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"Sorry, boy,” Michael said with a frustrated sigh. “I’m just pissed.”
“Shit!” Faith cried.
Turk jumped again, and Michael said, “What is it?”
Faith pointed at the TV. Michael watched for a few seconds, then said, “Oh God.”
The copycat killer had struck again. This time, the victim was killed in broad daylight in the middle of a school gymnasium that was empty for the holiday. The victim, twenty-nine-year-old Brenda Fiero, was treated exactly as every other copycat killer victim was. Faith watched, seething with anger, as Clark and Desrouleaux released the usual boilerplate “we’re doing everything we can” speech.
They were doing everything they could, but they shouldn’t be the ones on the case. It should be her, dammit. It should be her putting a stop to him.
“He’s escalating,” Michael said, half to himself. “He waited for the janitors to leave so he could kill her in a much more public place. He wanted her to be found.”
“Dammit,” Faith said. She leaned back and shook her head, staring at the TV with her jaw clenched and shoulders stiff. “This is so stupid.”
Michael glanced at Faith but said nothing. He knew that she wanted the copycat case and still resented the Boss for giving it to Clark and Desrouleaux.
Faith watched as the story continued. This death now marked the Copycat Killer’s ninth victim. Nine victims in just over a year. As she watched, she grew angry. If the Boss had just let her take the case, she could have found him already. She had found him.
Dammit, she had found him. She had Jared Greenwood literally right in front of her, and she’d let him get away. Worse, she had scared him. Now he was in hiding, which meant it would be even harder to find him. She had just let him leave and forgotten about him. Sure, that’s what the boss wanted her to do, but that didn’t make it right. She should have pursued him instead of just letting him off.
She sighed and stood, grabbing her coat. “I’m taking Turk for a walk.”
“Another one?” Michael asked.
“Yep,” she said.
“Christ Faith, what if I need to pick you up? I can’t drive all over Houston looking for you.”
“So, give me a phone call,” Faith said.
She left with Turk before Michael could lodge another protest.
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
He smiled agreeably as he stamped the form and handed it back to Mr. Dawson. “All set! Have a great day.”
Mr. Dawson offered a distracted smile before moving off. The next person arrived, and he smiled pleasantly. “Good afternoon! How can I help you?”
He didn’t mind his DOT job. He actually liked it. He liked it a lot.
Working at the DOT never bothered him, and he sometimes took delight in the way his coworkers grew angry and frustrated. The customers, of course, were regularly frustrated, and he imagined that was just the nature of being herded back and forth like cattle. He understood that, but it seemed strange to him that the employees would feel the same way. Why would a wrangler be angry having to deal with cattle? In all his time working there, he had never drawn any suspicion to himself. He just went about his day with a calm and collected demeanor, processing applications, handing out driver's licenses, forms, titles, and documents, just helping customers with whatever they needed.
And every now and then, he would catch a stray that needed to be culled.
He felt a thrill knowing that beneath the placid surface was a simmering cauldron of thoughts most would find evil. It wasn’t evil, of course, to cull the strays, to remove from the herd those cattle who refused to keep to the path. Still, he couldn’t deny the thrilling nature of knowing that what everyone saw was, at worst, another cog in the irritating DOT machine and, at best, a man doing all he could to make an unpleasant errand a little more enjoyable. To everyone else, he was just another average or maybe better than average DOT employee, and he liked it that way.
A woman caught his attention. He watched as she walked carefully into the building, her heels clicking against the tile floor. She had a natural beauty that was impossible to ignore, but it wasn’t her beauty that caught his attention.
His eyes were sharp. You needed sharp eyes to do the work he did, not the work at the DOT. The old adage about trained monkeys was true. Anyone could do this job.
But his work, his real work, required a sharp eye.
This woman possessed beautiful skin that was a uniform shade of copper across her entire body, the parts that were visible anyway, save for one exception. A small band of skin at the base of the third finger of her left hand was much paler than the rest of her—a watery tan color, almost beige.
Here was another stray.
The strays angered him. They always did. It was so simple, so easy, to stay faithful, so easy not to stray. All it took was a little commitment. People who couldn’t commit were strays, and they needed to be culled.
