Sense of Evil - Kay Hooper [17]
She hesitated just long enough to make the internal debate obvious, then said, “What I picked up out there confirmed something I suspected even before I came to Hastings. This town is just his latest hunting ground.”
“He's killed before?”
“In at least two previous locations. Ten years ago, he butchered six women in Florida. And five years ago, six women in Alabama.”
“Blondes?” Rafe asked.
“No. Redheads in Florida. Brunettes in Alabama. We have no idea why.”
“And nobody caught him then.”
“Lots tried. But he hit quick—one victim every week, just like here—and then he vanished. Typical serial killer cases, if there is such a thing, usually drag on months, years, and it takes time to get law enforcement organized once a pattern is even noticed. But this monster hit and vanished before the task forces could even get up and running. And he didn't leave so much as a hair behind to help I.D. him, so they had almost nothing to work with.”
“Then how do you know it's the same killer?”
“The M.O. The profile. The fact that Bishop himself worked on the second set of murders—one of his very few unsuccessful cases.”
“I wasn't told about any of this in the initial profile.”
“No. The first profiler wasn't a member of the SCU. And even though the two earlier sets of murders came up on the computer as possibly connected, he discounted them because it was believed at the time that the most likely suspect was killed trying to escape police in Alabama. His car went off a bridge. But they never found the body.”
“So do you and Bishop believe he didn't die—or that the suspect the police were chasing wasn't the killer?”
“We believe the latter, actually. The man the police were after had a few violent crimes on his rap sheet, but neither Bishop nor I was convinced he had the right psychological makeup to be the clever serial killer we were after.”
“So he kills his six victims, lays low for five years, and then starts up all over again. That's a hell of a cooling-off period.”
“And unusual. We believe he uses the time to relocate and get to know the people around him. We also believe there's always a trigger, as I said. Something sets him off. Something always sets him off.”
Again, Rafe heard a note in her voice that made him wary. “There's another reason you believe this is the same killer. What is it?”
Isabel answered without hesitation. “Standing where Tricia Kane was murdered, I felt him. Just the way I felt him five years ago when I first encountered Bishop and joined the team. And the way I felt him ten years ago when he killed a good friend of mine.”
It was nearly midnight when Mallory Beck pulled herself reluctantly from bed and began getting dressed. “Dammit. Where on earth did my bra get to?”
“Over there by the bookcase. You could stay, you know. Spend the night.”
“I'm back on duty at seven,” she said. “First big meeting of our task force, FBI agents included, starts at eight. That's off the record, Alan.”
“Mal, I've told you before, anything you say to me privately is off the record.” His voice was patient. He propped himself up on an elbow and watched her dress. “I'm not going to cross that line.”
She was reasonably sure he wouldn't. But only reasonably sure.
“Okay. But I still need to go home. I won't sleep much if I stay here, and I want to be rested tomorrow.”
“You don't have anything to prove, you know. To these FBI agents, I mean. Or to Rafe. You're a damned good cop, everybody knows that.”
“Yeah, well, being a good cop hasn't been enough so far, has it?”
He frowned a little as he watched her, wondering as he so often had in the last few months if he would ever really know her. It was undoubtedly part of the attraction as far as he was concerned, he knew that very well; there was so much of her beneath the surface, and his instinct was to dig, to explore and understand.
She wasn't making it easy for him.
Maybe that was part of the attraction as well. Plus the mind-blowing sex, of course. Either it was sheer natural