell of a thing to be optimistic about,” Kovac muttered. “If we’re lucky, he’ll spend more time torturing her before he stabs her to death and beats her head in with a hammer.”

“It’s more time to look for her,” Quinn said.

“Yeah. If we had a freaking clue where to look.” Kovac turned to his boss. “I’ve got a small army canvassing Dana Nolan’s neighborhood. They’re knocking on every door that has a sight line to that parking lot and the street.”

“And you haven’t found anything to go on from the previous cases?” Kasselmann asked.

Kovac shook his head. “Nothing. I’ve got guys double-checking, triple-checking, quadruple-checking everything from each of those cases—every report, every statement. They’re calling the families of the victims. They’re reinterviewing the people who reported finding the bodies. Nothing.”

“He’s smart, he’s careful, he’s experienced,” Quinn said. “But he just changed the way he does things. That’s when these guys make mistakes. He’s always hunted victims of opportunity, but he singled this girl out. He knew where she lives. He knew her schedule.”

“He stalked her,” Kovac concluded. “He singled her out because of the coverage of the Penny Gray case.”

“This is his big moment to show the world he’s smarter than everybody.”

“So far,” Kasselmann said, “he is.”

“We’ve got to trace Dana Nolan’s every move over the last few days,” Kovac said. “If he was stalking her, someone might have seen him.”

“He might have even interacted with her in the days leading up to this,” Quinn said. “He was able to get right up to her in an otherwise abandoned parking lot. He’s either a master of the blitz attack or she didn’t feel threatened. And the only way she didn’t feel threatened in this circumstance was if he was somehow familiar to her.”

“So he’s probably not a scary-looking guy,” Liska said.

“Probably not. Probably average size or smaller,” Quinn said. “He’s probably friendly, smiling, familiar. He could be using a ploy, like he needs help with something or he needs directions, or something like that.

“I got that feeling looking at a couple of his older cases. The Rose Reiser case, in particular. She disappeared walking out of a convenience store, and no one saw anything, which means she didn’t struggle. He had to have gotten right up to her without causing alarm. Then he probably used a stun gun or some other quick way of subduing the victim.”

Kovac looked up at the wall and the photos of Penny Gray and thought about the video of her walking out of the Holiday station down the street from the Rock & Bowl.

“The Holiday station,” he said. “If he’s the one who snatched Penny Gray, that location probably wasn’t a coincidence either. It was probably this sick bastard’s idea of a joke. Doc Holiday snatches his victims from the Holiday stations of Minneapolis.”