She answered on the second ring. “Hello,” she said, her voice a little frosty.
“A late job came in, honey—sorry.”
“How long will you be?”
He smiled at the thought of what lay before him if things went his way. “It could take quite a while. I’ll just get something to eat on the way home later.”
“The boys will want to stay up and wait for you.”
“Tell them to go ahead to bed. I’ll take the day off tomorrow, and we’ll do something as a family.”
“Really? Do you mean that? Darling, that would be wonderful.…”
She sounded almost giddy, like when they first had met. For a moment he felt a twinge of nostalgia. “Sure,” he said, trying to sound magnanimous.
“That’ll be great. Should I tell the boys? I don’t want to tell them if there’s any chance you’ll cancel.…"
The SUV sped up a little and switched lanes. He kept his eyes on the rear bumper but did not change lanes himself.
“Sure, go ahead and tell them.”
“I love you,” she said.
He mumbled something and pushed the button to end the call. He knew that by the time he got home, much later if he had his way, she would have the whole day planned out.
The SUV was in the fast lane now, pulling away. Switching lanes, he gunned it and his car slowly eased closer, two cars between him and his prey.
He eased right a lane, closing in a little more, but not getting too close. The SUV crossed over two lanes and instantly the killer knew where they were going. They would take the next exit and the SUV would go to one of the three motels that sat on corners of the intersection at the bottom of the ramp.
Happily, he watched as the SUV did exactly as he had supposed it would, as if he controlled the vehicle with his mind. In his mind, he picked one of the three motels as he followed the SUV down the ramp. The vehicle turned right then turned again into the motel he had chosen.
The rush was great—they were following his every telepathic command. He mentally told them to stop and let out the passenger in the backseat. When the SUV pulled under the overhang outside the front door and stopped, he pulled his car around and parked in a nearby spot.
The passenger climbed out of the SUV. He was a white man in his late forties, a little overweight, and he carried a briefcase in a meaty paw. He wore a navy polo and navy blue slacks. He was a salesmanof some kind, who had just been wined and dined by customers or vendors or some business contact and they had just dropped him at his motel. He was in motion before the SUV pulled away.
And by the time the SUV was on the same expresswaythat another SUV bearing two FBI agents and a Chicago detective had taken several hours before, the mark was near the killer’s car… and before the coworkers who’d dropped the salesman off had reached the next exit, the killer had the victim stuffed in the trunk of his car and was calmly driving away from the motel with his unwillingpassenger.
Chapter Four
July 29 Chicago, Illinois
Emily Prentiss, in black slacks and black blouse, knew that by the end of this muggy summer day she would be cursing the choice of color. Nonetheless, she also knew black aided and abetted her sleek professional look and nicely complemented her lithe figure.
Not that she was showing off, but this was her first trip back to the Chicago area since joining the BAU. She knew that more than one agent in the field office here had been against her transfer, seeing it as a promotion she didn’t deserve. In particular, some of the Old Boy’s Club, who still had issues with women rising in the Bureau, took her making it to Quantico as a personal affront. She would look her best today, and the naysayers could take that as a personal affront, too, if they liked.
The team had rooms at the Hilton downtown because of a favorable government rate and its proximity to the Chicago field office. If her mother had been along, the accommodations would have been at the ritzier Drake or possibly, if Mom was going tourist, the Palmer House. The Hilton was fine with Prentiss; with the BAU, she had checked into such varied inns as Holiday, Ramada and Comfort, and survived just fine.
After clipping her holster to her belt, Prentiss checked her pistol to make sure a shell was in the pipe and the safety was on. She had drawn her weapon in the line of duty only a few times, but this girl abided by the Boy Scout motto: be prepared.
Ten minutes later, seated in the hotel’s restaurant, working on her second cup of coffee and the morning crossword (a stress-reliever she had learned from Jason Gideon before his unexpected retirement), Prentiss tried to clear her mind for the upcoming day.
A thought kept intruding, though: she missed him… Gideon. Even though Rossi seemed to be fitting in, Gideon was the teammate who had treated her least like the new kid in school when she had joined the BAU. He’d had a warm, compassionate way about him, lending a sort of spiritual center to their relentless work, which was absent from the team now. Even though Gideon had been gone for a while, she still missed his mentoring, his kindness, his presence.
“Did you catch the crossword bug from Jason?”
She looked up to see Hotchner standing over her wearing a gentle smile. Smiling back, she nodded. “Please—have a seat.”
Hotchner sat and a waitress came over.
“Coffee, orange juice, and a bagel,” Hotchner said.
The waitress nodded and disappeared.
“Not exactly a power breakfast,” Prentiss said.
“I don’t eat much in the morning.”
“I know. Why send the blood rushing to your stomach, when our kind of mornings usually require blood to the brain.”
His smile blossomed, a rarity in his grave countenance. “I don’t disagree.”
Before they’d finished their coffee, the rest of the team joined them. As usual, Reid looked like a refugee from a prep school whose roommate insisted he dress in the dark. Sharper by some distance, Morgan wore a pullover sweater and dark dress slacks, a page out of a GQsalute to law enforcement. Meanwhile, Jareau had gone with a gray pantsuit that played up her professionalism (and played down her shape), and work-casual Rossi wore jeans, a sky blue button-down and a red tie under a dark blazer.
Good mornings were exchanged, followed by light talk of how people slept and other such trivia; but no words of work. Yet Prentiss knew every one of the minds in this group was already going over what little they knew about this new antagonist.
Knowing one of these predators was at large, and active, when you were one of the team called in to stop him, presented a variety of stress known to few. If they moved too fast, a perp could walk on any number of technicalities; if they moved too slow, another victim might lose his or her life before the BAU could stop the predator.
Sometimes, morethan one victim.…
So they sipped coffee, nibbled bagels and pretended to be just another group of coworkers about to head in to the office.
Taking the SUVs, they drove west on Roosevelt Road to the field office just west of the University of Illinois at Chicago and the Rush University Medical Center. The FBI was housed in an antiseptic twelve-story monument to glass and steel at 211 West Roosevelt Road.
By the time the team piled out of their SUVs in the parking lot, Lorenzon and Tovar had joined up with them. Soon they were in the lobby, which had a metal detector at the front door (added after the Oklahoma City bombing in 1995) with fire hydrant concrete columns outside (after September 11). Once they had negotiated the building’s defenses, they were met by the Special Agent In Charge of the field office.
The SAIC, Raymond Himes, was a tall, broad-shouldered African-American with black hair cut close to the scalp. He wore a gray single-breasted suit over a white shirt with a red-and-blue tie, very sharp, very professional.
He greeted them all with handshakes and smiles, reserving an exceptionally warm smile for his old coworker, Prentiss. Like her, Himes had faced prejudice in his rise within the Bureau and the two had been kindred spirits.