“Fabulous,” I muttered.
“If it helps us find this guy, I don’t give a fuck,” he said.
“Of course,” I replied, then asked, “Have you been able to profile him, even a little?”
Not a second passed before Bohannan launched in.
“He’s intelligent. He might be ex-military, but that’s doubtful. He won’t like being told what to do, and he’ll take pains to guard against anything he might fail at and washing out of the military because he doesn’t respect authority will not be on his agenda. Also, there might be too much competition there. Too many things to excel at, someone is going to be better at something than him, and he can’t have that. He doesn’t work well with his attention scattered. Eye on one goal. Though it could be a lesson he learned along the way. More likely, he grew up hunting and spending a lot of time outdoors.”
He took a breath.
And kept going.
“He’s definitely killed, but not messing with easy targets, like a family pet. It’d be about the hunt. The quest. The test. Big game. Bears. Nice trophies. Wolves or big cats. He’s fit. He’s adaptable. He’s accomplished. He was a star athlete. He’s an excellent marksman or a prize-winning fisherman or a successful bonds trader, all of those or none of those. He’s good at not just something, but a lot of somethings. He’s bested people who thought they were better than him. Every challenge he’s found and surpassed hasn’t done it for him. So he’s pursued bigger ones. More extreme ones. He has no interest in the kill, except for the response it will garner in me. He intends to play against me until he breaks me, publicly humiliates me or makes me give up, and then he’ll move on to a bigger, more extreme challenge.”
I was struck dumb, for a number of reasons.
That was good, because Bohannan wasn’t finished.
“He has no sexual problems, though he might be into domination, but maybe not the good kind. That said, he won’t cross a line. He’ll find partners who get deep like he does, and he’ll get explicit consent. That is not going to be the misstep he makes. Women are easy prey, so he fulfills his base instincts and gets off on games. He’s young. Not in his twenties, probably mid-thirties, which intensifies his feeling of superiority, tasting so much success at his age. Even if he rigs the game by focusing solely and obsessively on only one thing at one time. Though he could be in his early forties, but not older. He’s likely attractive. Probably very much so. He had a functional family who was proud of him, maybe too proud. But it isn’t on them. He was born not wired right.”
Holy cow.
That was a lot.
And he still wasn’t done.
“The next kill won’t be soon. I hope to fuck I’m right, but we got time. He’s savoring this. Getting off on every second. Every reaction. He wants to prolong it. He wants the suspense. He wants the control. He’s not from Misted Pines. He’s not local. But he’s here and he came for me. Besting me on my turf is not only part of the kick, besting unknown terrain is an added bonus. Making it even better, he’s not unaware of the shit he’s stirring. He was at the meeting at the city chambers. He’s managed to get his hands on every one of those videos. He could have even been watching as that party in the woods turned bad. He’s loving it. He’s not the puppet master. He’s making himself a god. And that’s what he needs.”
When he stopped talking and didn’t start again, I noted, “So, you don’t have a little profile, you have a profile.”
The beard twitched up again.
“You left that town meeting because you didn’t want to feed his ego,” I surmised.
He dipped his chin. “He got off on that circus. He wanted me to watch. Wanted to watch me do it. But I’m not a puppet and he’s not my god.”
I decided not to dig deeper into that because it gave me the serious heebie-jeebies knowing the killer was there, with all of us, the entire town, but more specifically, anywhere near Celeste, Jess, Jace, me…and he was there to watch not only what he’d wrought, but Bohannan.
“More extreme challenge than becoming a serial killer so people will hunt him like he’s a serial killer?” I asked.
“He’s already figuring out what’s next when he beats me, and he’s assured he’s gonna beat me. He’ll flip that coin. He’s made himself prey. His next challenge, he’ll be the hunter. And he won’t be after eight-year-old girls or college freshmen.”
I shuddered.
Bohannan wrapped his arms around me, pulled me close and watched me closer.
“You get, he’s probably watching. And I’m not talking about just the town council meeting.”
Oh, I got that.
I’d been completely in denial about it.
But I got it.
Bohannan gave me a squeeze.
“If the last couple of days were days he watched, it’s driving him fucking crazy I’m more interested in stringing your lights than breaking my back trying to find him. Jace and Jess too. They’re bonuses for him that might even be why he picked me. I trained my boys and they’re good at what they do. We’re a great team. So if he beats me, he doesn’t just beat me. He beats an entire team. Men, real men in his estimation. Typical alphas, who, once he takes us down, will make him leader of the pack.”
“Will he…” God, I didn’t want to think it, much less say it. But I had to know the answer. “…get frustrated and target you or one of the twins another way?”
“That would be a cheat. I matter to him. Jace and Jess do too. Alice didn’t matter. She was a laboratory mouse. An experiment. What he did to her was gruesome, but inexpert. Malorie didn’t matter. She was a pawn, important to the game, but easily expendable. Though, this isn’t chess. He’s not guarding his king by sacrificing his queens. This is a duel. He thrusts, I’m supposed to parry, until he forces me to thrust, and he parries.”
One could say he had a definite handle on that.
But this brought us to something else I wanted to know about.
“What do, um…Jace and Jess…do?”
“I think you realize there’s not a soul on this planet who won’t open up to one of them.”
I blinked.
“They’re the best investigators, and interrogators, I’ve ever come across. And I don’t take credit for that. They just had that in them. I was a decent investigator. I can get a bead, and I’m a trained profiler, so I didn’t suck at interrogating, but I’m intimidating, and that never helped. Profiling was my gig. I found a home in it, for better or worse. But you got a witness who doesn’t want to talk, Jace or Jess will get them comfortable. You sniffed out your last line of inquiry and are stumped, Jace or Jess will look at what you got and find three new trails to go down. I taught them what I know, and they just ran with it in ways I’d never guess. It’s fuckin’ uncanny.”
I was careful when I asked, “Why don’t they become police or follow in your footsteps and join the FBI?”
“Because they make four times as much as consultants than they would if they had a badge.”
I raised my brows. “So they’re twenty-seven-year-old investigative hotshots with utterly no official law enforcement training or experience?”