Double Vision (10 page)

S
hortly after the dramatic statement, auburn had flashed in. The color of vengeance. Jenna's team pager had gone off, and she'd excused herself. “Calliope, I appreciate you taking the time to go over these things with me. You've been more helpful than you can possibly know. But I'm afraid I have to cut this meeting short. The rest of the Behavioral Analysis Unit needs to meet, share what we've found out, and regroup. But I may have a few more questions later if that's okay.”

“Oh, it'll be quite all right. I'll do what I can. You won't mind, of course, if I ask you to see yourself to the door. I have a lot of work to do.”

“Not at all,” Jenna said, with a sneaking suspicion that she'd hurt the mythology expert's feelings. Ah, well. Duty called.

After all, a theory was forming in her head now. What better way to test a theory than to run it by the best of the best? Not to mention she wouldn't exactly mind knowing what the other team members were up to. Jenna hopped in her Blazer and drove five over the speed limit as she raced across town to Quantico.

The team was already seated around the table, Dodd noticeably missing. All eyes followed Jenna as she slipped into a vacant chair near the door. But when Saleda spoke up, all heads turned to focus on her.

“We've each been working different angles, thinking we could divide and conquer in this case, but I thought it best to call you all back since there's been another murder.”

The silence was so thick it was suffocating. Saleda opened her shiny blue folder and removed a glossy black-and-white photo. She pinned the photograph onto the felt board beside her. “Ladies and gents, this is Brooklyn Satterhorne. She was found in a Target parking lot around eight p.m. tonight by another shopper. Shot three times—clipped once in the left forearm, once in the left shoulder, and once in the chest. A penny over each eye.”

Jenna stared back at the smiling photo of what looked like a high schooler with wild, curly hair and a bridge of freckles dotting her nose.

“Pennies? Where are the threes?” Jenna asked.

“That's the funny part. Well, if you have a warped sense of humor anyway. No discernable connection to the number three aside from the three gunshots,” Saleda replied.

A few colors fought for dominance in Jenna's mind. None of this made any sense.
Relax. Don't force it.

“And the pennies are different, too,” Jenna muttered.

“No threes, nothing related to put over the eyes,” Porter piped up from the other side of the table.

Teva frowned. “The pennies have to be related in some way, though.”

Nail, meet head.
Figure out the relationship of the pennies, the details of this profile might solidify enough that the team might at least know they were on the right track. Either that or they could steer in the direction they needed to go.

“Ballsy,” Porter said, crunching the bill of the ball cap on his head. “Shooting her during the store's open hours.”

Next to him, Teva's pencil seesawed in between her thumb and forefinger. “He's spiraling, maybe? Making mistakes?”

“I'd say he spiraled way before now, what with the seven dead people in the grocery store,” a voice said from the doorway.

Jenna's head whipped around to see Dodd entering the room. No one asked questions about where he'd been as he circled the table. He unbuttoned the top collar button of his navy polo as he parked in the only remaining empty seat. Saleda glared at him.

Despite the dark circles under his eyes, he didn't seem irritated. He smiled a tired but jovial grin, ignoring Saleda's annoyance. “He's a bad shot, too. Clipped her in the left arm?”

Saleda turned away from him and to the table, seemingly to keep herself from screaming. “Shots were fired from at least a few yards away.”

The cornflower blue Jenna associated with sloppiness flashed in. Once again, confirmation this killer was disorganized.

“So if we're right that this is the same UNSUB as the one at the grocery store, and our UNSUB is right-handed, the victim was facing him,” Porter replied.

“Maybe. We'll have to wait until we have more details to be sure.”

Dodd leaned forward. “Speaking of, why are we talking about this here? Why aren't we at the crime scene scrutinizing the evidence and seeing this bastard's inept shooting skills for ourselves?”

Saleda took a deep breath. “Because we were waiting for confirmation this was tied to our case, since until about two minutes ago, it could've been anything. But as of a couple minutes ago, she's in the morgue at Prince William County Hospital. Only when she was pronounced DOA there did the locals run this through as a homicide. Until then, this shooting was nothing more than clatter on the tip line. Wouldn't have mattered if they'd run it through as an attempted homicide before, either, I don't guess. Even if she'd been so badly injured that she couldn't wiggle and disturb the evidence, the paramedics would've destroyed what was left, coins or no coins—”

“What are you muttering about here, boss?” Porter cut in.

“We're here and not in the Target parking lot because I didn't know for sure that this shooting was linked to our case until I got details from the homicide report filed after she was declared at Prince William County Hospital. Prior to that, she was any other shooting to their first responders, even though she was lying on the parking lot cement with a coin over each eye.

“Now that we know, we need to split up again, but in one less group than we would've if Brooklyn Satterhorne was still with us, because then we'd be interviewing her, too. As it is, we've got Target crime scene, potential witnesses, and family. No Brooklyn herself.

“Shame, too,” Saleda continued. “When the shopper found her in the parking lot, Brooklyn was still alive. She might've stared right at him as he bent to put the coins on her eyes so they'd be that way when the shopper found her.”

“How can he show remorse, put down the coins to pay the ferryman for her crossing, if she wasn't dead yet?” Teva asked.

“Maybe he knew she would be. Didn't care? Maybe his ritual was more important than the act of killing itself—”

Jenna cut Dodd off. “Maybe he was too delusional to stop and check for vitals. Look too hard. If you're so out of it that you think a god or goddess is telling you to kill, you're not going to plug a person with a third gunshot, then wait until after emergency responders arrive and determine if the victim's dead so if he is, you can somehow manage to lay down calling cards and tokens for the cops to find. If a god's telling you to do it, the god's obviously going to make sure it goes to plot. Plus, the rest of the circumstances told him what he wanted to know. His shots—location and number—suggested she would die or was already dead. Brooklyn's own stillness when he laid the coins over her eyes makes it look like she didn't speak to him again or move anymore.”

Saleda chimed in. “Question is, did she talk to anyone or move anymore after her shooter was gone? I want to know every shopper who squatted beside her in the parking lot, every medic who took her pulse, and every number her fingers could reach to send a text to before she was pronounced DOA at the hospital. I want to know if by some chance she was trying to get us a message, or if she was just weak, incoherent, and barely even cognizant during her last moments on earth.” Saleda turned to Jenna. “And I want you to find the shopper who found her in the parking lot when she was still alive. I want to know if that shopper saw or spoke to anyone anywhere near where she found Brooklyn Satterhorne, and whether or not Brooklyn herself said anything to or so much as grunted at this shopper.”

M
olly woke with a start.
G-Ma. The people running.
Her heart raced. She blinked into the darkness, and the butterflies hanging from the ceiling fan slowly came into focus as her eyes adjusted.

She wanted to get up, run to Mommy and Liam's room.

No. Mommy is barely sleeping at night anyway. She needs to sleep.

Think about something else.

Else. Four letters. Letters. Seven. Seven. Five letters.

She pushed away the covers and swung her feet off the side of the bed, then padded toward the bathroom. The flower-shaped nightlight glimmered from the wall socket, giving her face an eerie glow in the mirror. She couldn't help it; she needed to walk around. She had to dislodge this thing stuck in her brain she hadn't yet been able to jog loose.

As she'd tried to fall asleep earlier, she'd gone over and over the grocery store in her mind. She knew most kids her age would be afraid, and a lot of adults seemed to be worried about her. She wasn't a scaredy-cat, though. She just wanted to help.

The old man in the aisle had been what she'd tried to remember. Why hadn't he been in the back room with all the other witnesses that day?

He'd had four items in his grocery basket. Two were cereal. The same kind. He'd been in the cereal aisle. What other numbers?
Come on, head.

He'd been wearing a gold watch, the kind with slash marks instead of numbers. Molly hated those kinds of watches.

She leaned against the sink, closed her eyes tight. His shirt. Two diamonds on the pocket of the T-shirt. They overlapped.

Associations with the number two flew through Molly's mind.
The smallest prime number.
The smallest number in a standard deck of cards. Two mountains in the left window of Liam's painting of
The Last Supper.
The number of NASCAR racer Rusty Wallace.

The diamond image burned in her mind. Two.

Molly blinked. She'd been walking into the store with G-Ma. A short bus had been parked in front of the entrance. Two diamonds, overlapping, were painted on the sign.

She scampered back to bed, climbed in, and pulled the covers all the way to her chin, even though she knew she wouldn't get any more sleep tonight. She was still thinking about those two diamonds. The ones on the short-bus sign.

Under the diamonds had been the words
CARMINE MANOR
. In small type below that had been
ASSISTED LIVING FOR SENIORS
.

•   •   •

O
nce Saleda had assigned Porter to go take a statement from the family, told Teva to accompany her to the crime scene, and stuck Jenna with Dodd, the latter two had left to interview the traumatized shopper who'd found poor Brooklyn Satterhorne. Jenna wondered if maybe she ought to take it as a compliment—the fact that Saleda thought she could handle the rogue—but somehow his pairing with her didn't exactly feel like a medal of honor. If the last interview they'd performed together was any indication, this would go over about as well as that time Ayana thought her goldfish would like to try some of her Kool-Aid.

As they climbed into the FBI-issued SUV, Dodd in the driver's seat, Jenna tried to sound nonchalant. “So, where have you been?”

Dodd sighed heavily, and his shoulders hunched. “Big case I was head investigator on a few years back has been reopened. Defense appealed a competency ruling, more medical and psych evaluations followed. Doing everything I can to keep that bastard on the inside. If ever I wanted to see a killer convicted, it was him. To do what he did to those people took something. Something awful. Inhuman, even.”

Jenna nodded, solemn. “Saleda told me about the Cobbler. I hadn't realized until then you'd been on that case.”

Dodd's gaze stayed on the road as he turned right out of the Quantico parking lot. “Unfortunately.”

Jenna sat in silence, unsure what to say as the particulars of the infamous serial murder case drifted through her head. Every member of the BAU had looked at them, after all. The case was still somewhat of a mystery in the profiling world. Twelve people's throats slashed, and when the FBI's Violent Criminal Apprehension Program assessed the victims for possible connections to known serial murder cases, all twelve fit the ViCAP data for the slayer the media had dubbed the Cobbler due to his MO of cutting off
some
of his victims' feet. An individual with a known history of mental disorder had eventually been implicated in the case, and when his home was raided, investigators found the ten feet that
had
been severed in the guy's freezer. Despite his questionable mental capacity, the killer had been convicted of twelve counts of murder among a slew of other charges and was sentenced to death. However, no one could explain why he chose to remove some of his victims' feet and left others' intact. The acts certainly didn't fit the standard concept of a trophy killer. Some investigators had surmised that he'd simply been interrupted or spooked during the killings where the feet were left alone, but Jenna had never bought it. It didn't make any sense. Some people lost one foot, some two. Others had kept both. Jenna's gut said those discriminations happened for a reason, but what it was she'd probably never know.

“Ridiculous is what it is. That now . . . It's not just that they're tryin' to get him put into psych lockup instead of death row, where he belongs. No. It's worse. Defense is hinting that they've got proof coming out soon that there's no way their client committed the Cobbler murders. Damned out-and-out ridiculous is what it is. Feagin McKye had ten feet in his freezer, for Christ's sake. It takes a lot of balls to dismember someone. Forget
multiple
someones,” Dodd muttered.

A pang of pity hit Jenna. No matter what she thought of Dodd, she couldn't help but feel bad for the guy. He'd apparently put this case to bed in his own mind long ago, something everyone in this job knew you couldn't really do with one you were sure you'd solved until the perp was apprehended, the trial and all its appeals over. If you were lucky, sometimes the execution that followed gave closure. Sure, they must have some huge questions to reopen what seemed so cut-and-dry a case, and she was sure Dodd was biased. After all, your gut was all you had in some cases. She couldn't blame Dodd for feeling so sure he had the right man. If Jenna had found a bunch of feet belonging to victims in someone's freezer, she'd consider it a closed case, too.

Which, of course, begged the questions: if the new evidence did turn out to be game-changing and by some chance proved Dodd had been wrong, where the hell was the real killer, and how did those feet get in that guy's freezer?

“What now?” she asked, despite her better judgment.

Dodd put on his blinker. “Well, for now, we find out what we can about Brooklyn Satterhorne.”