Page 71 of Fatal Mistake
“And now?” Her focus shifted to his abs. “Can you do that many sit-ups?”
He shook his head. “I try to work out every day, but I’ve resigned myself to the fact that I won’t ever be in such good shape again.”
“Nothing wrong with your shape right now.” She clapped her hand over her mouth. “I said that out loud, didn’t I?”
He couldn’t resist smiling over her error, and his whole body relaxed. They were in the haymow to track down a serial killer and they were flirting. He had to admit he liked it, and at the moment, he would rather keep up the conversation than look for Keeler’s secret stash.
She suddenly sobered and tipped her head at the wall. “The hiding place. We should check it out.”
He nodded, and she climbed over a single row of bales to the corner where she lifted out the last bale and set it on wide floor planks behind her.
He scrambled after her and dropped onto a bale to wait while she pressed her hands against a section of the slatted wood wall that let loose in her hands.
“Oh my gosh.” She handed the piece to him. “There’s something in here.”
“Did you leave anything here when you were kids?”
She looked up for a moment. “No. I remember emptying it out. We fought about who got to keep the candle we used for secret meetings.”
“Who won?” Cal asked, surprising himself that he wanted to know more about her childhood than what the hiding spot contained.
An impish grin lit her face. “We arm wrestled for it, and I won.”
“Remind me never to wrestle against you.”
She rolled her eyes and turned back to the wall.
“Hold on,” he said as he dug latex gloves from his pocket and snapped them on. “This item could be evidence. I can’t have you touching it.”
“Right.” She shifted around until she sat next to him with her leg pressed up against his. She didn’t seem to notice, but he was painfully aware of her touch and inched away to lift out an oversized padded envelope from the wall.
He opened the clasp and pulled out a stack of pictures.
The top photo was of Dafiyah Jabbar.
“Oren’s first victim.”
“She was pretty.” Tara’s voice was barely more than a whisper.
Cal wished they could go back to a moment ago when they were flirting. When she still possessed one more piece of her innocence before Keeler stole it from her.
He flipped to the next picture and the next. All were photos of Dafiyah going about her everyday life, and they proved that Keeler had stalked her before he killed her. Cal turned them upside down on the bale, then removed a sheaf of papers with e-mail headers printed on the top of the pages. Cal scanned the first one, and the word ISIS in bold, capital letters immediately caught his attention.
He read the entire e-mail, then sat back, his mind racing to process the information. He didn’t recognize the name or e-mail address of the sender or the address Keeler used, but that wasn’t surprising, as the Knights had found no direct communication linking him to ISIS prior to locating this message.
“The killing. It isn’t about me.” Tara looked up at him, her expression flooded with relief. “He says he’s targeting Muslim women who turned their back on their faith. That’s his reason. It has to be.”
“He would definitely see someone who rejected his faith as an infidel who needed to be punished,” Cal mused aloud. “FBI profilers once suggested Keeler’s use of the necklace bomb was his way of beheading infidels—an action ISIS took from passages in the Quran. We rejected it when we didn’t find any evidence to support that theory.”
“But it makes sense now.”
“Yes and no. If that was his only motive in these bombs, he wouldn’t have begun targeting you, too.”
“I know, but I…”
“But you want this to be true so you don’t feel guilty.”
“Yes.”
