The moment I heard the phrase crime scene, I flashed back to opening the door to my mother’s dressing room. I’d always thought that I knew so little about what had happened that day. By the time I’d gotten back to the dressing room, the killer was gone. My mother was gone. There was so much blood.…
Victimology, I reminded myself. I knew my mother. She would have fought—nail-scratching, breaking-lamps-over-his-head, struggling-for-the-knife fought. And there were only two things that could have stopped her: dying or the realization that I was due back in the room at any second.
What if she went with him? The police had assumed she was dead—or at the very least unconscious—when the UNSUB had removed her from the room. But my mother wasn’t a small woman, and the dressing room was on the second floor of the theater. Under normal circumstance, my mother wouldn’t have just let a killer waltz her out the door—but she might have done anything to keep her assailant away from me.
“Cassie?” Agent Locke said, snapping me back to the present.
“Right,” I said.
She narrowed her eyes. “Right what?”
“Sorry,” I told Locke. “Could you repeat what you just said?”
She gave me a long, appraising look, then repeated herself. “I said that walking through a crime scene from a victim’s perspective can tell you a lot about the killer. Say you go into a victim’s house and you find out that she compulsively writes to-do lists, color-codes her clothes, and has a pet fish. This woman is the third victim, but she’s the only one of the three who doesn’t have defensive wounds. The killer normally keeps his victims alive for days, but this woman was killed by a strong blow to the head on the day she was taken. Her blouse was buttoned crookedly when they found her.”
Putting myself into the killer’s head, I could imagine him taking women. Playing with them. So why would he let this one off easy? Why end his game early, when she showed no signs of fighting back?
Because she showed no signs of fighting back.
I switched perspectives, imagining myself as the victim. I’m organized, orderly, and type A in the extreme. I want a pet, but can’t bring myself to get one that would actually disrupt my life, so I settle for a fish instead. Maybe I’ve read about the previous murders in the paper. Maybe I know how things end for the women who fought back.
So maybe I don’t fight back. Not physically.
The things Locke had told me about the victim said that she was a woman who liked to stay in control. She would have tried reasoning with her killer. She would have resisted his attempts to control her. She might have even tried to manipulate him. And if she’d succeeded, even for an instant …
“The UNSUB killed the others for fun,” I said, “but he killed her in a fit of rage.”
Their interaction would have been a game of control for him, too—and she was just enough of a control freak to disrupt that.
“And?” Agent Locke prompted.
I drew a blank.
“He buttoned her shirt,” Dean said. “If she’d buttoned it, it wouldn’t have been crooked.”
That observation sent my mind whirring. If he’d killed her in a rage, why would he have dressed her afterward? If he’d undressed her, I could understand it—the final humiliation, the final assertion of control.
You know her, I thought.
“The UNSUB’s first two victims were chosen randomly.” Agent Locke met my eyes, and for a second, it felt like she was reading my mind. “We assumed the third victim was as well. We were wrong.” Locke rocked back on her heels. “That’s why you need both sides of the coin. Checks and balances, victims and UNSUBs—because you’ll always be wrong about something. You’ll always miss something. What if there’s a personal connection? What if the UNSUB is older than you thought? What if he is a she? What if there are two UNSUBs working as a pair? What if the killer is just a kid himself?”
I knew suddenly that we weren’t talking about the type A woman and the man who’d killed her anymore. We were talking about the doubts plaguing Locke right now, the assumptions she’d made on her current case. We were talking about an UNSUB that Locke and Briggs hadn’t been able to catch.
“Ninety percent of all serial killers are male.” Sloane announced her presence, then walked up to join us. “Seventy-six percent are American, with a substantial percentage of serial murders concentrated in California, Texas, New York, and Illinois. The vast majority of serial killers are Caucasian, and over eighty-nine percent of victims of serial crimes are Caucasian as well.”
I could not help noticing that she spoke significantly slower when not under the influence of caffeine.
Briggs followed Sloane into the room. “Lacey.” He got Agent Locke’s attention. “I just got a call from Starmans. We have body number four.”
Thinking about those words—and what they meant—felt like eavesdropping, but I couldn’t help myself. Another body. Another person, dead.
Locke clenched her jaw. “Same profile?” she asked Briggs.
Briggs gave a brisk, slight nod. “A palm reader in Dupont Circle. And the national database search we ran came back with more than one match for our killer’s MO.”
What MO? I couldn’t shake the question, any more than I could stop wondering who this new victim was, if she’d had a family, who had told them that she was dead.
“That bad?” Locke asked, reading Briggs’s face. I wished Michael were there to help me do the same. This case was none of my business—but I wanted to know.
“We should talk elsewhere,” Briggs said.
Elsewhere. As in somewhere that Sloane, Dean, and I weren’t.
“You didn’t have trouble coming to Dean for advice when he was twelve,” I said, unable to stop myself. “Why stop now?”
Briggs’s eyes darted over to Dean, who met his gaze without blinking. Clearly, that wasn’t information Dean was supposed to share with the rest of us—but just as clearly, Dean wasn’t going to look away first.
“The flower beds could use some weeding.” Judd broke the tension, coming into the room to stand between Briggs and Dean. “If you’re done with the kids for a bit, I can put them to work. Might be good for them to get their hands dirty, get some sun.”
Judd directed those words at Agent Briggs, but Locke was the one who replied. “It’s fine, Judd.” She glanced first at Dean, then at me. “They can stay. Briggs, you were saying the database turned up more than one case with the same MO?”