Such a Pretty Girl by Tess Diamond

Author:Tess Diamond
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: HarperCollins
Published: 2017-09-26T04:00:00+00:00

Chapter 17

There was something incredibly intimate about being in Grace’s home, eating with her on the enormous dove-gray linen couch that was way more comfortable than it looked.

She’d come downstairs with her still-wet hair pushed over her shoulder, damp strands dipping into her eyes as she leaned over the laptop. With her hair down and wet, her face free of all makeup, and those glasses perched on her nose like some sort of adorable librarian, she looked different. Young. Innocent. Vulnerable.

This was a version of her he’d never seen; gone was the FBI agent, gone was the crack shot, gone were the perfectly tailored clothes and bold slash of lipstick she wielded like weapons.

This was just her—relaxed, at home, comfortable.

She’d never been more beautiful.

Until she stole the last piece of chicken satay, and then he had to declare her his sworn enemy as she laughed and snapped the skewer in half, then handed one piece over.

But eventually, the last delicious mouthful was gone, and they got to work. Gavin took the stack of files on the Andersons while Grace combed through Janice’s and Nancy’s lives. She preferred to sit on the floor, her legs crossed and the papers spread out in front of her in a pattern only she could understand.

“Where did Megan Anderson go to college?” she asked.

“Reed, in Oregon,” Gavin answered.

“Damn, I was thinking maybe he was picking women from the Ivies—Nancy went to Yale and Janice went to Harvard . . .” She glanced down at the paper in front of her. “Janice was a sorority girl and everything.”

“This . . . what we’re doing,” he said.

“Victimology,” she supplied.

“Right.” Of course she had a fancy word for it. “You really think it can tell us something we don’t know about our unsub? It’s not like this guy has been subtle.”

“That’s why I’m sure there’s an answer in the victims,” Grace explained. “What he’s been doing? The different methodologies of killing, leaving the diamond earrings, sending us these misogynistic messages through his positioning of the corpses? That’s all deliberate. It’s a narrative he’s trying tell us. He’s in control of it. He’s all about messages. There’s a connection between his victims. He wants me to find it.”

“Another piece of his puzzle,” Gavin said, staring at the papers.

“Not just that,” Grace said. “He thinks he’s in total control, but they never are. Someone can be the coldest damn killer in the world, the most experienced, and they’ll still be making choices they’re sure aren’t part of a behavior pattern, but they are. All it takes is the right profiler to see it. The right profiler sees all.” She gestured at the sea of papers in front of her. “I need to see all.”

He felt the urgency behind her words. It mirrored his own. “Well, I’ve got the Andersons’ schedule narrowed down,” he said. “They were on a green cruise—those big boats that look like pirate ships and are all wind powered—for a month. They’d been home for only two weeks when he killed them.

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