All of these women had been killed by the same person.
Youre escalating , I thought. Something happened, and now you need more, faster .
I stared at the photos, my mind whirring, picking up each detail of the pictures, the files, until only three things stood out.
Knife .
Redhead .
Psychic .
That was the moment that the ground disappeared from underneath me. I lost the ability to blink. My eyes got very dry. My throat was worse. My vision blurred, and all of the photographs got very fuzzy except for one.
The nineteen-year-old runaway.
The hair, the facial structure, the freckles. Through blurred vision, she looked like
Knife .
Redhead .
Psychic .
Cassie? Michael took my hands in his. Youre freezing.
The UNSUB is killing redheads, I said, and hes killing psychics.
Thats not a pattern, Sloane said peevishly. Thats two patterns.
No, I said, its not. I think
Knife. Redhead. Psychic .
I couldnt say the words. My mother I took a short breath and brutally expelled it. I dont know what my mothers body looked like, I said finally, but I do know that she was attacked with a knife.
Michael and Sloane stared at me. I got up and walked over to my dresser. I opened the top drawer and found what I was looking for.
A picture.
Dont look at it , I thought.
Directing my gaze at anything but the picture in my hand, I stooped and tapped my fingers on the palm readers photograph. I dont think she dyed her hair red, I said. I think the killer did.
You kill psychics. You kill redheads. But one or the other isnt enough anymore. Its never enough .
Glancing up at Michael and Sloane, I laid my mothers picture down between the two columns.
Sloane studied it. She looks like the other victims, she said, nodding to the column of redheads.
No, I said. They look like her.
These women had all been killed in the past nine months. My mother had been missing for five years.
Cassie, who is that? Michael had to have known the answer to that question, but he asked it anyway.
Thats my mother. I still couldnt let myself look at the picture. She was attacked with a knife. Her body was never found. I paused, just for a second. My mother made her living by convincing people she was psychic.
Michael looked at meand into me. Are you saying what I think youre saying?
I was saying that Briggs and Locke were tracking an UNSUB who killed women with red hair and people who claimed to be psychic. It could have been a coincidence. I should have assumed it was a coincidence.
But I didnt.
Im saying this killer has a very specific type: people who resemble my mother.
YOU
Last night, you woke up in a cold sweat, and the only voice in your head was your fathers. The dream seemed real. It always seems real. You could feel the sticky sheets, smell the urine, hear the whistle of His hand tearing through the air. You woke up shaking, and then you realized
The bed was wet .
No, you thought . No. No. No.
But there wasnt anyone there to punish you. Your fathers dead, and youre not .
Youre the one who does the punishing now .
But its never enough. The neighbors dog. The whores. Even the palm reader wasnt enough. You open the bathroom cabinet. One by one, you run your hands over each of the tubes of lipstick, remember each of the girls.
Its calming .
Soothing .
Exciting .
You stop when you get to the oldest tube. The first. You know what you want. What you need. Youve always known.
All thats left to do now is take it .
CHAPTER 23
Maybe this was a bad idea. Coming from Michael, those words sounded completely alien.
No, I said. You wanted to distract me. Im distracted.
The likelihood that this UNSUB is the one who attacked your mother is extremely low. Sloane spoke hesitantly, like she thought one more wordor one more statisticmight set me off. This killer abducts his victims and kills them at a separate location, leaving little to no physical evidence at the site of abduction. Theres some indication that at least two of the victims may have been drugged. The women have relatively few defensive wounds, indicating that theyre likely restrained before the knife comes into play.
Sloane was talking about this killers MO. With her gift, that was as far as she could go. She couldnt see underneath it, couldnt imagine how a killer might have refined his technique over the span of five years.
When does Agent Briggs get back? I asked.
Hes never going to let you work on this, Michael told me.
Is that your way of telling me that you dont want him to know we hacked a stolen jump drive? I shot back.
Michael snorted. Personally, I wouldnt mind taking out an ad in the paper or hiring a skywriter to announce that he and Locke were outsmarted by three bored teenagers.
I could think of a lot of words to describe my life right now; boring wasnt one of them.
Briggs is nothing if not predictable, Cassie. His job is proving that we can solve cold cases, not dragging us along on active ones. Hes probably lucky his bosses didnt fire him when they figured out what he was doing with Dean. Even if this case does have something to do with your mothers, hell never let you work on it.