Only, she wouldn’t let him cave.
“No, you’re staying there. I mean it. We didn’t move out here to just work cases. I could be doing that back home. We follow the plan, Ethan.”
Yeah, her husband got it, and she was right. They’d given him the opportunity to be Shaman, and take up Timothy’s role, so he had to be true to that.
“Thank you, Elizabeth.”
She didn’t need thanks.
She needed a profile.
“Now, profiler, riddle me this. How the hell do I catch this nut, because he’s moving fast? It’s day one, and I’m only about eight hours in, and already, I’m being called out, and have a slew of bodies.”
Ethan knew.
“He won’t return there. You caught him in the act, and while he might want us to believe that he was only setting the scene of the crime up, he’s going to be angry that you interrupted. That will taint it for him, so he’ll refocus, and likely go off the rails. He likes a well-ordered life, and this isn’t going to please him.”
She listened to what he was saying.
“In his perfect world, he would have closed Steph’s coffin back up, and re-buried her so you would still be a step behind. The horned skull would have been all you found. This gave you more than he wanted. This gave you an opportunity to catch up to him, and that’s going to piss him the fuck off.”
She was curious.
“He’s playing a game, right?”
He nodded.
“Yeah, and that he didn’t finish, and you found him here says we’re getting close. At some point, you’ll get a name, and we’ll have to catch him. That’s not going to be easy. He’s been doing this for a long time.”
Oh, she didn’t like this at all.
That meant he’d had time to perfect this.
“He’s been playing this as a game from the start. That means he was prepared to be‘found’. There are going to be red herrings all over the place,” he admitted. “Because he’s hadYEARSto set this up.”
She was to the point.
“Chris is running the semen DNA against cold cases. I’m curious if he’s been practicing for a lot longer than the first three grave robberies. We might have someone who started in his youth, or someone who is older.”
Ethan agreed.
“He would have started as a child. You know that pattern. First it’s fantasies, then animals, then…people. Over time, he perfected it, and you’re not going to get a DNA match. He is smart enough to know that he could never get his tested, or risk it going on record.”
Yeah, she didn’t like this.
Not.
At.
All.
“We found out that one of the victims works for the church,” she said.
That’s when he blinked, and again, she could see him running that against what was already in his head as a profiler.
That’s when he said the one thing sheDIDN’Twant him to say.
“We might have made a tactical error,” he said. “If they’re all tied to the church, then Jeffrey Von Gunter is back in the running for being tied to this. He could be faking it. He might be savant intelligent, and hiding it under a guise of being an idiot.”
