She was doing it again. Identifying with the victim. How could she not? He’d noticed the similarities between her and Aimee Gibson from the beginning. "And that's personal. That level of anger doesn't come from a stranger, Sunny. It comes from someone who feels wronged. Someone who's been carrying that wrong for a while. Years, maybe."
"So if he’s been doing this for a while, was it really the Gibsons he was after? Or were they just another in a long line of victims? Substitutes for his own ghosts?”
“That’s what we need to find out.”
Chapter 32
They’d missed other cases. Pierce stared at the notes on the whiteboard and tried to make it make sense. This…this was all new. He shouldn’t have missed this. “I called other jurisdictions, I called the FBI, I did everything I could think of.”
“Stop beating yourself up. Sometimes, these assholes are out there for years. The guy who shot me targeted a man in the damned FBI for years. It wasn’t a failure. We just have more resources,” Knight said. Pierce wasn’t sure what he thought about the other man. Knight was all business—except when looking at Miranda. That was hard to miss. “And someone who can search databases quickly.”
“Dani’s working on making a list of possible overlapping connections between the cases.” Miranda put her phone down for once and looked at Pierce. “At the least, it’s a new angle we can consider.”
“So…the guy is a serial killer. How in the hell did I miss that?”
“Statistically, a single cop may run into one serial killer case in the entirety of their career,” Knight said. “The smaller the location, the even less likely that is. That’s a twenty-to-thirty year spread.”
“Assuming the killer was personally motivated and knew the victims makes sense realistically.” Miranda added. “And we aren’t completely convinced he didn’t know the victims personally. He very well could have known all of them in some way. Dani is checking for any obvious possibilities now.”
“So how do we find him? How many serial killer cases go unsolved?”
“Fifty to one hundred fifty per decade,” Knight said. “An equal number are solved in that same time. At any one time, forty to sixty percent, either way. The odds of you solving this on your own was very slim. You did everything right. It just unfortunately wasn’t enough. But…we’re not closing this case until we give it everything we have, too.”
“Even if you leave before we do. We’ll keep going, Pierce. I promise.”
“Then…tell me about the guy who did this. From a serial killer’s perspective.”
Chapter 33
Miranda thought about the words. What would make a man do this. What would make him focus on a woman like Aimee Gibson specifically. Or the women Dani had found—if they were connected. But in her gut, she suspected they were. Geographically…they were just too close. It just so happened they were over state lines, giving a bit of jurisdictional distance, and making it a happy hunting ground for their killer.
Women in the midst of their child-rearing years. Career building years. Old enough, sophisticated enough, to know who they were, and what they wanted. Confident? Very likely. Or at least secure and stable in their lives. “Why the women? That’s where we need to focus now. If we go on the theory that this is a serial killer. We had a nine-year-old girl targeted, a thirty-six-year-old woman, and potentially a thirty-two-year-old woman who just happened to be away the night her father was killed. All the women were mothers. Of daughters.”
Pierce was still up pacing. That beautiful man was agitated—and feeling guilty. This Asher brother tended to take things personally. He embodied the protector type, and when he failed at that, it hurt him. “Like Aimee and Terra. But what does that mean?”
“It means something to him,” Knight said. Miranda looked at him for a moment. Her partner had his suit jacket off, and his sleeves rolled up. He wasn’t wearing the glasses tonight. The gray of his eyes matched the gray of the tie still hanging loose around his neck. She was surrounded by two very beautiful male animals.
Both definitely alphas in their own way. No missing that.
But each was programmed far differently.
Alphas. Male programming. Something tickled the back of her head. She knew a lot of men who could be described as alpha in some sense. Law enforcement almost guaranteed that. As did the men her sister and cousins seemed to attract. A woman couldn’t grow up in Masterson County and not see alpha male in action.
But a truly alpha male was one who was in control—not of the people around him, but himself. “Control. It still is about control with this guy. What if part of his problem is that he could not control women? Specifically, women with daughters? Mommy didn’t protect you. That’s what he implied to that little girl. And he took Terra, after torturing Aimee. Aimee did not protect Terra. At least not in his head. So…what woman in his life didn’t protect a girl? Was the girl his daughter, or a stepdaughter? A child he was responsible for? One he had trusted the woman—most likely the girl’s mother—to protect and she’d failed?”
“And this child ended up dead,” Knight said flatly. “And in his mind, it was her mother’s fault. And he was reliving how he would punish that woman over and over again?”
“We’ve seen stranger motives,” Miranda said. “What if it was always about him lashing out not at just one woman, but all women? Or using the other women as a substitute for the woman he was really angry with?”
“Who?” Pierce asked.
It was Knight who answered. “The woman who let his daughter die.”
“A daughter within the age range of eight to fifteen. We need Dani to cross-reference our entire pool of male interviewees who would have been the right age to have fathered children within twenty years of the Gibson murders. With death certificates, in Kentucky, Indiana and Illinois. I don’t think he has traveled further than the tri-state area.” Miranda started tapping notes into her phone. Dani would see the notes in the morning and would know what direction to take. If the woman hadn’t already started. Dani was just that good at being two steps ahead of them at times. “And divorce filings. Because I do not think a man with this much rage at a woman who he blames for the loss of his child would have stayed married to her this long.”
“So this whole thing could be because he blamed another woman for what happened to his child. And he lashed out at everyone else? Including the Gibsons. I will never understand that kind of evil,” Pierce said.
“Chances are, and if you are lucky…You won’t ever brush up against this kind of evil ever again.” Knight told him.
