Page 93 of Midnight Creed

“I heard you skipped out on us,” her friend said. “How are you doing?”

“Tired. I spent all night following him and I still might have lost him.”

“Your instincts are usually spot-on, so hang in there.”

“They weren’t this time. I think I really screwed up.”

“Racine makes her own choices. Even she will tell you that. And Nessie? She’s going to be okay. She’s conscious. I just talked to her, and goodness, that woman can talk. But more importantly, she is a survivor.”

“They let you talk to her?”

“You forget, I still have hospital privileges. As of a few hours ago, I am officially one of her consulting doctors.”

Before working with the FBI, Gwen had her own successful practice as a psychiatrist. She still saw a few clients on a regular basis.

“I have an amazing team,” Maggie simply said.

“You got that right.”

Her phone vibrated with another call.

“Speaking of my team,” she told Gwen. “Alonzo is calling.”

“Get your mind off Nessie and get some rest. We’ll get this guy.”

“Thanks.”

She clicked off and tapped on Alonzo’s call.

“I might have something,” he said immediately.

“Good, because I have nothing.”

She paced. Stopped to grab a cold French fry from the room service tray she had abandoned a few hours earlier.

“I’d been coming up empty-handed because I was using the wrong name.”

“You found another alias?”

“No, not an alias. Peter Gregory was adopted when he was eleven. It wasn’t until years later that he went back to using his birth name of Gregory. He actually grew up outside of Pensacola in Milton. That’s where he went to elementary and high school. Left to go to Florida State in Tallahassee. Didn’t graduate. When he turned twenty-five, he inherited money his biological father had left him in a trust. The man died when Peter was ten, but he had a family trust fund. Looks like it was something he’d inherited from his father. The fund has built up over twenty years. It’s worth over ten-million dollars.”

“This doesn’t sound like our guy.”

She couldn’t add up a profile of a millionaire traveling from city to city and bludgeoning homeless men to death. She’d seen photos of the victims. There was too much passion. The murders looked personal.

“Hang on a minute. This might help. I went back to see what happened to his father, Thomas Gregory.”

“Go on.”

“The family was going home late one night and stopped to help a motorist stranded on the side of a country road. The motorist started attacking Thomas Gregory. Get this...with a crowbar. The wife sped off to get help. Said her husband gestured and called out for her to go. Headlines emphasize that she saved her boys.

“By the time sheriff’s deputies got back there, the vehicle was gone and so was Thomas Gregory. There was blood at the scene. But Thomas’ body was never found. Newspaper reports called the motorist a transient.”

“Okay. That’s pretty...incredible. How many years ago are we talking about?”

“Nineteen, almost twenty now.”

“Something triggered him to start killing,” she was thinking out loud.