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Zurich, Switzerland
Monday, 25 January, 7:45 p.m.
––––––––
Aidan found me on the carpet. Pieces of paper formed a half moon around me. He stood behind me and stared down at the pages. "So instead of a murder board, you created a murder floor?"
I giggled, perhaps for the first time in my life. "Yes. Does this make sense to you?"
"It does." Aidan squatted and wrapped his arms around me. "They are telling us a story."
"I don't follow." I rarely understand the workings of his brilliant mind. As for the workings of his beautiful body, that language I speak without even a hint of an accent.
"Poison from a frog. Organophosphate poison. Buried alive. Exsanguination by severing both hands. Death with no identifiable cause, as if the women simply fell asleep, never to wake up again. Burned alive."
I turned and stared up at him. "I'm dumb remember, spell it out for me, or draw me a picture."
Aidan kissed me hard. "You're not dumb, clever enough to marry me." He drew his bottom lip between his teeth.
"Focus, Commander Walker. Deaths to avenge, killers we need to bring to my justice."
Aidan's left eyebrow raised. "Are you telling me or yourself to focus, Commander Williams-Walker?"
"I'm not commander of anything. Not even of my murder floor."
Aidan pressed his lips to my ear, his voice low and filled with promise. "You command every part of me. Mainly the part which is forcing me to hide behind your back, so as not to give my brothers another reason to be jealous of me."
I laughed and leaned back in his arms. Do other people talk like this when death surrounds them?
Rowan stepped closer and held out a white envelope towards me. "Same dress. Golden poison frog toxin."
"The Frog King," Aidan said.
I waited for him to continue. When he didn't, I constructed the most intelligent question I could while a very hard part of him pressed against my back. "The what now?"
"I told you, the murders are telling a story." I gestured with my hands for him to continue. "Look at your notes, you've solved it."
The words scribbled on the pages surrounding us mocked me. I didn't solve diddly squat. When I told Aidan as much, he laughed and pressed his lips to my hair. He stood and pulled me to my feet.
"Dr Williams-Walker, profiler extraordinaire, I need you to push the profiler and mother buttons inside your brain at the same time."
"Huh?" My expression must've matched how dense I felt.
"Fairy tales, my love. The murders are based on fairy tales."
I pursed my lips to stop another huh from escaping. Instead, I stared at the pages at my feet. Victims two, eight, and fourteen were all murdered with an organophosphate poison. They died wearing the same dress, their hair black. The bodies of the victims staged in Perspex boxes. Glass coffins. "Snow White!"
Perhaps I had been out of the profiling game for too long. I lost my serial killer hunting touch. The entire time, the answers were right in front of me.
Aidan placed his hands on my shoulders. "Don't start shooting stuff. I also didn't realise it until I saw it written out like this."
"Lying to me won't make me feel any less inadequate." A herd of swear words galloped through my mind.
"Okay, I suspected it, and during the ride to meet with the operative I did some research. Some of the fairy tales he, or they, are recreating aren't in most of the books available today."
I turned and stared up at Aidan. My husband with an IQ of 210, and on a scale of one to ten in the looks department, he also scores at 210. I never felt happier about being good in bed, on a couch, or wherever, even if I have to say so myself. At least Aidan loves me for more reasons than my lower IQ. Whenever I mentioned anything about being dumb, he reminded me I hold a doctoral degree in criminal psychology. Something very few people ever accomplish. He then also reminded me that I had completed my thesis while hunting a serial killer and undergoing fertility treatment. Why are we always so hard on ourselves?
The pages at my feet told the stories. Which stories, I didn't know yet. I took Aidan's hands and wrapped his arms around me as I stared down at the riddle, desperate for some of his brilliance to transfer through our clothes. "The Frog King. Snow White. The victims who appear to have died in their sleep, could be Sleeping Beauty. The male and female victims who were burned alive might represent Hansel and Gretel. I'm not familiar with the others."
Aidan pressed his lips to the back of my head. "Sleeping Beauty was originally known as Little Briar Rose. The stories were all written by the Grimm brothers. The three snake-leaves. The girl without hands. Those are the other two fairy tales being recreated."
"I don't recall ever hearing those stories," Rowan said. I forgot he and Liam were in the room with us.
"Long story short – princess dies, wanted her husband to be buried with her, so he gets in the crypt. A snake slithers into the crypt, the prince kills the snake, the snake's mate slithers in and sees the dead snake. The snake leaves and returns with three leaves and places it on the dead snake. Soon thereafter, the snake awakens and both slithers away. The prince then puts the leaves on the princess, she too comes back from the dead—"
"And they lived happily ever after," I finished for Aidan, or so I thought.
"No happy ending for this story. The princess falls in love with another man and tries to kill the prince. Her father finds out, and then the princess and her would-be-lover are executed. Again, this is just the short version."
"Okay, not cool of her considering the poor prince spent time with her corpse and sacrificed himself to die with her."
Aidan opened the bottle of water I had left on the desk and downed the content. "The girl without hands is quite clear. The girl loses her hands, but somehow doesn't bleed to death. Fairy tales aren't very factual. Can you imagine if an author had to write something like this today?"
"Depends on the genre," I said. "Question, what can cause death, but is undetectable?"
Aidan shrugged. "My first guess is insulin. It metabolises fast. Ten units are enough to kill a non-diabetic."
"Please explain to those of us without medical degrees how much that equates to," Rowan said from where he sat on the couch. The closest he had been to Liam since the Anna/Maria fiasco came to light.
Aidan ran his hand up my back and massaged my neck with his thumb and middle finger. I couldn't suppress the whimper. The look on both my brother-in-law's faces told me it might've been more of a moan.
Aidan's fingers stopped their magic. "One unit is 34.7 micrograms of pure crystalline insulin. Times ten and converted to milligram, that's 0.347 milligrams of insulin. Which isn't a lot, or difficult to get your hands on. I need to review the autopsy reports to see whether the pathologists tested the injection sites for insulin. It isn't the perfect murder, but without a standard toxicology screening method it's possible they didn't test for it. Which cities are we talking about?"
I dropped to my knees and picked up the relevant piece of paper. "Hong Kong, London, and of course, Budapest." As I read the names, I realised Aidan tried to make me feel more in control of the investigation. With his eidetic memory, he knew which cities the possible insulin murders occurred in.
We had been partners in everything since we first met but working together might prove tricky. Aidan sees answers long before I even realise there is a question. How can we work together if I'll end up feeling inadequate? He never did it on purpose, and for that I loved him even more. But I had to find a way to do what I do best – understand the criminal mind. I've hunted many serial offenders without Aidan's help. With it, we can identify the unsubs much faster. Faster equals less victims.
Somehow, I would get over my own insecurities. Being a full-time mother for the past year left me doubting my own abilities. Do all mothers experience this when returning to work? However, I had taken two lives without giving it a second thought. I could do what I do best and harness the super computer that is my husband's brain.
Aidan pressed his lips to my ear. "You're brilliant in your own right. An apex predator. You've been out of the game, but the game hasn't left you. We'll make this working together thing work. I still need to thank you for saving my life."
I hated, and loved, when he knew where my mind wondered off too. "Spank me, is what I said," I whispered.
Aidan huffed a laugh. "We don't do that, my love. Sparring with you is enough of a turn on. Do you want to go a round?"
"I need to dig into our victims' lives, starting with the first victim in Mexico. Somehow, they're finding the victims. This is organised down to the finest detail."
I stepped away from Aidan and spoke to the killers while staring at my reflection in the window. "You're intelligent, cunning, and think yourself above the law. Did you start fantasising when you were young? More than one killer shouldn't share a fantasy this detailed. Unless you're a group, each killing in your own country."
I tapped my palm against my forehead. "Only one gets the tattoos. Are you the ringleader? The author of the fantasy, the rest are your hands and feet where you can't go."
My SIG felt at home gripped in my hand. I sighted down the barrel, pointing it out into the dark Swiss night. "No, that's not you. Control, precision, everything has to be in your hands." I lowered my weapon and turned to Aidan. "One killer, but he has help." My palms itched.
"How did you go from multiple killers to one in a matter of hours?" Rowan asked.
"She understands him." A predatory sneer spread across Aidan's face. It mirrored my own.
"He's still here but won't be for much longer. Someone's helping him. No way one killer can control the male and female victims at the same time. I checked the autopsy reports of the victims who were buried alive, no traces of any tranquilliser in their toxicology reports. One killer, but he has help. He keeps his circle tight and he holds the power. Full control."
I turned to Rowan. "Call Janos, ask him who is the best tattoo artist in Zurich. Then, ask Eli to run background checks for ones with criminal records. We might catch him getting his ink done, if he hasn't already."
"Fin, are you sure we're looking for only one killer?" Liam asked.
Rowan spoke first. "Janos was right from the start. One killer. But the big guy, the one Janos thought is a bodyguard, he's the helper. Janos said they both wore disguises. No way for him to identify them in a line up."
"Because they don't want to be identified." I wanted to scream. I had lost my killer touch. Pun intended. From the beginning, Janos gave us the answers. As much as I wanted to shoot myself in the foot, not in the proverbial way, I reminded myself in a murder investigation nothing is a given. One must consider all possibilities. It's called being a good detective. Sometimes the evidence leads you in the wrong direction, but I realised soon enough that our killer had only one helper.
Whoever the killer was, he hid his face for more than one reason. He was someone recognisable. An actor, a celebrity, an athlete? Someone getting paid a lot of money for not doing much, if you think about it. If that was the case, we had to investigate almost every politician in the world. To be inclusive, of course.
"I need to hunt."
Rowan and Liam left to track down the local tattoo artist. Aidan carried his laptop into the bedroom to read all of the autopsy reports. What did I do? I became a cyber sleuth. At least this time not in the abyss, or as most people know it – the dark web.