“And start building a profile on our UNSUB while you’re at it.” Brad shifted his attention to the other side of the table. “Brian, Rafe, check with BCI and see if Hank’s got anything new. Deputy Emory stopped by Visions last night and pulled a list of everyone working Saturday, along with contact info. It was a busy night for patrol, so that’s all he was able to get. Once you’re done at the lab, start the interviews, please.”
Pens scratched across notepads as everyone jotted down assignments. Brad rattled off his office and cell numbers, then collected theirs.
“We’ll regroup here around five.” He leaned back, the chair giving a tired squeak beneath him. “By then this case will be all over every station in the state, so brace yourselves for the flood of psychics, armchair detectives, and every citizen who suddenly thinks they’ve cracked the case.”
A few grim smiles circled the table. Sean knew exactly what was coming. Open investigations made people crawl out of nowhere, desperate to be useful, desperate for attention, or convinced they’d uncovered some hidden truth. Most leads amounted to wasted hours and dead ends. Still, somewhere in that avalanche of nonsense, there was always the chance one phone call would matter. And until they found the man responsible, they couldn’t afford to ignore any of them.
Chapter Seven
While the others split off to tackle their assignments, Sean grabbed his laptop from the Mustang and headed back inside. The conference room the sheriff had claimed for the task force already felt different from the day before. It had taken on that charged, lived-in feel that investigation spaces always developed once a case gained momentum—coffee rings on the table, legal pads scattered across the surface, and pens everywhere but never within reach. Above it all, tension hung in the stale air.
The room had everything they needed. Dry-erase boards covered one wall, corkboards on another. Plenty of space to map victims, timelines, locations, and suspects. At the moment, most of it still sat blank.
That wouldn’t last long.
As he waited for the department’s IT tech to link his laptop to the sheriff’s network, Sean got busy. He pinned photographs of the three victims across one corkboard in neat rows. The top held images of the women as they’d been in life—smiling, dressed up, full of energy. Beneath those came the crime scene photos. The bottom row held the autopsy shots.
The contrast was heartbreaking.
Three women who’d gone out expecting nothing more dangerous than a night of drinks and laughter.
He turned to the dry-erase boards and began listing details beneath each name. Age. Hair and eye color. Last known location. Time last seen. Blood alcohol level. Body recovery site. Condition of remains. Signature elements.
Patterns lived in details. The more he wrote, the more the information began arranging itself into something that should have made sense.
It didn’t.
By the time he capped the marker, close to an hour had passed. The muted clicks of keys and the occasional shuffle of cables broke the silence as the IT tech finished connecting Sean’s laptop to the department’s system and confirmed network access for the task force computers. After thanking him, Sean dropped into a chair at the conference table and logged into the FBI’s National Data Exchange.
Most agencies could feed their major case data into the system, but not all. Some smaller departments still lacked the budget or workforce, but enough participated to make the database one of the bureau’s best tools for linking crimes across jurisdictions.
Serial offenders repeated themselves. Methods evolved. Confidence grew. Mistakes changed shape. But the core behaviors usually remained.
If this wasn’t where the pattern had begun, there could be other victims buried somewhere in the system.
Sean entered the known parameters: blonde females in their twenties or thirties, ligature strangulation, carved torso, and a penny placed on the forehead. He programmed the search to flag any homicide matching at least three of the four markers and launched the scan.
The system would need time, which gave him room to tackle the second part of his assignment—profiling.
He wasn’t a behavioral analyst, but he’d taken enough bureau courses over the years—and worked enough violent crime cases—to know how to build a foundation. Sometimes, all it took was asking the right questions.
What kind of offender escalated from straightforward strangulation to repeated resuscitation?
Why the pennies?
Why the carving?
Why leave two bodies where discovery was almost guaranteed, then place the third in partial concealment?
His fingers drummed against the tabletop as he pondered it all.
There was one person he trusted to help him work through those questions. He pulled out his phone and scrolled to Dr. Suki Ralston’s number.
Stationed at FBI headquarters in Quantico, Virginia, Suki held a Ph.D. in criminal psychology and was one of the sharpest minds he’d ever worked with. A native of Hawaii, she was petite and dark-haired, with soft caramel skin that turned heads the moment she entered a room. Most men noticed her looks first.
Sean had learned fast that there was far more to her than that.
She had a fun personality, a deep love of her work, and a wicked sense of humor that often surfaced at the exact moment a brutal case threatened to swallow everyone whole. Her profiles were razor sharp, and in the three cases they’d worked together over the past two years, every one of them had proven frighteningly accurate once the suspects were caught.
