Reid made it to the apartment in record time. Two attacks in a day, both with a surviving victim who had seen the killer. And neither witness could identify him. Prosecutors could put both the boy and her father on the stand, and they would still have a hard time getting a conviction.
“Where’s Ezra?” Maggie asked. She’d closed the bathroom door to muffle the living room television, but she still felt like she had to scream to be heard. Maybe she just wanted to yell. It was absolute garbage that only blenders were allowed to shriek while they worked—she and Reid both needed it more.
“He’s in the hall with the security guard. It felt safer to have him here.”
Safer. Fair enough. He, along with the rest of the police department, was intent on guarding the boy, and with good reason—the mole guy says I’m next. If he left Ezra at his house with another officer, and the killer came back for him… Reid was the kind of person who’d have a hard time forgiving himself. They had that in common.
Reid stepped cautiously past the sink, crime scene booties on his feet, hands sheathed in blue latex.
“Did my dad… stab the guy?” she asked. “My father has a gash on his arm, but it wasn’t dripping this much, and there was no blood in the hall.” She’d looked. “And I know Dad came back here—he said to ‘mind the flood.’ It’s bizarre that he’d leave this mess on the floor, though.”
Reid turned to her. “He’s a neat freak like my brother, eh?”
His brother, Tristan, had OCD tendencies, but now was not the time for semantics. She pointed at the water in front of the sink. “Dad has a thing about… slipping.” Aiden had knocked his three front teeth out on the kitchen counter—puddle, one; brother, zero. After Aiden was gone, it felt more like he was trying to keep the kid in mind, but she’d never had the heart to ask.
Reid leveled his gaze at her—concern mixed with a healthy dose of skepticism. His figuring-it-out face. “From what the officer in the hall said, the staff got here within minutes of the commotion in the living area. The killer could have planted the truck on his way in. Or our suspect entered through the back door and walked in here before attacking your dad…” They both paused, listening to the music from the program in the other room—so loud. Her father wouldn’t have heard the killer sneaking up behind his La-Z-Boy.
Reid frowned at the puddle at the base of the toilet. “And that doesn’t look like blood.”
What did he think it was? Next to the toilet… well. Her father wasn’t incontinent that she knew of, but she’d been waiting for that to creep up on them. Maybe she was wrong about the chain of events too—maybe Dad had just heard water running, and that’s why he’d mentioned “the flood.”
Reid stepped past the toilet, his head cocked at the shower—no, the window on the back wall. She followed his gaze. Shatterproof glass, but the narrow panes slid apart to allow a breeze. And… oh. Usually, there was a screen in that window. But not now. Too high for her dad to climb through, but a thin, athletic killer… maybe.
“See those scuffs beneath the sill?” Reid said, gesturing. “The killer either came in the back door, roughed your father up, then escaped through here, or he came in and out the same way. But no one has any idea how that back door came to be open—no one’s missing a keycard. If our guy opened that door, he had to steal the card and put it right back, which seems impossible on such a short timeline—you only met Ezra two hours before the attack. The staff assures me that there’s no way he could have gotten a copy. And there’s less chance of being noticed at this window. It faces the back alley, right?”
Right. But that wasn’t what was bothering her—at least not the only thing. “If the killer planned this, brought the toy, that suggests that his presence here… means something. He didn’t pick my father by accident.” Did the killer choose him because of me? Because I spoke to the one child he left alive?
Reid crouched suddenly and reached a latexed hand behind the toilet. When he righted himself, his fingers were pinched, something small and white between them—a scrap of paper. He frowned at it, then held it out for her to see. “Does this mean anything to you?”
She stepped closer. Huh. A series of numbers in writing that looked familiar—done in her father’s hand. Less familiar were the block letters scrawled beneath: POOR BABY.
Her brow furrowed. She wasn’t sure what the phrase meant, but that number… “That was my father’s office phone number back when he was in clinical practice.”
“Is this his handwriting?”
She nodded. “The numbers are. I can’t be sure about the words. The block letters make it hard to tell.”
“Is it a phrase he uses often?”
“I… not often.” Her bones were heavy. She wanted to lean against the door, the sink, but she couldn’t risk screwing up the scene any more than she already had. “He isn’t really the infantilizing type. And I have no idea what it would mean in this context.” Or why it would be behind the toilet.
“Did he ever give his phone number out this way?”
She blinked at the page. POOR BABY blinked back. “Yeah—he didn’t always carry business cards. And now, he does sometimes get… confused about what year we’re in. So, I could see him scribbling it down for a nurse or something. I’ve seen you write your number on a scrap, too, for the record.”
“I did that once because I ran out of business cards after a night at a crime scene.” Reid’s gaze had hardened, glaring at the scrap as if it were an extension of the killer—like he might flick it and hope the suspect winced. “I can’t see your dad writing out his number in the middle of an attack. I’m not sold that our guy would get friendly with him; he sneaks up on his adult victims, he doesn’t engage them. And the staff got here too quickly for the killer to write it in the aftermath.”
Her head was swimming. What was he implying? Did he think the killer had the scrap before he came here today? There were so many factors at play. The killer’s pattern had changed significantly. New targets, on a much faster timeline. And it would have been so easy for this guy to kill her father—so easy. Had he tried? From the state of the living area, it was possible that her father had just won the fight. The killer was five-three to five-five, and her father was closing in on six feet.
Reid sniffed, and she looked over at him—watching her. Taking her apart with his gaze, trying to figure her out? No… he just cared. But she couldn’t set her nerves aside, couldn’t make her heart slow. Just how close had she come to losing her dad?
“Forensics is on the way,” Reid said. “We can wait in the other room.”
Her belly twisted, but she followed him down the hallway, the voices on the television swelling from the muted din in the bathroom to a piercing roar as they drew nearer. Her father did not look up as they entered the main room. No way he could hear them over the TV. Which was exactly how the killer managed to do… whatever he did in that bathroom before her father noticed and fought back.
They paused near the tipped dining table. Reid leaned closer, trying to ensure she could hear him. He smelled of cinnamon gum, his breath hot against her neck. “The nurse said they rushed in and found your father sitting on the floor beside the piano bench there.” He gestured to the lingering shards of glass—the broken frame, the glossy shot of her and Aiden staring at the ceiling. Was that how he hurt his arm? The glass?
Reid’s gaze lingered on the picture for a beat longer than a blink, then he went on: “The toy truck in the bathroom, even leaving your dad alive but unable to tell us who did it… It feels like a taunt as opposed to an attempt on his life. If he wanted your father dead, he would have climbed through that bathroom window in the middle of the night instead of brazenly walking in during TV time.”
She nodded. He was right; the killer could have snuck in and slit her father’s throat while he slept—less security on duty overnight too. Maggie pressed a finger to her temple which had begun to pulse-pulse-pulse, heavy and dull like a goat head-butting a tire. “But why?” she said, hating the way her voice shook. “Why come here? Just because I interviewed the kid? The killer doesn’t like me being involved?” It couldn’t be a warning to keep her quiet; even if Ezra had identified the suspect, Reid was in the office with her. By the time the killer came to her father’s apartment, the police already knew everything she did.
Reid swallowed hard. “You’re the psychologist, but this is an exceptionally quick turnaround. Two attacks in a day is unheard of for this guy.”
“Unless there was always another step that you missed. He might have a more complicated pattern—killing a family of four, then attacking a single, older male.” But as Reid had said, she’d only met Ezra two hours before this attack. Did he choose her father impulsively? Perhaps he’d come to regret that Ezra was breathing and decided to teach her a lesson about interacting with his catch-and-release quarry.
“So he kills a family, then offs a grandfather?” Reid sniffed, glanced at the television, then back. “I’ll see if there were similar attacks on elderly men following the earlier crimes. But can you think of any other reason the killer might be after your dad?”
She balked. Uh, maybe because you dragged me into some serial killer’s crosshairs? “Are you kidding me?”
“Your dad said ‘my guy.’ You told me that.”
“And now we know that it’s connected to the killer, the one Ezra called ‘mole guy.’ It’s easy to believe that Dad misspoke.” But two eyewitness accounts using the same strange term? That was unusual.
“What if he didn’t misspeak? Who would your father call ’my guy’?”
She shook her head. “I’ve never heard him use that phrase. Ever. And I can’t imagine him using it casually. He’d say ‘Thank you, sir’ not ‘Way to go, my guy.’” The thought of it was so absurd that it almost made her smile.
“What about someone he treated? With that clinic phone number scratched out like an impromptu business card…”
She frowned. Her shoulders went rigid. She could see where he was going now, and she liked it about as much as she’d like a colonoscopy from Freddy Krueger.
“He used to work with a lot of dangerous people, Maggie.”
“I work with dangerous people too. And what you’re implying…” She shook her head. “You think that I just stumbled into tracking a killer that my father happens to have a history with?”
“Maybe the connection to your father came first. What if our suspect planned the murders here in the hopes that I’d catch the case and call you? Our professional relationship isn’t a secret. He’s never killed in this jurisdiction before, I get called in to consult a week ago, and now, there have been two attacks here in a single day. It wouldn’t hurt to look at your father’s old cases. If your dad saw a former patient, he might have jotted down his number out of habit, right? Confused, like you said. Maybe there’s something in his old files, someone who fits our profile. Worst case, we find nothing and move on.”
Her jaw dropped. Was he serious?
He raised his palms in mock surrender. “If he was worried about what Ezra might tell you, he should have attacked your father while you were in session or created some other diversion. Even pulling the office fire alarm would have gotten you away from the kid before he could say anything. And now we have two victims attacked but not killed—the first two in his history that I’m aware of. I’m not the only one thinking that there’s a reason for that, am I?”
No, he wasn’t, but clearly they were interpreting the data differently. “I wish I knew what to tell you.” She was missing something, some critical piece to the puzzle. Perhaps the killer himself was still ironing out his new M.O. And it would take them longer to nail it down if the killer was behaving erratically. “It all feels too much like a game; those toys weren’t gifts to the dead today. Maybe he got bored with his previous pattern. He got a rush leaving the kid alive and figured he’d try it again.”
Reid nodded. “Yeah, he’s getting off on staying one step ahead of us. Nothing makes things more exciting than cat-and-mouse with the cops—taunting us in our own homes… our families’ homes. I’ll get a unit over here to keep watch, same way they’re watching Ezra. In case.”
In case the killer returned. In case that maniac decided he wanted her father dead.
She drew her gaze to the television screen, looking past the chairs and her father’s wispy white curls. The streaks of red in his hair suddenly felt more subdued, a reminder that nothing lasted forever.
Yes, Reid was right—the killer was having fun with this. And there were plenty of people to taunt. Namely the boy and anyone who had spoken to the child since this morning. They’d probably set up patrols to drive by her place, Owen’s too, though neither of them fit the killer’s previous pattern. It didn’t seem to matter that Ezra hadn’t told them anything of use.
The killer was in it for the game now. Time would tell whether his next attack involved an ax, but one thing was certain: He wouldn’t leave the blade behind forever. He wouldn’t be fully satisfied until he’d once again spilled innocent blood.