14 - J. T. Ellison [106]
She’d never done that with her dad. After her mother died giving birth to Joshua, she’d been in charge of the house. When she’d walked in on him murdering Ava D’Angelo, the second of his victims, she’d calmly shut the door and gone to the kitchen to oversee the dinner preparations.
He sought her out, later. He talked to her, discussed the murder with her. It was an experiment, he said. “Like the experiment I did on Joshua’s guinea pig?” she had asked. He’d seen it then, that he’d passed along the emptiness of soul that accompanies the desire to take life. Funny, she remembered the very moment when he kissed her forehead and entreated her to keep his secret. He was proud of her. As she was of him.
That was the last they discussed his extracurricular activities. She’d gone away to school, then went on to college, got her Ph.D., and joined the FBI. He was forced to stop killing by the advancement of the arthritis. They were both complete, yet empty.
Then Troy had come into their lives.
It had taken her weeks to write the special program, to upload it into the CODIS database. It was a brilliant deception, a Trojan horse that took the information inputted by the various law enforcement officials across the country and filtered the results. She’d built the program to warn her of possible anomalies in DNA matches before they made it into the official system. This gave her the freedom to examine the kills, then pass them along unscathed to the official database, keeping back the murders she was most interested in. To be honest, she was astonished the program had failed. The IT support at Quantico must have rolled out an update that kicked her Trojan out of the system. That’s why the DNA matches suddenly poured in. Her system wasn’t flawless, after all. That could, would be fixed.
She’d found Troy through a Web site designed for killers to talk freely about their escapades, had alerted her perverted CODIS program to his particulars. The sites were filled with poseurs and fakes, like wannabe vampires who had their teeth filed into fangs and drank the blood of their friends but weren’t really ever going to be burned to ash by sunlight. That was the kind of miscreant that usually populated these sites, the fantasy seekers. Fallacious seers and the unintended Apocrypha, murderous sycophants. After a few false alarms, she’d learned to spot the real ones.
Once she’d found Troy, she couldn’t help herself. She’d known it was a bad idea from the beginning, but was compelled. Obsessed. She wanted to lay eyes on the man who was already such an accomplished, sophisticated killer. She knew he was the one she’d been waiting for.
Troy was difficult at the start. He made no excuses, played no tricks. Except his name, of course. He refused to share his real name with her. It was nearly a deal breaker, but he was just so talented, she decided to let it slide. Feeling a bit like she’d been conquered, she christened him Troy.
Charlotte started to gather the remnants of her father’s tea and medications when the phone rang, surprising her. The tea tray clattered to the floor; her father jerked awake with a groan.
She answered the phone, then gave it wordlessly to Snow White. The caller spoke loudly; it wasn’t hard to overhear. Picking up the tubes and jars, the teapot and sugar, she listened.
The call was brief. Her father didn’t bother to say a word. When he handed the phone back to her, he almost look ashamed. That’s when she realized he was scared.
“Who was that?”
“An old friend. Where is Troy?”
“I believe he is teasing the girl.”
Teasing, that’s what Troy liked to call it. Unlike his mentor, he enjoyed conversing with his victims beforehand, getting to know them a bit. Instilling a tiny fragment of hope into their beings that they might, might, get away with their lives.
“Get him out of there, Charlotte. We must release her.”
“Are you kidding? That’s like