CHAPTER TWENTY

Down the hallway, AJ used a key to unlock a room on the right, opposite the bathroom. When she pulled the key out of the deadbolt lock, she gestured farther down the hall.

“The master bedroom is down at the end. Ryan’s room along with a guest room are upstairs. I have to keep this locked to keep a certain curious little boy from messing things up in here.”

The detective flicked on the light switch. It looked like a spare bedroom that had been made into an office. The walls had been painted a deep, dark brown, giving the room a serious, professional cast. There was a tall gun safe in the corner—tall enough for long guns. Boxes of ammo were lined up across the top of the safe. This was not a cheerful place. It was a place that meant business.

Against the wall with the door stood black metal shelves holding semi-clear plastic tubs, all the same size. They appeared mostly to contain stacks of papers. Some were labeled, some not. Opposite the shelves was an older oak desk, its side up against a window. There was space underneath so a person could sit on either side with their legs under the middle.

AJ gestured to one of the chairs. “Why don’t you have a seat?”

While she sat in an old wooden chair with arms, AJ pulled down several translucent tubs from a top shelf.

“How do you want to do this?”

“What do you mean?” Kate asked.

AJ set two plastic tubs on the end of the desk. “Do you want to see batches at a time, like we did at your house last night? Or should I just get them all out at the same time? You tell me how you want to look at them.”

Kate flicked her hair back over her shoulder. “I think the best way would be if you test me with all the photos you have. All the ones you showed John. If you have more than that, show those to me, too. I want to see everything.

“There’s no real purpose in separating them into batches. Unless there’s some reason you want them in separate batches? Some kind of order you want to keep them in?”

AJ shook her head as she set another tub on top of the two already there and pried off the lid. She took out all the blocks of photos and removed their rubber bands. She started stacking the photos on the desk in loose piles.

“I have a ton of photos of witnesses—a lot more than photos of convicted criminals. No need to worry about keeping any of them together or keeping them in any order. Their only real value is with you. I guess that without really knowing it, this is the reason I’ve been collecting them all.”

“How many murderers are in all of these photos?”

“Enough” was all AJ said.

She clicked on a desk lamp and extended it up out of the way to give them room, then pulled up a rolling office chair and sat down on the opposite side of the desk. Kate pulled several of the piles close.

“Does it matter if I pull some out and don’t put them back in where they were with the others?”

“No,” AJ said as she leaned in on her elbows. “Do whatever you want, however you want. There’s no reason any of them have to stay in any particular place. They’re random photos.”

She set the empty tub to Kate’s right. “The ones you’ve looked at we can put in here. When it’s full, I’ll put it away and give you another empty tub.”

As she picked up a batch of photos off one of the piles, Kate felt like she was once again descending down into some kind of psychic black hole, afraid of what she might find, afraid of what she might not find. Some part of her was afraid that it was going to work again. But some bigger part of her was afraid that it might not.

As shocking as the experience the night before had been, she’d had time to think about it, so she was more prepared this time. This time, she knew what to expect. This time, she planned to use her knack to compartmentalize information, to prioritize, in order to focus her attention on what was most material.

Kate looked at the first photo, saw nothing out of the ordinary, and laid the photo down like she was placing a card on the table.

“Here we go,” she said, “down the rabbit hole.”

Elbows on the table, AJ locked her fingers together as she leaned in a little to be able to see the faces on the photos Kate laid down.

Kate started a bit slow, taking a few seconds to look at each of the first photos. It wasn’t long, though, before she was moving through the photos quickly, dismissing each face she saw in less than a second. Because she wasn’t seeing anything that brought her to an abrupt halt, she began to worry that she might not be giving each face adequate time to register, but that notion was swiftly dispelled when the first killer met her gaze.

Not allowing herself to be overwhelmed by an emotional reaction, like the first time, she made sure to not merely look at their eyes, but to take in their whole face. Kate only paused briefly before putting that first photo of a killer facedown beside the face-up stack she had already looked through.

AJ made no comment and showed no reaction. In fact, Kate didn’t really know if AJ saw the face of the hollow-cheeked man before she placed it facedown on the table. There were some notes on the back, but Kate didn’t try to read them.

She made her way through photo after photo, not letting the memory of the one she had put facedown slow her. This time she was determined not to let the eyes of any killer disrupt her task or prevent her from seeing everything about them.

At the next photo that momentarily hit her with that same jolt of recognition, she put it facedown atop the first she had already set to the side and continued on almost without pause. She was able to disregard that momentary recognition of evil and go back to looking at faces, mostly of men.

Kate moved methodically, looking at all of the photos in her hand one at a time, as if looking at cards, and setting them down on the pile, faceup, when the card wasn’t useful. She moved through the stacks quickly, taking a fresh handful without pause. When the stack of photos she had been through had grown big enough, AJ pulled it away and put it in the tub to the side.

Every once in a great while Kate would meet the eyes she knew to be those of a killer. One of them was a stocky woman with dark hair pulled back into a ponytail, the different lengths and stray strands sticking out in disarray. That photo she placed in a second pile. She noticed that she had already placed another one in that second pile.

Before long, she put a photo she encountered facedown in a third pile. She was beginning to understand why. That third pile helped her move more quickly. AJ sat stone-faced as she watched.

Kate was so absorbed in the photos that at one point she glanced up and noticed that AJ had a cup of coffee. There was another with a carton of cream beside it. Kate didn’t really want any coffee. She felt driven to look into all the faces.

As she put the last photo in her hands down faceup on the stack before her, she looked up at AJ.

“I need some more.”

“That’s all of them. You’ve looked at them all.”

Kate blinked. “How long has it been?”

AJ reached out and took away the last face-up stack. “An hour and forty-five minutes.”

She put the stack in the plastic tub. After replacing the tub on the top shelf, she sat down, looking into Kate’s eyes.

“Not one of the ones you put in the face-up stacks was a killer. Not one. You didn’t miss a single one.”

Kate glanced at the three piles lying facedown to the side. The one in the middle was bigger than the one on the left, and the pile on the far right was bigger yet.

“The real question is, are there any innocent people in those piles?” Kate asked. “Did I get any wrong?”

“Well, let’s see.”

AJ picked up the first pile and looked at each one, turning each over after looking at the face to read what was written on the back.

“These are all killers,” she announced after a time. “Serious, nasty killers. They’ve all been convicted and are in prison. One has already been executed. I hope to god that none of these monsters ever get out to kill again.”

Kate pushed the second pile across the desk. “What about these?”

AJ was watching her again. “Why did you put these in a different pile?”

“Because they are a different kind of killer.”

AJ’s brow drew down over her dark eyes. “Different?”

“That’s right, different.”

AJ finally looked at each face and then read the back.

“They are different,” she finally said. She turned around the last photo, of the woman with the wild hair. “This woman, for example, killed her husband. It wasn’t the killing of a stranger or anything like that. They fought all the time. One day when he was drunk on his ass and she was a bit drunk herself, she shot him. It was spur-of-the-moment, but had been building.”

“That’s how they are different,” Kate said. “They aren’t premeditated murders of a stranger or a particular type of victim. They were a different kind of killing. Someone they knew, probably knew quite well, like a wife or girlfriend. The first stack were predators. These people aren’t predators. Still, they are killers.”

“And what about the third pile?” AJ asked as she picked it up.

“Bad people,” Kate said. “In some cases, very bad people. Some of them very well might one day kill, but they haven’t killed anyone yet. They haven’t crossed that line.”

AJ went through the stack, announcing some of the crimes associated with the person in each photo.

“This guy is an armed robber. This one does home invasions, leaving the victims terrorized. This one pistol-whipped a store clerk in the course of an armed robbery. This one, and this one, both violent rapists, but they never killed their victims. This guy stabbed his wife in the legs several times with the intent of crippling her to keep her from going out and seeing other men, but he didn’t intend on killing her. A bunch of these are men who beat their wives or girlfriends to a bloody pulp. Robbery, burglary, arson,” she ticked off as she shuffled through the photos.

Her gaze finally turned up after she’d looked at the last one. “How were you able to tell the difference?”

Kate shook her head. “I wish I knew. I can just see that they’re cruel. In the others, I can see in their eyes that they’ve crossed that line and murdered someone.”

“What made you put these here in the first pile?”

Kate felt somewhat shaken and uneasy. “They are altogether different. They’re the ones that John would have said were the devil.”

AJ let out a deep breath as she drummed her fingers on the desk, looking down at the three piles.

“Well?” Kate finally asked. “How did I do?”

AJ looked up, staring at her again in that way that was so unsettling. “You passed the test,” she said in a low voice.

Kate wanted more detail than that. “What grade do I get?”

“You get a one hundred. You didn’t get a single one wrong. Not once. Not a single innocent person, not a single killer, not a single violent criminal. Not one.”

“Has your husband killed people?”

AJ showed no reaction to the question. “He was a sniper in Afghanistan.”

“And you’ve never had to shoot anyone to defend yourself.” It was a statement, not a question.

“No. I’m just a detective. I’ve only had to draw my gun a few times over the years. I’ve never had to kill anyone.”

That had answered Kate’s last two questions. “Okay, now I have one hundred percent.”

AJ wiped a weary hand across her face. “I guess I hadn’t thought about the two of us.”

Kate sat back, taking a deep breath as if coming out of a daze.

“What about the missing girl?”

AJ got up and pulled a manila envelope out from under her jacket on a lounge chair. She tossed the envelope on the table.

Kate opened the envelope and took out the small stack of photos. Without asking any questions or waiting for instructions, she started shuffling through the photos, tossing the ones that didn’t mean anything to her across the table toward AJ, as if she were dealing cards.

Near the end of the stack she pulled out two photographs and then finished looking at the rest.

“These two,” she said, with one finger on each as she slid the photos across the desk so that AJ could see them.

“Shit,” AJ said under her breath. She pulled her phone out of a pocket, unlocked it, and then hit a number in speed dial.

“It’s AJ,” she said when someone answered. “Pick up the Dominguez couple. Yes, both of them. Yes, I’m serious. Get them down to the station.” There was a pause. “Never mind that, just get them each into an interrogation room. I’m on my way.”

When she hung her phone up, Kate asked, “Who are they?”

AJ looked at her a long moment. “A man and his wife who are doing a remodeling job on the front porch of a house a few doors down the street from the missing girl. The husband does most of the work, the wife is his gofer.”

AJ threw her straw-colored, faux-alligator leather jacket around her shoulders and stuffed an arm through a sleeve.

“I have to go. Thanks, Kate. You don’t know how much this means to me—everything you did. But I gotta go.”

“The girl is already dead,” Kate said.

AJ froze, her other arm partway into the sleeve of her jacket. “How could you know that?”

“I can see it in their eyes. They have no empathy. They’re bad people and have been for a long, long time, but this was their first kill. They just jumped from the third pile to the first. They skipped right over the middle pile.

“I think their intent was to ask for ransom. The man is somewhat mentally retarded. He raped the girl—”

“Raped her? How do you know that?”

Kate blinked at a question about something that was so obvious to her. “Haven’t you ever looked into a man’s eyes and known that if given the chance and if he could be reasonably sure he could get away with it, he would rape you?”

AJ frowned as she stared. “No.”

“Oh. I thought everyone could tell that.”

“No, they can’t. What about the rest of it?”

“Like I said, the husband has limited mental ability. He acts on impulse. He’s raped before. The wife got some kind of perverted pleasure out of hurting the daughter of a ‘rich’ family. The husband had sex on his mind; the wife thought the girl was getting what she deserved. The husband’s urges overran his sense of self-preservation. The wife is the one who decided they needed to kill the girl, but the husband took part. They used knives.”

“Knives.”

Kate nodded. “These two are monsters. Now they’ve killed for the first time. The barrier is gone. It will come easier for them the next time.”

“You could read all of that in their eyes?” AJ asked as she finished shoving her arm through her sleeve. “Just from their photo?”

Feeling a bit self-conscious, and not wanting to oversell what she could see, Kate shrugged one shoulder. “I could see that he’s a rapist. I’m pretty sure that’s how it went.”

But she knew that was exactly how it went. She could see it in her mind’s eye. She could see the girl, naked from the waist down after being raped, screaming in terror as the two started cutting her.

AJ leaned down. “How can you know all this? John couldn’t do that.”

“He couldn’t do it because he didn’t have the intellect to evaluate what he was looking at. He could only react emotionally to what he saw. He was so overwhelmed with fear that he couldn’t really get beyond it. I can.”

AJ pulled her car keys from a jacket pocket. “Kate, you give me goose bumps.

“Thanks for this, but I’ve got to get down to the station. If you’re right, I have to get a confession out of them so we can recover the body. If you’re right, the girl they butchered and her family deserve at least that much.”