"And this was after the Gibson murders?” Miranda asked.
"Three years after."
If Graves had killed the Gibsons, if he'd spent twelve hours in that house controlling everything, he would have evolved. Gotten better at what he did and more controlled. Instead, he'd broken into a house in Carbondale without a weapon and panicked when the husband came downstairs?
"The husband woke up," she said. "Graves lost control almost immediately."
That didn’t shout control to her. The exact opposite, actually.
"Probably panicked when faced with a direct threat," Knight said. "Beat the husband with whatever was handy, then went for the wife. She fought back and he ran."
Miranda grabbed the file from Pierce and flipped through it herself. "He didn't bring a weapon with him. These are deescalations."
And that did not fit. Miranda was sure of it.
Knight stepped closer, to see the man in the interrogation room more fully. Or…to just get in Miranda’s space. She wouldn’t put it past him. "A man who'd killed four people wouldn't show up empty-handed years later. He'd be more prepared. Not less."
"There is a prior assault charge in Dani’s notes. Anyone have it?” Miranda said. "What was it?"
Pierce checked his phone. "Bar fight in Vincennes. He grabbed a woman who was with someone else. Her boyfriend broke Graves's nose. Graves waited in the parking lot and jumped him when he came out. Both men were drunk at the time. Graves got his ass kicked, it looks like. But multiple witnesses pin him as the aggressor."
“When was this,” Knight asked.
"Also after the Gibson murders."
Both incidents after the Gibsons were killed. Both showing the same pattern—a man who reacted instead of planned. Who lost control when things didn't go his way. He didn’t try to prevent that loss of control first. It meant something. No denying that.
"He's not a planner," Knight said. "He's reactive."
“Our unsub was a planner.” Miranda was emphatic on that. Everything about the Gibson crime scene had shouted planning and control. From the moment the killer had stepped across the threshold.
The man who had killed the Gibsons had done so with forethought and strategy to get what he wanted. Was this guy capable of that?
"Maybe Graves learned over time," Pierce said. "People change after they get away with something."
"They get better at hiding their tracks," Miranda said. "Not worse. If Graves killed that family, the crimes that came after should show some sort of escalation. Not a man who panics when a husband wakes up and runs when a woman scratches his face."
"He doesn't fit," Knight said. It wasn’t a question.
"No. He doesn't." Miranda was sure of it.
"There's one more thing," Pierce said, turning another sheet of reports over. "The couple in Carbondale. They were his ex-in-laws."
Miranda looked at Graves through the glass. That changed things, too.
"He targeted his ex-in-laws," she said. "Years after the Gibson murders."
"And he had a grudge against Derek Gibson," Knight said.
"A grudge he put in writing,” Knight said. “That definitely doesn’t exclude him, though. It shows a man who lets things fester.”
"Profiles are guidelines," Miranda said. "Not rules." And every profile helped them build the next.
"You think we're wrong about him?" Knight asked, sending her that look from those dark gray eyes of his that always gave her a little bit of a shiver when he sent it her way.
"I think we built a profile based on what the killer did inside that house and how long he stayed." Miranda turned from the glass. "But we don't know what he was like before he walked through the door. We don't know if this was his first time or his fifth."
"You think Graves could have learned to be that controlled?" Pierce asked. “What was the reason behind the home invasion, then?”
