“Don’t be a goon and a wimp.” She laughed, a ghostly sound in the room. She hated the overhead fluorescent lights.
She brought up the menu on her computer and checked all the available databases. She found him after only twenty minutes. She would have found him in under two minutes if he’d killed any more in the past seven years. But he hadn’t.
She read the profile, then read it again, then cursed. She could have written it. She’d written profiles, dozens of them, during her graduate courses in Criminal Psychology. She’d even written her Master’s thesis on The Inclusive Psychometry of the Serial Criminal. She supposedly knew all the ingredients that went into the psychotic mind, co-mingled in endless patterns to produce a monster. The “inclusive” had been her advisor’s idea. She still thought it sounded obtuse and pretentious, but her advisor had patted her on the back and told her he knew what the professionals respected. She’d passed, so at least she must have sounded convincing in her defense. In fact, she’d gotten high grades on all the various protocols, tests, and measuring tools she’d developed to predict and judge the depths of contamination in the serial murderer’s mind. None of it had helped. He’d gone underground.
But even the FBI profile hadn’t provided a clue about where to find him. There was nothing at all that provided a different slant or perspective. Nothing new. Wait. She scrolled up again and reread two sentences. “The subject would never vary in his execution. His mind is locked into performing this single repetitive act again and again.”
It made sense. As far as she knew, each of the seven murders had been utterly identical. She slowly went through all the police reports, including Belinda’s, then printed them out.
She hated the autopsy reports, but through the courses she’d taken, she’d learned to remove herself from the gruesome details, most of which were couched in medicalese. But the photos were different, tougher. She didn’t read Belinda’s autopsy report. She knew she’d have to, but not now. No, not now, or tomorrow either. She printed out all of them, including Belinda’s.
She had to stop. She’d barely be able to carry out all the papers she’d already printed out.
Nick was smiling, that jaw of his out there, when he saw her. “You got lots of stuff there, Agent Sherlock. You gonna take it all back to two twenty-one B Baker Street now? I just remembered the two twenty-one B part.”
“Yep. It’s all on Moriarty, you know. I’ll catch that villain yet.”
“I don’t know about this Moriarty. But I did see a Sherlock Holmes movie about that hound. Boy, was that hound mean.”
“It was a good one,” she agreed as she signed out.
“You’ll be working more overtime?”
“Probably. They’re all real hardnoses here. They never let up.”
When she reached her car, she clicked her security alarm before she reached her Mazda 4×4. Everything worked. Lights went on inside the Navajo. No one had broken in.
When she got to her town house, she checked all the entries, then fastened the dead bolts and the two chains. She turned on the security alarm. She left her bedroom door open.
She read over the reports far into the night. But not Belinda’s, not just yet.
“Just feast your eyes on this, Sherlock.”
She looked down at a map with dots on it. The computer had connected a number of lines. “It’s the Star of David, Ollie. So what?”
He was rubbing his hands together. “Nothing bad happened, Sherlock. Savich and I got there and we talked with everybody. You know Savich, he was cool and low-key and then he just showed this to everyone. I thought Captain Samuels-she’s with the St. Petersburg Police Department-was going to kiss him. These four dots are where the killer’s already hit. Savich just did some extrapolation and voila!”
“It could be anything, Ollie. A Star of David?” She studied the three dots that represented murder sites. They formed a nearly perfect right-side-up equilateral triangle. The other murder could very well be the beginning of an upside-down equilateral triangle, but who knew? “Well, sure, it could be, but it could also be random.”