That was a good place to start. With people who knew the victims. Very rarely was a murder like this random.
"So why did you call PAVAD on this one?" Knight asked, right on her heels like he almost always was. She was stuck between two extra-tall, gorgeous male creatures, and it made her feel vulnerable in ways she definitely didn't like.
Well, Knight did, anyway. Whenever the jerk got this close.
Pierce was the kind of guy she could easily handle. Knight...no woman on the planet could easily handle that man. Not even for a moment.
Miranda wasn't brave enough to even try.
“This was my first case. I’d just hired on to the county department. I was barely old enough for the job—I’d just had my twenty-first birthday a week before. I hadn’t even been to the police academy yet. Hell, I was a damned volunteer my first four months because they didn’t have a paid position with the county then. I worked for the county five years, then went to the ISP. I’m on year eleven there. This…is the last case I’m going to wrap up in Indiana, Randi. I’m done here. I’ve been offered a position in Texas. Start there at the end of the month, if I take it. Either way, I’m out of law enforcement now. My kid…needs me more than this job will allow. But I made that family a promise fifteen years ago. I aim to keep it.”
There was more going on with this man than just the case. And…she considered him a friend. She’d try to figure out how she could help. Somehow. “Then let’s do it.”
In order to understand the hunter, one had to study the hunted. Knight knew that far too well.
He’d thought about the victims as Miranda maneuvered the SUV through the small-town streets toward the original crime scene. They’d spent five minutes talking to Asher before the man had made it clear he wanted to get started. Knight appreciated that, at least, though his opinion of Asher wasn’t set yet. The man had spent most of those minutes they were out of the car hugging Miranda.
Speaking very familiarly. Almost intimately. Enough to make one thing clear: she knew him very, very well.
Another one of her conquests, apparently. They just had a way of coming out of the woodwork, didn’t they? Hell, maybe he should start keeping count. Knight would let her handle Asher—however she felt was necessary. He’d focus on what they were actually there to do.
Find the answers.
The Gibsons, Derek and Aimee. Derek, forty-two, and Aimee, thirty-six, at the time of their deaths. Derek had had a sixteen-year-old daughter by a previous relationship. She'd been the one to discover the bodies of her father, stepmother, and younger half-brother. To report her sister Terra missing to the police. The Gibsons’ son Cruz had just had his ninth birthday three weeks before.
The case photo they had of that boy showed him eating his Transformers birthday cake and grinning. There had been chocolate icing all over his face. He'd had curly hair, like the woman next to Knight now. Even similar in color.
That innocent little boy had deserved better.
Now, they stood in the drive of a small bungalow typical of the 1920s style that dominated houses in this part of rural southern Indiana. The landlord was going to meet them there. He was just late.
"I spoke with the landlord. He'd owned the place back then, too. He's done minimal updates, just cosmetic. Safety maintenance mostly. He dropped a key off for me last week, when I told him I was taking a final look," Asher said, in a voice like gravel. He was equally as tall as Knight's own six-foot-five, but damned if he didn't have fifty pounds or more on Knight. Knight wasn’t a small man, either.
The man might look like a pretty boy that women would fall all over, but there was an air of menace about Asher that his little sister definitely didn't have. Knight would hate to meet this guy in a back alley. And…the man was conflicted about something.
"So it's relatively the same as it was back then?" Miranda asked. She glanced at the case file in Knight's hand. Where the photo of the boy was clipped. She flinched.
Of course she would, her own boy wasn’t even seven yet. She'd adopted him after a case gone horribly bad last year. Kids got to her, deeply. Knight knew that. But hell, kids got to all of them. As they should.
"Not much different at all." Asher pushed open the door and waved Miranda in ahead of him. One hand rested on the woman's back.
Knight bit back a snarl.
She had a habit of collecting male admirers everywhere she went. He was starting to expect it by now. Most times it wasn’t a problem, but there had been a few instances where it had seriously gotten under his skin. He suspected she did it on purpose.
She was playing some game with him—and only she knew the rules.
Knight shut out what they were saying and focused. On the house. Tried to imagine what it had looked like in the crime scene photos. To bring it to life in his mind. So that he could understand.
To catch the hunter, you had to know the hunted. That was where she excelled.
"Did you ever determine how he picked this particular family?" he asked.
Asher shook his head. "Not anything definitive. They were your typical working-class family. Derek worked lower management at the auto parts factory. He'd started as a line worker when he was twenty, took a few night classes, and moved up the hierarchy. Had an ongoing relationship with one of the women in the shipping department for a few years in his early twenties. They had a child together, but the relationship ended two years in. Within eighteen months, he'd married Aimee. Their daughter Terra was born a year or so later. Followed by their son Cruz four years later. Aimee was an admin assistant at the factory when they first met. She eventually went on to work at the hospital as a records clerk. Terra and Cruz were well-liked kids. Average-to-good grades. Popular and outgoing. She participated in dance and softball, he did gymnastics, baseball, and swimming. Teachers said they were happy, healthy, well-adjusted kids. That jibes with what the interviews said."
"So there were several places their paths could have crossed with the unknown subject,” Knight stated, as he followed his partner into the front of the house. Even in small towns like this one, the number of people that connected could make investigations complicated.
"He picked this family for a reason," Miranda said, quietly. She stood in the center of the living room. The light from the nearest window tangled in that wild hair of hers. Highlighted the hurt on her beautiful face. She was one of the most compassionate women he had ever met. Worked with.
