“Like the boys.”
“Exactly. He didn’t hold them underwater to drown them; he put them on the ice and let it happen. One victim was decapitated in his own garage. The one Wyatt told us about, with the woman responding to the online job listing. You heard what he did to her.”
“Yeah. Sick. And he’d never used the Internet to lure his victims before?”
Alec shook his head. “Never. It is impressive if your boss really did figure out who he was dealing with last month. I was…” He had been about to say he was on medical leave, but didn’t want to open that issue up for questioning yet. “I wasn’t in the office at the time, but if the BAU had known there was another Professor case, I would have heard about it.”
Oh, would he ever.
“Our boss,” Stokes explained, “is better than anybody I’ve ever worked with. Or anybody you’ve ever worked with.” There was no slavish vehemence in her voice, no defensiveness. Just pure confidence. “So this change in his MO, using the Internet-does it mean anything?”
“I’m sure it means something,” he admitted. “Any change in the pattern can leave him vulnerable to mistakes he’d been careful not to make in the past.”
The timing of that change had been fortuitous. The killer had begun using the Web to lure his victims around the same time Alec had been on the verge of disciplinary action, possibly even of losing his job. Considering Alec knew more about the Professor than anyone else in the bureau, landing on Blackstone’s team had seemed a stroke of luck. Bullet holes in his body notwithstanding. But he already knew it was not luck at all. Wyatt Blackstone had known whom he was up against before anyone else had figured it out and had moved Alec into place like a chess master positioning his knight.
That fascinated him, and Alec took no offense at the manipulation. He wanted to stay in the FBI. He wanted to nail the Professor. So, if anything, his respect for his new boss had gone up a notch once he’d figured everything out.
“Think he doesn’t want to get his hands dirty? Or doesn’t think he’s really a killer if he doesn’t pull a trigger or plunge a knife?”
Alec considered it. He had been considering it for a long time. He slowly shook his head. “I don’t think so. Deep down, my gut tells me he’s trying to prove how much smarter he is than anyone else. That it’s easy for him to kill because he’s so brilliant, and each kill is an in-your-face taunt to prove it.”
“Yeah, real smart to commit murder.” Stokes frowned. “I don’t remember the Professor in Gilligan’s Island inventing wild scenarios. Maybe you guys should have called him MacGyver.”
“I didn’t call him anything,” Alec pointed out. “Besides, there was another reason for the name. He typically writes to the family after the crime. The messages are condescending and arrogant. Very literate. All on the same stationery, which was expensive but not easy to trace.”
Until he’d suddenly switched to e-mails.
“What else do you know about him?”
Having memorized the profile, since he’d contributed to it when he’d first been brought in after the Richmond killing, Alec quickly rattled off the details. “He’s highly organized. Above-average intelligence. Probably not involved in a relationship right now, but he might have been in the past. Likely a professional, an engineer, maybe a lawyer or a doctor.”
Stokes snorted. “Right. White male, in his thirties, and his mama didn’t love him? I asked what you know about him.”
He glanced at her through half-lowered lashes. “I take it you don’t think highly of profiling?”
Stokes shrugged. “I think profilers are a lot like those crime-solving psychics. They always look back and focus on the stuff they got right, like, ‘The missing person will be found near water,’ and they claim victory when the vic shows up a block from a fire hydrant.”
Alec chuckled despite himself. Stokes obviously had attitude. Her own personality, rather than any rumors she might have heard about him, had likely been behind her posturing when they’d first met at yesterday’s meeting. He relaxed in his seat, beginning to suspect he could actually like her, if only she’d stop talking so much. And perhaps not kill him in a car crash.
“Give me numbers and calculations over guesses and hypotheses any day.”
Her opinion wasn’t unique. Lots of people both in the bureau and out of it cast a skeptical eye at some of the work done by the BAU. Usually it was because they got caught up in the thriller novels and the serial-killer movies that romanticized the job of profiler until it became unrealistic. As if they were the crime-solving psychics she spoke of so disdainfully.
“Human beings often behave in patterns, like computer programs,” he replied. “Profilers keep track of the patterns and use them to their advantage. No magic. No psychic powers. It’s almost mathematical, really. Statistics and probability.”
“And a bunch of psychobabble. But math and computers I get.” The other agent’s frown eased. “Meaning I should be the one to talk to this Dalton woman. Her being into computers, too.”
They’d just exited the city and were on the beltway heading toward Baltimore to interview one Samantha Dalton. During yesterday’s examination of a computer belonging to one of the victims, the IT specialists had found communication between Ms. Dalton and Ryan Smith. They’d e-mailed within hours of the boy’s death, and he and Stokes had been assigned to go interview the woman, some computer expert.
Stokes’s presence made sense, with her cyber crimes background. Alec’s? Not so much. He’d have been of more use going up to Wilmington and walking the crime scene. But toeing the line was what he was all about these days. Even though his tongue had nearly bled when he’d bitten on it to keep from arguing the issue with his new boss. He didn’t figure it would be a good thing to get fired his second day on the job.
“Why don’t we play it by ear?” The frown snapped back into place.
“I mean,” he calmly explained as he reopened the file and glanced at it, “let’s meet her before deciding how to proceed.”
“I bet with your looks you like playing good cop for the ladies.” If words could actually sneer, those would have.
Alec didn’t look up. His hand remained flat on the autopsy report in his lap. The only sign that her jab had hit home was a slight tightening in his fingers, the tips of which turned white. “Do you have a problem working with me?”
“Let’s say pretty boys in expensive suits make me itchy.”
Pretty boy. He’d been called worse. Rich dude. Hotshot. Maverick.
Thrill-seeking bastard. That had been the one his ex-girlfriend had thrown at him when he’d refused her demands to quit the bureau in the days following the shooting.
Whatever. As long as Stokes wasn’t talking about Atlanta, and he suspected she was not, his new partner could think whatever the hell she wanted.
“Well, drivers who can’t keep all four tires on the road make me itchy, too.” He grabbed the dashboard as Stokes zipped around a tractor trailer doing seventy on the bumper-to-bumper beltway. “How about whoever lives for the rest of this ride gets to decide how to conduct the interview?”
For the first time since he’d set eyes on her, Stokes cracked a real smile. “Snarky, huh? Maybe you’re not just a pretty boy after all.” She put the pedal down, sending them hurtling off the 295 exit ramp at near warp speed. “I guess I’ll give you more than the week I predicted you’d last.”
“You keep driving like this,” Alec mumbled, taking no offense, “and I’ll be lucky to make it through the day.”
With a pencil stuck behind her ear, reading glasses perched on the tip of her nose, and her fingers flying across her keyboard so fast they barely connected with the letters, the last thing Samantha Dalton wanted to do was answer her front door, on which someone had just knocked. She’d finally hit her stride. The flicker of an idea had met the tinder of her own creativity and burst into an inferno of words that had to erupt out of her or be lost forever. Overblown imagery, but, as usual when she was on a deadline, she’d take whatever she could get if it kept her glued to her chair.