AllFreeNovel
Share Us
ME: Already got a reason to come back.
LANA: Now you have two…
There’s a picture attached to the last message of her from the waist down, definitely wearing my boxers. I run a hand through my hair, hating the fact I don’t want to be at work for the first time ever. I’ve always loved the job, yet a girl I barely know has me tempted to take my first ever sick day.
ME: Keep them on. I’ll be back tonight, and I want to see them in person.
LANA: Lucky for you I have no plans. And I’ll just be wearing these when you get here.
Groaning in frustration, I put my phone away, and I hurry through some of the slim new leads. The hotline tips get more ridiculous every day. The Boogeyman case is getting about as cold as my murder/mutilation case.
Several other cases are on the backburner, since no new murders have popped out. The ones that kill once or twice a year are twice as hard to find. Our only hot case is a murder/robbery serial.
I work, looking through some of the leads, examining the same photos as always. After two hours, I’m at the murder board, still trying to piece together what makes these women the targets.
None of them are overtly rich. They all have different family backgrounds. Different ethnicities. Different hair colors.
Though they were all attractive, there was no rape as incentive. Impotence is a possible in our profile, but...there’s something else that is driving him. There’s a reason why he selects and stalks these particular women.
My eyes look to their eyes, then their noses, then their mouths… Something clicks, and my heartbeat picks up.
Just as Hadley walks by, I grab her wrist, stopping her as my eyes narrow on one piece of evidence we haven’t been able to figure out.
“The lab analyzed that clay you found in the apartment, right?” I ask, lost in thought.
She nods. “Yeah. Nothing special about it. You could buy it at any arts and crafts store. And no one knows why it was there. It wasn’t found on the victim or anywhere else in the apartment. They think the unsub brought it in on his shoes or clothes.”
“And the faces had all been thoroughly cleaned then bleached. The hair had also been shaven off and the head was cleaned then bleached,” I state, still doing the math.
“Yes… Why?”
I look past her to where Donny is.
“Donny, look up art galleries in the area of the robberies/murders.”
He looks perplexed, but starts typing.
“Hadley, I need you to get on all the art sites you can find and see if anyone is selling bronze sculptures of faces. Narrow them down to the ones who started in the past four months, when the killings started,” I go on, walking toward Donny’s desk.
I turn to see her still standing there, confused.
“Now!” I urge her, and she scrambles to her desk.
Donny is typing furiously when I come up behind him. “Four in the area. None are selling bronze sculptures of faces,” he says, frowning. “Or was I supposed to be looking for something different than Hadley?”
“Call each one and ask if anyone tried to sell them the bronze sculptures. It’ll be faces only.”
He picks up his phone to do as I ask, and I go back to my computer, pulling up the program I need. I place all the victims’ pictures in the spots, and after a few keystrokes, my suspicions are confirmed.
“Symmetry,” I say on a long breath.
“What?” Craig asks, coming to look over my shoulder.
“He’s choosing them because of the symmetry of their faces. Perfect symmetry, which is supposed to be very rare, if not impossible. He’s choosing them because they have it, and he’s using their faces to mold art. He’s probably trying to sell it, and he’s fixated on anyone who has a symmetrical face. Women in particular. He may have a da Vinci fixation as well.”
My eyes scan the room, and I spot Lisa clipping her fingernails.
“Lisa, look at anyone in the comfort zone who might have ordered a lot of Leonardo da Vinci prints, or books on da Vinci. Focus primarily on anything revolving around the Vitruvian Man. The unsub would most likely be obsessed with that work.”
