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"Yes, this is right," she muttered. "This is exactly right. It's what we wanted. Right here. I just missed the point he was using for his pivot. The central point, where all the kills are clustered around. And it’s here. The Statue of Liberty."
The kills in New York, when plotted in relation to the Statue of Liberty, showed a perfectly straight arc. The first kill due east, the second one northeast, and the third one due north. All the same distance away from the statue – about two and a half miles. Why hadn't she seen that before? She'd picked up the arc, but the fact that the killings had been in different states had confused the issue.
She had not realized until this moment that they hinged around the presence of the statue, each a similar distance away from Lady Liberty herself.
"Now, what's he doing here?"
With hands trembling slightly from tension, she looked at the second map.
The first kill was due south from the Eiffel Tower, about a mile away. The second one was exactly southeast and the same distance away.
And that meant, if he was following his pattern, the third would be east, due east, and approximately a mile from the tower. Just like the others.
"We need to get there. Fast," she said.
She got on the phone. "Sierra, the place where he's killing. I've mapped it. Due east, about a mile from the Eiffel Tower. That is going to match up with his pattern, which seems to be to move counterclockwise. I'm going to go there, right now."
Urgency flared within her.
"It’s very smart to pick that up. But he’s a psycho. Unpredictable. Are you sure he’s following it so closely? There's nowhere else he could be?" Peering over her shoulder, Wyatt sounded as anxious as she felt. "What if we've got this wrong and he's moved the other way for the third kill, gone southwest instead of east?"
He pointed to the map.
Juliette considered it. The pressure was on. They were trying to read his mind and predict his actions, with the limited information they had. And Wyatt was right. They hadn’t gotten all the way into his mind.
"I think he'll go east," she said. "But you're right, it's possible he decided to choose the other direction this time, so southwest could be a possibility."
She didn't want to make the wrong judgment call and miss the chance of saving his next target.
"There's also still the possibility it is our guy in there?" Wyatt said. "He could have been planning this, on his way to one of these points on the map, when he got caught by the cops? We can't rule him out."
"No. We can't. Especially not now that he's started talking. But Sierra can give the information to Lucien. That might help him talk, if he’s the killer and he knows he’s been found out."
Juliette considered their strategy.
"We're going to have to go out and look. He's planned this so methodically. He's not going to stop; he's going to continue on the same killing interval. So we have to get there. In case he’s already there, waiting to trap someone."
With a strong suspect in custody, and the feeling that the case had been closed, the hard working police had all departed. The only cop left in the station was the officer at the front desk, one other, and themselves.
"Let's you and I go," she told Wyatt. "I'll take east, you take southwest. Whoever sees him, we message the other for help, and we wear our earpieces."
There was no time to do anything more but rush out of the police station, and into Paris's late night streets.
From where they were, Wyatt would reach his coordinates first. She had further to drive. Juliette headed off, and as she drove, she got on the phone and updated Sierra.
"I need you to message Lucien and tell him what we're doing," she said. "The killer is using the Eiffel Tower as his new point of reference, just like he used the Statue of Liberty back in the States. We're heading to the approximate coordinates where we think he'll be. East is the most likely, and I'm going there. Wyatt also suggested maybe he'll go the other way, southwest, so we need to cover that base as well. We don't have backup, so we're going alone. So if you can put the word out to other police stations, we can get bigger numbers there."
“Gotcha.” Sierra sounded impressed. “I’ll message him straight away, and get the other police out to those two sites.”
Juliette felt cold with dread inside to think he might already have killed and vanished, that the numbers they were going to summon would get there too late.
What if she herself was already too late?
No, Juliette thought. No, I can't be. If she was right and he was out there, about to grab his next victim, she didn't want to be the one to let him get away.
She put her foot down and sped through the streets, now empty and quiet, racing against the clock. He must be here, following his deluded pattern, dancing to the beat of a drum only he could hear as he carried out these obscene murders.
"I'm almost there," she told Sierra, speaking into her earpiece, as the Eiffel Tower came into view about half a mile away. She scanned the map on her GPS carefully. Yes, he would be due east, and he would be a mile away, but he also had to consider how he would lure his victims in. Finding the right alleyway might mean he was a few yards closer, or further out. This was exact, yet inexact. There had been small differences in the plotting of the other kills.
