“What’s your gut?” he asks. “What are you thinking?”
“I’m thinking I need to jump ahead of forensics and make sure I know as much about who I’m dealing with that I can possibly know. The good news is that Roberts, the missing detective in question, collected a ton of necessary data I’m already diving into.”
“Does Roberts have family or close friends in Houston?”
“Unless it’s a friend we don’t know about, a new woman, or some long-lost cousin, no. His ex-wife is here. His parents are dead. We went by his house. It’s cleaned out, which should make me feel better about the idea of a decisive action, but it doesn’t.”
He’s silent a moment. “Sam—”
“No,” I say, reading his mind easily. “I don’t think he was involved in my father’s dirty deeds, but they were friends. I can’t rule it out.” I leave out the part about this killer feeling like a familiar killer or my thoughts on that connecting him to my father. Anything to do with my father will have Wade at my doorstep.
The truth is that Wade and Lang suffocated me for two solid weeks after my father died until I couldn’t take it anymore. I needed space in a bad way and before I forgot that I’m the badass with a weapon and brain I know how to use, and use well.
“I’ll make some calls,” he offers. “I’ll find out if anything was about to come down on Roberts.”
“Thank you.” I sip my wine and then set my glass down. “Now,” I say, moving on, “about the actual case. I think this guy has killed before and will kill again.”
“Based on what?”
“The scene was clean, really clean. You asked about DNA. I don’t think we’re going to have some hidden source of DNA suddenly pop up.”
“What do you have?”
“A glove print, which we both know is nothing, and a possible, extremely weak description, along with a poem he stuffed in the victim’s mouth.”
“A poem,” he notes. “I see why this one landed on your desk. What’s the poem mean?”
“That’s a subjective question, but it’s about destiny.”
“Sounds like they have a history, the killer and the victim.”
“No,” I say quickly. “I don’t think so. I think this guy has a God complex. He judged his victim unworthy of living, a disruption to all those who remain. I’m just not sure why yet.”
“Okay then.” He doesn’t ask how I came to this conclusion. “Cause of death?”
“Poison, and I’ve seen this before. I’m certain it’s going to test out as cyanide.”
I can hear his pencil scribbling on a pad. “I’ll see if I get any hits on cyanide here and call a guy I know over at the ATF. And send me everything you can send me. I’ll run a ViCAP report and see if we can find him hiding in those reports or across state lines.”
“You read my mind. And one more thing.”
“You want a profile.”
I smile at how in sync we are. “Yes,” I confirm. “Perfect.”
“Have you done your own?” he says. “You spent months in an FBI training camp, where you were the badass everyone wanted to recruit. Again.”
That’s actually how Wade and I truly met the first time. The FBI used him to try to recruit me. They’d thought my flunking out of college had been a youthful mistake. There was a lot about why I followed my father that turned into a mistake I’m not going to visit right now, or perhaps ever again.
I move on to what I know. “The Poet, an organized killer, a planner. Highly intelligent. Well employed. These types like to appear stable and we’re most likely looking at someone in a circle of family to shelter himself, even convince himself he’s normal. None of this is on paper. And I don’t feel like I have room for error on this one.”
“The Poet?”
“That’s what I’m calling him.”
“Whatever you call him, do you really think he’s a serial killer?”
“I know he’s a serial killer. We just have to find his victims.”
“I’ll get you your profile for peace of mind.”
“Thank you, Wade,” I say, gratitude in my voice.
“Thank me by being careful. If this asshole came after Roberts, you could be next.”
“If Roberts was his type, I am not.”
“Be careful, Detective Jazz,” he says, and this time he uses his best Special Agent Wade Miller voice, the detective title meant to make the “I’m serious” point.
“I am. I called you for a reason. I’m going to get him before he ever has the chance to get me.”
We disconnect a few seconds later and I pull up the poem compilation Chuck put together for me on my MacBook. I gravitate toward the poem The Poet left called “Fate, The Jester.” His message could be in those few lines or in another verse inside the full poem. I read it all slowly, all eight paragraphs, dissecting each one, but I return to the three lines he left in Summer’s mouth:
Who laugh in the teeth of disaster,
Yet hope through the darkness to find
A road past the stars to a Master
A master, a statement that seems to reference superiority and drives home my earlier thoughts. The Poet judged Summer beneath him. Perhaps he judges us all beneath him. He believes he’s above the law, and that’s dangerous to those who come into contact with him.
That means I need to become dangerous to him, and quickly.
Chapter 14
After my call with Wade, I refill my wineglass, treat myself to another bag of popcorn, and tackle my next big problem. How to narrow my approach to the data dump I’ve been given. Deciding how to approach this takes me back to my teen years when I’d spent hours on end at a table with my father and godfather, now the chief of police, nosing into their case files. They’d tried to protect me from the horrors in those files but eventually gave in to my persistence. I’d become their protégée, and both lectured me not to get lost in the overload of data each case delivered, stressing how important it was to pick out the most productive angles of a case and focus. Most importantly, find “the system,” my system, whatever that might be, and use it religiously.
For me, that means writing out lists the old-fashioned way, with pen and paper. It drives Lang crazy, probably because his system is all about pushing to the point of bullish demands of everyone who stands between him and solving the case. To each their own, but my lists have helped us catch more than a few killers.