Page 24 of If She Sensed

"Agents Wise and Sloane," Middleton said."This is Abby Torrence.She's in 4B, right next door.She's the one who called it in."

Kate looked at the woman steadily."Ms.Torrence, can you tell us what you heard?"

She unfolded her arms and then refolded them, as if she simply couldn’t get comfortable.Kate took note of the nervous little twitch at the left corner of her mouth."I was in my living room, watching TV.The walls in this building are not thick… you know?So, I heard her—I heard Nancy cry out.Just once.It wasn't a long sound but it was clear it was pain or maybe surprise."She stopped and pressed her lips together briefly."I know her a bit….we're friendly.And that noise sounded just odd enough that it registered, you know?So, I got up to check on her and… God, I wish I hadn’t waited.But I came to the door and knocked and it wasn't fully closed.It swung open."She looked at the open door to 4C and then back at Kate."I didn't go in very far.I could see her from the doorway."

"Did you see anyone in the hallway?Coming out of her apartment, on the stairs, anywhere?"

"No one.I looked both ways before I called 911.The hallway was empty."

"How long do you think passed between hearing her cry out and calling 911?"Sloane asked.

"Maybe five minutes.Six at most.Like I said… I didn’t act when I first heard the noise… mainly because I didn’t want to appear nosy.So, it took me a minute before I went to check.I wasn't sure at first if I'd really heard something."She looked down at her slippers, ashamed."I should have gone faster."

"You did the right thing," Kate said.She meant it, and she said it plainly enough that the woman seemed to receive it.Kate looked at Middleton and asked, "How long ago was the call?"

"Thirty-two minutes," he said."This scene is about as fresh as it gets.Help yourselves."He then held out two pairs of latex gloves that he had taken from his back pocket.

Kate pulled on the gloves Middleton handed her and moved toward the apartment door.

The living room felt far too familiar, presenting the same picture she’d already seen twice before.The place had not been ransacked and there had been no fight.Nancy Briggs had been taken completely by surprise.Aside from the dead body on the floor and the copious amount of blood pooled around it, the room was in perfect, tidy order.The only thing that looked remotely out of place was the champagne glass sitting on the kitchen counter, still holding a shallow inch of pale liquid.

Nancy Briggs was on her back near the front door, one arm extended toward it and one at her side.She was dressed in pajamas, which meant she had come home and changed before this happened.Her black hair was going slightly gray at the temples and she had a face that Kate thought might be described as pretty in a plain sort of way.The wounds were visible from where Kate stood: two to the chest, close together, and a long lateral cut across the throat that had bled heavily down onto the hardwood.

Kate stood at the edge of the room and looked at all of it without moving for a long moment.The champagne glass on the counter.The pajamas.The front door, which was the entry point this time rather than a back door, which she noted and set aside for now.She took this all in as Sloane crouched near the body, examining the wounds without touching anything.A CSI technician was working along the far wall and another was visible through the kitchen doorway processing the counter and the door handle.Kate had been so wrapped up in the fact that the scene was so fresh that she’d hardly even registered there was someone else present.

Kate moved slowly around the perimeter of the room and stopped at the small side table near the couch.There, she spotted Nancy’s phone.It lay face-up, the screen still lit.Kate leaned over it without picking it up.

The Fresh Horizons forum was open on the screen.A post was visible, time-stamped from earlier that evening.Kate read it without touching the phone:Third date tonight and I think this might actually be something real.Feeling grateful and more than a little terrified.Wish me luck, ladies.

Below it were seven likes and four comments, all posted within the last few hours.

"Sloane," Kate said.

Sloane came to stand beside her and looked at the screen.

"She posted about a third date," Sloane said.She straightened up and looked at Kate."The first two victims had just come home fromfirstdates.This doesn't match."

"It matches exactly," Kate said."Carol posted on the forum after her first date.Donna posted after her first date.Nancy waited until her third date to post about the relationship at all."She looked back at the phone screen, at the seven small hearts beneath Nancy Briggs's last post."Maybe the victims aren't being selected because of the number of the date.Maybe they're being selected because they posted about it on the forum."

Sloane looked at the phone and then back to Nancy’s body.“But based on this, we can assume the killer is at leastlookingat the forum, right?”

“That’s my guess, yeah.”

The killer was not following these women from restaurants or staking out their homes in advance.They were sitting inside the forum, reading the posts, and then moving.The timeline from post to murder was almost certainly a matter of hours.Nancy Briggs had posted about her third date at some point this evening, come home, changed into pajamas, and poured herself a glass of champagne.And someone who had seen that post had come to her front door inside that same stretch of time.

Kate looked at the champagne glass on the counter, at the cork beside the sink, indicating the private evidence of a woman celebrating something she had been waiting a long time to feel.

"We need to get into the nooks and crannies of that forum," Sloane said quietly."Every post, every like, every interaction on anything Nancy Briggs ever put up.We find who was watching her."She then nodded to the comments on Nancy’s posts and said, “And I think we start with them.”

CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

Within less than twenty minutes, Nancy Briggs’s apartment had taken on the frantic energy of an urgent crime scene.Two CSI technicians now moved through the living room in a slow, overlapping pattern; one processed the area around the body while the other worked the front door and the entry wall.The medical examiner had arrived twelve minutes after Kate and Sloane and was now crouched beside the body, speaking in low tones to an assistant.A third technician had appeared from the kitchen and was photographing the champagne glass on the counter from multiple angles.Detective Middleton stood near the hallway, coordinating quietly with a uniformed officer and making sure to keep the corridor clear.

Kate and Sloane had pulled two chairs from the small dining table and set them near the window.The intent was to stay away from the center of the activity but to remain close enough to observe the room out of everyone's way.Both of their laptops were open, and the Fresh Horizons forum glowed on both screens.Kate figured this made a hell of a lot more sense than retreating back to the field office.

They had already made contact with all three people who had commented on Nancy's post.The calls had taken less than twenty minutes combined: a woman named Susan Park who had responded with a string of encouraging words and been reached at home, audibly shaken by the news and entirely without useful information.Next had been a woman named Terri Voss who had typedRooting for you!She’d checked out easily, as she had been at a dinner party with six other people all evening.Lastly, there was a user named, simply, MontyL who had left a simple heart emoji and turned out to be a sixty-one-year-old retired schoolteacher in the process of visiting his grandchildren in Boston.All three cleared easily.All three had simply seen a post from a woman they knew from the forum and responded to it encouragingly.

Kate had already forwarded both the forum URL and the linked Facebook group page to the bureau's tech team with a request for a deeper infrastructure pull—IP addresses behind usernames, account creation dates, login patterns, anything the surface-level view wasn't showing them.That was running in the background now, which meant the forum itself remained their most immediate tool.She knew such a task would take hours, but it was nice to know they had it as an option.