She saw the pistol rising again, the small black hole pointed at her face, Benny’s voice in her mind: Togetherforever, querida.That thought gave her a moment of peace as Adrienne Andrews saw the last thing she ever saw: a muzzle flash.
April 17 Oak Park, Illinois
Connie had not slept particularly well. She never did when her husband worked odd hours, and now she rolled over and looked at the alarm clock for the zillionth time since he’d left last night.
Just after five, she fought the urge to just say, “Screw it,” and get out of bed. She could read or watch TV or something. The kids wouldn’t be up for another hour and a half.
But she decided to give it one more chance and rolled over. Squeezing her eyes shut, Connie thought back to those early days when she and her husband had been so happy. Though she loved her kids and knew they were easily the greatest thing she’d done in her life, she still reflected on those earlier days as the happiest of her marriage.
Whenever she needed to calm herself, Connie went back to a day before they were married, before they were dating even.
They were doing a photo shoot, their first together.
She had been the ingenue, the new girl on the Michigan Avenue block, while her photographer was the hot young shooter who was already a star and in from New York to do the fashion magazine layout. Another model had gotten the cover but Connie had garnered the spot for a well-known fashion line the photographer was also shooting.
She wore a bikini for the summer issue, though the temperature outside the old Chicago Water Tower in early March hovered just above freezing. Her photographer wore a wool turtleneck and down vest over his jeans. He looked toasty warm while she was freezing her ass off.
Still, he was doing everything he could to keep her comfortable and happy until the rain came. After the sudden cloudburst, the two ran for his rental car parked just across Michigan Avenue on a side street while the rest of the crew tried to keep the set from getting ruined.
He held the door for her, closed it after her, got soaked running around the car and, when he finally got in and they were out of the rain, they started laughing. He got the engine running, turned on the heater and they sat there talking for a while, then the talk turned to kissing and the kissing to serious necking, and she and the photographer moved to the back and her bikini came off and she couldn’t believe what they were doing right there off the Magnificent Mile. Steam had covered the windows, though, and they couldn’t see out. She hoped no one could see in.
Her eyes still shut, Connie felt more relaxed than she had in days. They were about to make love in the backseat of his rental car when she went to sleep.
She felt him climb into the bed next to her, the mattress creaking slightly as he settled in. She stirred.
“Shhh,” he said, his voice soothing. “It’s not time to get up yet.”
He touched her shoulder and she felt herself sliding back into the backseat dream.
She was almost completely in the dream moment when a harsh voice said, “WLS News talk 890 time is six oh five, let’s get the first on-demand traffic report from our traffic reporter Marin Ashe.”
Connie hit the snooze and rolled toward her husband. “How did it go?”
His face was pale and he was wet either from the rain or a shower she had not heard him take when he got home. She didn’t know which.
He looked at her for a long moment, his eyes blank.
Finally, he managed a thin smile. “Think I got some good shots.”
“That’s nice, dear. That’s nice.”
Chapter One
July 28 Quantico, Virginia
“Imitation,”
Oscar Levant said,
“is the sincerest form of plagiarism.”
For local detectives, one or more of four murder motives figure in ninety-nine percent of the homicides they encounter. These motives are, in no particular order, love, money, sex, and drugs.
No matter the circumstance, no matter how far afield the killers’ motives seem to be, the four basics almost always pertain: love, money, sex, or drugs. Love and sex, of course, have considerable overlap, but then so do money and drugs.
And when a crime comes up where the motive doesn’t clearly fall into those categories, that special one percent of murders that the local police cannot solve on their own, the best option remaining, in the minds of many in local law enforcement, is to bring such cases to the attention of the Behavioral Analysis Unit of the Federal Bureau of Investigation.
Just south of Washington, D.C., across the Potomac River from Maryland, the U.S. Marine Corps base at Quantico, Virginia, serves as home to dozens of Marine Corps schools, the DEA training academy, and the FBI Training and Development Division. Also nestled within the nearly four hundred acres of woods, surrounding what its inhabitants sometimes call the Facility, is the Behavioral Analysis Unit.
Within the walls of the blandly modern, anonymous concrete buildings, the BAU consists of several multiperson, close-knit teams, the nature of whose duty often creates a strong sense of family. Supervisory Special Agent Aaron Hotchner’s team was no exception; and his profilers were due back today from a weekend off—no duty, no on-call, no anything, just some much deserved R and R.
Rest and recreation meant, for Hotchner, reading through fitness results, budget analyses, and police reports for one day of his time off, rather than two. Other agents, both on and off his team, considered Hotchner a driven, somewhat humorless taskmaster. He considered himself only a professional with a job that required both concentration and detachment. Without the latter, burnout or even madness could be the consequence, as Aaron Hotchner was a modern-day Van Helsing tracking down real-life monsters who made the likes of Dracula or the Wolf Man seem quaint.
This took its toll. He and Haley, his wife of eleven years, had separated last fall. Now, they were facing divorce, their marriage another victim of the monsters Hotchner pursued. The severe tension of the initial breakup had eased some, however, and he had been welcomed to her sister’s house where he spent Saturday afternoon with Haley and their son, Jack. Three now, Jack was harder to chase down than most of the UnSubs Hotchner had been after during his FBI career. They had gone to a kid-oriented pizza place for supper, as a family, if a broken one, and while Jack played, the soon to be ex-husband and -wife had talked in a guarded but not unfriendly way about where things were, currently, with how they’d gotten there undiscussed.
After half a day with the two people on the planet he loved most, Hotchner had gotten the best night’s sleep he’d had in months. After sleeping in yesterday, he had read the Sunday paper in the kitchen, where the emptiness of the house almost overwhelmed him. He spent most of the day in his home office, going over reports, coming out only to microwave his meals and catch up on cable news.
For many years Haley had exhibited saintlike patience with his workaholic ways, but these last several years had included an array of horrific cases that had made Hotchner only more withdrawn and had taken him away from home for days and even weeks at a time. When he’d turned down a nine-to-five job on the white-collar task force, Hotchner had finally pushed Haley too far.
“You can’t stop allthe monsters,” she’d said.
“I have to try. I’ve seen what these creatures do to families. Think of our son.”
“No, Aaron. Youthink of our son. You need to put our family first, and everybody else’s family needs to go into second place.”
“Try to understand. Stopping these people ismy way of protecting my family.”