"What if everything we’ve thought has been wrong all along?"
Chapter 23
Miranda disconnected with Pierce. She didn’t think they were wrong about the profile. At least not completely. She looked at her companion. He’d been listening, even if he hadn’t said a word.
Very rarely did Dr. Allan Knight get a profile wrong. He just didn’t. The man understood killers on a very deep level.
Which…now that she thought about it, that was a bit of a frightening concept.
Considering she was alone in a hotel room with him, hundreds of miles from home, after all. The only one who could rescue her would be Pierce, and he was a bit busy at the moment. His kid had been crying in the background right before he’d hung up.
Miranda knew all about child nightmares—Bentley was getting better, but…he still had a long way to go, too. He probably always would. She’d find a chance to talk to Pierce about his son again. Let him know she was there to listen if he needed it. Or…commiserate.
"The fixation was already there before that night. He didn't walk in trying to decide what he was going to do. He knew who he wanted. He knew how the house worked, when people would be home and when they wouldn't. He knew how long he could stay without anyone noticing." It looked like it was going to be a really long night. They were going to go over the profile from start to finish, see if there was anything they actually had missed. Or come up with an alternative.
But Miranda was still ninety percent certain their profile was not wrong. They just hadn’t found the actual suspect to apply it to, yet.
"He’d preselected his targets. He'd been watching long enough to learn the routine. That takes time and patience, which means he had access to observe without drawing attention. Neighbor, delivery route, someone with a reason to be in the area. Someone nobody would think twice about seeing." He had his little notebook out and was making those little chicken scratches again. He was so predictable.
Predictable. Even Knight was predictable in his own ways, even if she didn’t fully understand that complicated, complex man at all.
The thing was, most people fit patterns. Profiles. Life scripts. She’d been studying those very patterns for years. Killers like this—they fit patterns. Decades of psychological profiling had taught them that. It could be really frustrating trying to find that person who fit the pattern though. It wasn’t always easy, it didn’t always happen, but once they found this suspect, she was sure he’d fit their profile. She trusted the process. "And the timing matters. He didn't plan the night years in advance, but the idea lived in his head for a long time before he acted on it. This was his ultimate fantasy. Something happened that pushed him from thinking to doing. Once that switch flipped, he moved fast."
"Short planning window between the trigger and the act," Knight said. "Whatever set him off would have been recent. Days, maybe a week. Not longer than that. If we can figure out what changed in that window, we might be able to narrow down who had a reason to act when he did."
"Inside the house, nothing is random," Miranda said. "He doesn't wander. This guy had a clear purpose in being there. Getting to Aimee.”
Aimee was the only one who was killed with any kind of emotion whatsoever, and it had been brutal. Of course, whatever had happened to Terra was a wild card. One they might not ever be able to define. Miranda seriously doubted Terra’s remains would ever be found. Unless…the killer told them what he had done with that little girl.
Which…they had to catch him first. Hopefully, before Pierce relocated. The Cold Case division would not close the case until they had definitive answers. But that could be decades from now. Cold Cases were the least likely cases to ever be solved, and a lot of the unit’s work was done in St. Louis, at a conference table, with computers, databases and paperwork. And could take weeks—some cases would realistically take years, if they were solved at all. Their unit had a fifteen day max field time, unless extenuating circumstances. This case…they’d be back in St. Louis in just a little over a week, no matter what they’d found. They wouldn’t give up, but complete one hundred percent focus—no. They were just not realistically able.
"Control," Knight said. "He's not reacting to the situation. He’s an organized offender. He had a vehicle nearby, with rope to subdue Aimee. He brought it with him.”
"Cruz wasn't killed for symbolic reasons. He was old enough to run for help. Old enough to scream, to be heard by neighbors. Old enough to tell someone exactly what was happening. Leaving him alive would have put everything at risk. But he was positioned symbolically—between his parents." Cradled in his father’s arms, his own arms crossed over a stuffed bear. That image had been burned into her mind from the moment she’d opened the file for the first time.
"Cruz was just in the way, but…when the fantasy had been fulfilled, there was regret. He was seen as human again, instead of just an obstacle. At least where the child was concerned. Derek was just incidental. In the way of getting what he wanted. I don’t think he was even contemptuous with Derek. Derek was just in the way, as well as Cruz. But Derek wasn’t moved much. Just left almost where he’d landed. Almost like…Derek was a stand-in for the killer, and the killer felt invisible as a man? It’s possible. Aimee and Cruz were moved to his location. Like the killer was giving them back to him…after it was over.”
"Aimee is where punishment shows up. Was he punishing her as a mother or a wife, or just a woman in general?" Miranda said. Derek and Cruz’s deaths had been clinical in a way. But Aimee’s had been wild, chaotic, torturous, and extreme. "She represented something to him; she had to. This wasn’t about sex. It's about making her suffer for what he believes she did. Over and over. And that's personal. That level of anger doesn't come from a stranger. It comes from someone who feels something personal. He was punishing Aimee specifically. For something he thought she did to him.”
And that just reaffirmed that Aimee had been the target. They weren’t wrong about that.
Knight was quiet for a moment. "If he only did this once, and he had a specific target, and he blamed the mother for something—then he's not a stranger. He's someone who knew this family. Someone close enough to have a grievance that built over time."
"Someone who was already in their lives. I firmly believe that. But…if this was a first-time thing for him, it’s too controlled. It really is. We’re missing something here, we just are.”
“We are going to have to go over everyone they knew. Again. And look at them from a different angle.”
Chapter 24
Miranda parked along the curb on Knollwood Drive around ten a.m. the next day, and shut off the engine. The houses were packed close together, one-story ranches built in the same decade, updated unevenly as money allowed. There was a small Fisher Price style slide set in the front yard, and a tiny tricycle half-buried by the snow. The sidewalk had been shoveled and salted.
Hailey Gibson answered the door with a small girl wrapped around her leg. The child looked at Miranda, then turned her face inward and tightened her grip.
“She’s three,” Hailey said. “It’s been a long morning.”
Miranda nodded and stepped inside.
The living room opened straight into the kitchen. Toys were stacked in bins against one wall. A legal pad sat beside a closed laptop on the table. “Please sit down.”
