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“Not all of them, but in the ones they have, the guy looks the same.” Styles headed for the kitchenette and took down two cups. “The problem is that the footage is grainy in all of the robberies apart from the last one. Being new owners, they replaced the old camera, but we don’t have any firsthand witnesses because he killed everyone and then took the girl with him. She wasn’t a willing participant, from what the director just informed me. She was scared to death.”
Nodding, Beth took out the fixings and placed them on the counter. “You mentioned he abducts young women from the stores during the robbery. Have any come forward afterward?”
“Nope.” Styles poured coffee, added the fixings, and carried his cup to his desk. “They’ve all been found dead, miles fromtown, usually dumped on the side of the road. They’d been sexually assaulted and then shot in the head execution-style.”
Stirring her coffee slowly, Beth looked at him. “How many murders to date?”
“Ten in the stores, plus three girls and one missing.” Styles dropped into his chair and bit into his sandwich. He chewed and swallowed. “Going on the usual timeline, he kills them the following morning after the abduction.” He sipped his coffee, looking at her over the rim of his cup. “Another thing, all of them are carrying a one- or two-dollar scratch game. It’s not clear if he leaves it behind like a signature or not.”
Beth had mixed feelings about the case. “Interesting. Are they sending the case files and local law enforcement contacts for each case?”
“Yeah.” Styles leaned back in his chair, eyeing her with interest. “I can see your mind working from here. What are you seeing that I’m not?”
Laughing, Beth shook her head. “You just gave me the bare facts in a homicide slash robbery slash abduction slash murder and no conclusions. I’ll need to read all the information before I can hazard a guess as to what’s going on in this person’s mind.”
“They don’t have any suspects.” Styles leaned back in his chair, his large hand wrapped around the sandwich. “They assume he arrived in a vehicle, but no one saw anything. The only witnesses are dead, including a guy walking his dog past the store. No one seems to hear anything either. It’s beyond weird.”
Beth thought for a beat. “So he’s not local to any of the communities he hit or someone would recognize the CCTV footage of him entering the store.”
“He’s covered up, balaclava, cowboy hat, long coat, he wears gloves and is cool, calm, and collected.” Styles waved his egg salad around, and his dog followed the movement, just waitingfor him to drop a morsel. “I figured a random hit, but it doesn’t sound like that to me.”
The signal for an email sounded on his computer and then on Beth’s. She went to her desk. “Ah, that will be the files. We’ll need to print out all the images and get them onto a whiteboard for comparison. I’m especially interested in the girls he kidnapped.”
“How so?” Styles bit into his sandwich and tossed the remaining portion to Bear.
Beth scanned the files and sent images to the printer, which buzzed and spat out paper. “From what I’m hearing, this killer has two angles or two fantasies, which is unusual.” She glanced over her screen at him. “Give me time to look at the files and see if I can discover the nature of the beast.”
TWO
Pondering over what the director had said, Dax opened the files. He scanned a few of the reports and sipped his coffee, his attention drifting to Beth. She’d arrived from DC under a cloud. It fast became glaringly obvious that the slim-built beautiful blonde was a contradiction. She didn’t resemble any FBI agent he’d met before and she sure as heck didn’t back down from anyone. After watching her in action, he felt sorry for anyone stupid enough to attack her in a dark alleyway. The report had mentioned her lack of compassion and yet he’d seen her put her life on the line to save kids. She willingly walked alone into situations with nothing but her bare hands and yet managed to bring down the bad guys.
He found her eccentric way of doing things unnerving at times. She straddled the law, but then so did he. In Rattlesnake Creek, with only one sheriff and no deputies, he was often called upon to help out, and he wasn’t the type to draw down on anyone when he could reason with them. If they attacked him—it only happened once—he didn’t like or want to kill people or haul them in for drinking too much and brawling.
Beth didn’t depend on him. She liked her alone time, which suited him fine. She lived in the same building as he did, butthey both owned cabins in the forest. He liked to get away on his downtime and go fishing, but Beth had many hobbies. She painted landscapes and collected antiques. She could be anywhere and everywhere at any one time, visiting stores or out painting a masterpiece, although he never had a problem helping out if she needed assistance moving furniture, but that wasn’t often. It seemed she was taking her time furnishing her cabin and finding the right pieces was all part of the enjoyment.
When she met his gaze over the top of her screen, he realized he must have been staring at her and cleared his throat. “I know you must be disappointed being given this case. I did try to convince the director we planned on chasing down the Tarot Killer.”
“What did he say?” Beth slid her chair away from her screen to look at him.
Styles shrugged. “He said every man and his dog were on the case. Chasing a shadow was a waste of taxpayer’s money and we should concentrate on crimes we can actually solve.”
“Ah, I see.” Beth smiled at him. “He never changes, does he? We’re all bricks in a wall to him. Do the job, get results. He must have that on a plaque on his wall.” She sighed. “However, this is a good case for us because we have a different way of doing things. We both come into them from different angles. While the printer is doing its job, I’ve taken the image from the latest CCTV footage and it’s currently running through the FBI face-recognition software.”
Standing to refill his coffee cup, Styles looked over his shoulder at her. “Yeah, but that only covers people who have been arrested and you need a complete face.”
“Ah, well, technology is moving forward at a sizzling pace.” Beth held up her cup and jiggled it at him. “I can set up the program to run through every CCTV camera in the towns where each crime occurred. I’ve rewritten the software to focuson eye shape and color. Which means every person who walks by, if they resemble the man in the balaclava, we can get a list of suspects. Most people have ID, and any matches are immediately routed through various databases that carry images.”
After refilling both cups and taking one to Beth, Styles returned to his desk. Beth’s time in cybercrime gave her an edge most agents didn’t possess, and she was up to date to the second. “You did that already? How so?”
“It’s my specialty.” Beth gave him a long look. “I’ve been manipulating codes since I first sat in front of a computer. For me it was natural, like talking, and I picked it up real fast. I was writing games by the time I was twelve. I see the code as you would read a book. This is one of the reasons I was useful to the FBI. They don’t think of me as a fighting machine who takes down bad guys. They look at me as a nerd, so when I started taking down bad guys in the field, for them it didn’t compute. I know this by the way they speak to me—have spoken to me, I should say. You’re different. You see me as an asset even if I’m a little unconventional. I get the job done and that’s the whole point of why we do this work.”
Understanding flooded Styles and he nodded. “Yeah, I figure we make a good team. Sometimes you need to walk close to the line between legal and illegal to stop a killer.” He sighed. “So is this new technology all about AI or is this different?”
“Different.” Beth smiled. “If you mean, can we ask an AI how to solve this crime, well, we could, but it could only scan similar cases and come up with a variety of possibilities. Most of them would be like a bad fiction novel because we use our brains to think like a killer. An AI doesn’t have the capability to do that, and if they advanced to that level, there will already be a failsafe built into the system to prevent them from delving into a psychotic mind.” She grinned. “I’m sure we’ve seen enoughmovies about evil robots to stop them taking over the world just yet. The problem is, if they make them too smart, they’ll start thinking for themselves. If that happens, well, to them we’ll be redundant and a waste of energy. Let’s hope it never happens and the technology is used for good not evil.”
Shaking his head, Styles raised both eyebrows. “Amen to that.”
She always amazed him the way she explained technology. He’d believed he’d been up to date on most things until she’d arrived. Her mind was super fast, and he admitted to himself he envied her skills just a little. He walked to the printer and scooped up the images and tapped them into a neat pile. “Okay, these images all have the names of the victims and dates of their murders. The last three in the pile are the kidnap and murders and an image of the missing girl.”
