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“Good morning, Kyle. Is there something that I can help you with?”
Even with calling it an early evening, Kyle didn’t appear as if he’d gotten a restful night’s sleep. In fact, she doubted that he’d gone to bed at all from the exhaustion written underneath his eyes.
“How well do you know Millie Gwinn?”
Kyle’s question was surprising, not that Brook allowed her emotions to be on display. She gestured toward the seating area, and he didn’t hesitate to sit down on the couch. He set his briefcase on the floor, not bothering to remove his dress coat.
“I don’t,” Brook replied honestly as she claimed her usual seat facing the glass pane that separated her office from the waiting room. It was hard not to notice the gifts piling up on the tree skirt. “Millie is a client. Why do you ask?”
“Is it possible that she killed those women?”
There was a deep anguish in Kyle’s voice, and she had the sense that it had taken everything in him to walk through her doors and lay such an accusation at her feet. While he’d worded it as a question, there was no doubt that he’d already made up his mind concerning Millie’s involvement.
Brook had immersed herself with every statistic regarding serial murderers after she’d discovered her best friend’s body in a cornfield. People tended to believe what they heard on television or read online without verifying the facts. They didn’t know that most serial killers were social and able to navigate through daily life without anyone being the wiser. Serial murderers weren’t always Caucasian males or motivated by sex. While the percentage of female serial killers were relatively low compared to that of male serial killers, there were many active cases that the Bureau had open involving the possibilities of a female killer.
Had Brook considered such a theory in this particular investigation?
Of course.
It was one of the reasons that she hadn’t completed her profile.
There was still too much information that they didn’t have in order to put the pieces of the investigation together. A burial site usually indicated a male serial killer. Many females lacked the physical strength to dig an improvised grave in compacted soil strewn with tree roots. Such an undertaking would be a long, arduous process while being exposed to discovery at any given moment.
Their unsub had a preference in race, age, and physical appearance.
Eighty percent of Brook’s profile pointed toward a male serial killer, although she wouldn’t fill out the rest of her profile until she had all the facts presented to her from the forensic anthropologist. Considering the location of the burial site from the nearest access point, the depth of which the graves had been dug, as well as the overall location…well, all three denoted a male serial killer.
“Why would you ask me that question, Mr. Paulson?” Brook asked as she crossed her legs in a casual pose. She kept things formal since neither of them had ever offered to address each other by their first names. She basically saw him in passing, and vice versa. “Did something happen last night when you were with Millie?”
“Did you know that Millie was the one who suggested Andrea Firth apply for a position at the hospital?”
Brook hadn’t known that small detail, but she wouldn’t go jumping the gun quite yet.
“I wasn’t aware that the two knew each other,” Brook replied honestly as she turned the cup in her hand. “Were they close?”
“Well, no,” Kyle replied with a frown. He was sitting on the edge of the leather cushion as if he was going to stand up at any second. “She mentioned something about running into Andrea at a club downtown years ago. Millie suggested the hospital when she discovered that Andrea had been let go at an outpatient lab of some sort when the place decided to close down.”
Brook made a mental note to see if Andrea Firth had been let go from the outpatient lab due to something else, like stealing supplies. Andrea had been fired from the hospital due to stealing pain medicine, so it stood to reason that such behavior had carried over to her new place of employment. No charges had been filed against her by any previous employer, but the hospital’s legal department had been in the process of doing so before being told that Andrea had gone missing.
The most interesting factor in Kyle’s disclosure was that Brook had specifically inquired about the names of the victims to Millie. She, in turn, had said the only name that sounded familiar was that of Laura Keery.
At no time had Millie indicated that she’d been acquainted with Andrea Firth.
“Do you have reason not to believe Millie’s statement?”
“That’s the thing,” Kyle said as he somehow managed to lean forward even more. Brook couldn’t help but glance down at his worn shoes. “An hour after we arrived at the fundraiser last night, someone brought up a woman by the name of Laura Keery. I guess she was one of the victims found at the burial site.”
“And what was discussed about Ms. Keery that seemed odd to you?”
It was clear that Kyle was omitting some pertinent facts, and Brook would not handhold him into disclosing something that he believed was relevant to the case. If he had something to say, then he should come right out and be upfront with whatever details that he could provide her.
“Well, that was pretty much it, but it was the man who I overheard while I was waiting at one of the bar stations that were positioned around the room.” Kyle inhaled deeply, as if he needed additional courage to share some hideous secret. “He was talking to someone and saying that maybe the police should steer clear of the upstanding doctors at the hospital and focus on Millie. That she’d had issues with all the victims. He’d heard through the grapevine that she’d said things to the police that only the killer could have known, but that she’d somehow convinced them and your firm that Dr. Kolsby was the killer. And when that didn’t pan out, she then set up some cardiothoracic surgeon to take the fall.”
Brook mulled over what Kyle had just shared with her, but nothing about his story added up. Bit would have his work cut out for him, because she was going to ask that he scour the footage from the main ballroom last night. She wanted a list of people who had been standing within ten feet of Kyle Paulson. She had no reason to believe that he’d lie, but she also couldn’t take his word at face value.
“Is that why you left early?” Brook asked, purposefully not giving her opinion on the matter quite yet. “Were you uncomfortable staying with Millie? Do you believe that she could murder four women, carry their bodies to the trunk of her car, drive them out to the country, dig multiple five-foot deep graves, dump their bodies inside, and then fill up those graves with dirt all by herself?”
Brook could see that Kyle was doing the calculations in his head. Millie had a slight frame. She was maybe five feet and three inches tall. That wasn’t to say that she couldn’t have figured out a way to carry out such a progression of acts, but again, female serial killers usually didn’t take their victims to a burial site.
