Page 60 of Fatal Pattern

Blade dragged his pen across the page, blocky strokes, jotting: Verify her claim.

Her mouth twitched before she could stop it. “Your handwriting—so dramatic. Like every letter’s bracing for a fight.”

“Better than your bubble letters.”

“Those are not bubble letters.”

“They look like they belong in a middle school girl’s diary.”

“Shut up.” But she was smiling now, and so was he. The tension in his shoulders had eased.

She took the pen and drew another arrow, this one connecting the Crew and Florek boxes to a central point labeled Fractals. “Sullivan mentioned patterns. Dr. Stone identified the symbol as Keplerian.”

Blade studied the diagram. She could practically see the gears turning.

“Can you pull up those photos you took at Florek’s house and drop them to my iPad?” he asked, already pushing back from the counter.

“Sure.” Tori minimized her timeline document and opened her photo gallery. The crime scene images filled her laptop screen, graphic thumbnails of the violence that had torn through Donald Florek’s living room.

Blade jogged down the hall, his footsteps slapping against the tile. A drawer screeched open, then slammed. Plastic rattled. Something dropped, thudded, got shoved aside. He reemerged a beat later, iPad gripped in one hand.

“Why does the battery always seem to be dead on this thing?” He held up the iPad, squinting at the black screen. “I can’t find my charger.”

“Who needs the babysitter now?” Tori grinned, reaching for her laptop in her bag and grabbing a cable. “Here, but I want it back.”

He plugged in the cable and then jammed it into the port. The screen lagged, black and stubborn, until the tablet finally lit. His lock screen filled with a color photo of him and Kiara framed by a bleeding sky over water. Her gaze snagged on the image. She dragged her eyes back to the icons, locking her focus on the job instead of the picture.

Blade climbed onto the chair beside her. She could smell his soap. Something clean and masculine that made her hyperaware of his proximity.

She pushed the photos across to his tablet. Blade picked up his stylus, unlocked a drawing app, and the screen lit with a grid of tools.

“Okay, let’s see what we’re working with.” He flipped through the gallery of photos she’d sent. He tapped the wide shot of Florek’s living room and overlaid one from the original crime scene. The overturned furniture, blood spatter, and Florek’s mangled body filled the screen in high resolution.

Tori watched as he created a new layer. His fingers moved across the screen like he’d done this a thousand times before. He pulled up the Keplerian fractal image Gino had sent earlier.

“I can lower the opacity and create an overlay,” he explained, adjusting settings with quick taps. “See if there’s any correlation between the symbol and the scene layout with and without the victim.”

The fractal appeared as a translucent geometric pattern over the crime scene photo. Blade used a combination of the pencil and his fingers to resize the overlay, making the Keplerian fractal larger and smaller, testing different proportions and angles.

Tori leaned closer. “How do you know how to do this?”

“I dabble in drawing.” His voice carried a hint of defensiveness.

Her eyebrow hitched up, the kind of lift that pinned him in place without a word.

“What? It relaxes me.” He shrugged, still focused on the screen. “Gives my hands something to do while watching TV.”

As he moved the fractal image around the crime scene, rotating and adjusting, something began to emerge. The geometric lines seemed to align with elements in the room, but not quite.

“Hold on.” Her pulse quickened. “Can you zoom in on the lower part of the photo?”

Blade tapped the screen, enlarging the section that showed Florek’s body and the surrounding furniture.

“Here, let me—” She reached for the screen, her fingers brushing his as she pinched to zoom further.

“Twist to rotate,” he instructed. “Like this.”

Their heads bent close together as they worked, adjusting the overlay. She felt her eyes going wider as the pattern began to align. The Keplerian geometric lines traced along the positioning of Florek’s body, followed the edge of the overturned couch, connected to the coffee table’s corner, drew a perfect line along the fireplace mantel, and terminated exactly where the bloodied book had been placed.