Chelsea Cain by Heartsick

Author:Heartsick [Heartsick]
Format: epub
Published: 2010-04-08T15:08:18.171000+00:00

CHAPTER

26

A nne Boyd ate al of the chocolate in the hotel minibar. She started with the plain M&M’s, then ate the Toblerone, then the peanut M&M’s. When she was done, she flattened the wrappers and placed them next to the photographs of the dead girls that lay on her hotel room bed. Candy helped her think. There would be time to diet when people stopped kil ing one another.

She had memorized the girls’ faces, pre-and postmortem, but there was something useful in seeing them al side by side. The school photographs. The crime-scene photographs. Family snapshots. She had outlined a victim profile in her report to Archie. The kil er had a type: dark-haired white girls on the rocky side of puberty. Each from a different high school. What is your fantasy? she wondered. He kil ed this girl again and again. Then he raped her in the most control ing way possible. So who was it he was kil ing? A teenage girlfriend?

His mother? A girl who broke his heart without even knowing?

Whoever it was, it was someone he had not been able to control. Anne was growing more and more certain that this fact was key to identifying the person they were hunting. She rol ed off the bed, opened the minibar, and found a diet Coke. It was the last one. Her kids were already asking when she was going to come home. What they real y wanted was the loot she’d promised she’d bring back from the Nike outlet store. She didn’t know when she’d have time to get there. The truth was that she didn’t travel much for work anymore. But she had asked to be assigned to this one. She’d considered quitting after the Beauty Kil er case. Her profile had been wrong and it had nearly cost Archie Sheridan his life. She had been absolutely confident that the kil er was a male and that he was working alone. The signs had been textbook. Because Gretchen Lowel had read the textbooks. Anne had been famously fooled, and she blamed only herself for it. She was a good profiler, one of the best with the FBI, which had the best profilers in the world. But her confidence had been shaken badly by Gretchen Lowel . Confidence was essential to profiling. You had to believe in your skil in order to make mental leaps.

So she had to find the leap. He was acting out a specific fantasy, one that had started many years before. So what had triggered the action? There were al sorts of triggers: financial, relationship or parental issues, trouble at work, a death, a birth, a perceived snub. He initiated contact with the victims. He chose them. The crimes were highly organized. He took pains to destroy evidence, but he stil returned the bodies. Why did he return the bodies? This time, she wasn’t going to fuck it up. She couldn’t undo what had happened to Archie Sheridan. But she could help him this time.

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