Selina opened the door to his office and waved him in, which made him grin. She was lucky he wasn’t the kind of man who felt the need to posture and prove his manhood.
Handing her a cup of coffee, he dropped into his chair and leaned back, rolling her comment over in his head. “I suppose it is, but Magickals like our guy have five centuries, right? Three decades wouldn’t be that long to wait for round two.”
“I don’t know. What we’re dealing with is a compulsion, a sickness. It’s not about thinking, Well, if I have five hundred years, every thirty or so is a nice gap. It’s about playing out that compulsion over and over again.” She settled into her usual chair opposite his desk, dropped her bag to the floor, and crossed her legs.
Damn, he loved her legs. He had to concentrate to keep his gaze on her face. Those legs had been tangled with his while they slept every night. He’d never have pegged her for a cuddler, but he wasn’t about to complain when it meant he had her soft and naked in his arms. Not when it let him think about something other than this total bitch of a case.
She made an impatient gesture. “I haven’t been able to get that out of my head. Why here, and why now? But then I thought ... what if it wasn’t just here and now?”
“Right.” He went with that line of thinking quickly enough, excitement humming through him. “What if there have been killings in between, somewhere else? What if New Orleans wasn’t even his first stop? Maybe we’re only picking this up now because we have you—someone who’s dealt with this before.”
“And Merek by extension, who’d heard me talk about it with Theodore.” She seemed to realize she had coffee in her hand and took a deep swig.
He laced his fingers over his belly, turning his head to look at the whiteboard on his wall. The three victims’ pictures were up there, along with stats and time lines. One Normal, two Magickals. So far. He glanced at Selina. “You think we need to crawl through the databases and look for similarities?”
“Yeah, I do.” She nodded decisively. “What if it was missed before because Magickals try so hard to avoid attracting Normal attention? Maybe one or two deaths occurring in a particular way wouldn’t garner the attention that four would. What if the combination of Normal and Magickal victims has made him impossible to trace?”
“Could be. Our first victim had cut ties with her Magickal husband after she was divorced, which is why she was overlooked until I asked Rick.” The wheels in his head started spinning with more possibilities, further inquiries to look into. “Our killer may not even have stayed in this country, making it even harder to connect the dots. But we have Interpol now, and we can contact them as well.”
“Good. We should do that.”
Many hours and multiple cups of coffee later, they had some answers, and they weren’t good. Thousands of crime scene descriptions and photographs had scrolled by on their computer screens. They’d looked at everything they could get their hands on. Normal and Magickal divisions. Police departments for every major American city, NSA, CIA, FBI, Interpol, Scotland Yard. They’d even looked through the Canadian Mounties’ files. Or at least the ones that had been digitized. Jack wasn’t quite certain how Luca got the unit access to all the information that he did, but Jack suspected it might not be through entirely legal or legitimate channels. Then again, anything to do with magic and Magickal crimes wasn’t entirely aboveboard. It was the nature of the beast.
They’d hit pay dirt with the Mounties, the Normal side of the FBI, and a few American PDs. The photos had been eerily familiar, the crimes unsolved, and long considered cold cases. Just like in New Orleans. Just like their murders in Seattle.
“Five cities in the last thirty years.” Selina sat back in her chair, her expression stunned, even though the idea to check into this had been hers.
“There may be even more than this.” He had to say it out loud, but his stomach churned all the same. It wasn’t the images that bothered him—he’d seen worse—it was that no one had put the pieces together until just now. Thirty years of unsolved crimes, thirty years of people dying because no one thought to check into Normal victims that hadn’t been flagged as obvious Magickal crimes and taken over by the Magickal divisions. He sighed and let his head drop back for a moment. “I’ll have some people keep digging, see if they find more, but this gives us something to go on. We have to start somewhere.”
“Yeah.” But she looked as grim as he felt. “We need those New Orleans files. I want to go back over them, too. See if I missed anything now that we have this new data.”
All of the other cities had had five deaths, not four. According to the information they now possessed, New Orleans was the anomaly, not the rule.
“Shit. We need to look into Gregor’s history, see how many of these cities he’s been in, when, and if we can tie him to any of the victims.” He rubbed a hand down his face, his eyes burning from staring at a computer screen for so long. While he was glad to have more data to work with, he wasn’t happy that over two dozen people had died before he’d even come on the case. This bastard was careful, he was smart, and he was damn good at covering his tracks. And he’d been perfecting his technique for decades.
Just the kind of criminal who made Jack’s life hell.
Selina tapped her finger against the computer screen, her shoulder bumping against his. “His pattern is escalating.”
As if that told him anything. He shook his head, trying to see whatever it was she was seeing. “He always kills five, and the violence seems consistent with what we’ve seen so far.”
“No, I mean the amount of time between each city is shortening. Seven years, five years, four ... this last one was only a year ago.” She nodded, giving the screen a final tap. “He’s escalating.”
Great. More good news.
“Heads-up.” Jack cut a glance at Selina as they sat down in the break room to eat, guzzle some much-needed caffeine, and continue to pore over the new information they’d unearthed. If her stomach roiled, she told herself it was the coffee, but she knew it was a lie. Look how many more people had died because she’d failed. Look at what she hadn’t prevented. Guilt burned like acid in her veins, and she reached up to rub her thumb along the metal lines of her necklace. The talisman she’d worn for so long felt like an albatross around her neck, weighing her down.
At Jack’s words, Selina glanced around and saw a woman bearing down on them. “Should I run?”
“Nah, she’d catch you.” He flashed a grin that made her insides melt, which should not happen at her age. It probably wasn’t even healthy for her. He waved with a French fry. “Plus, she’s not someone you need to avoid, as far as I know. She’s new.”
“Well, hey there, darlin’.” She winked at Jack before offering Selina a hand to shake. “I’m Delta Dubois, and as Jack said, I’m new around here—I just transferred in from the Houston office.”
The woman’s accent was more bayou drawl than Texas twang, so Selina would bet she was originally from Louisiana. She was short and curvy. Her thick blond hair fell in waves down her back and her wide violet-blue eyes made her look like nothing so much as a sweet ingénue. Until you took in the delicate points to her fangs and the obstinate tilt to her jaw.
Classic southern belle, and Selina had learned a long time ago never to mess with a southern belle. They were scary women, and their men didn’t become southern gentlemen without learning a little respect—and fear—from their mothers, grandmothers, aunts, sisters, and wives. She’d seen one southern belle slit a werewolf’s throat and very politely explain that “he’d needed some killin’ ” and then “blessed his heart.”