But now there were three.
Three librarians dead in just the last few weeks.
Had they all been killed because of their jobs?
If they had, did that mean that all librarians in the city were in danger?
Did it mean she was in danger?
12:40 P.M.
* * *
“The couple who found Kim Johnson’s body didn’t see anything,” Milla announced, interrupting his train of thought.
“I didn’t think they would,” Dante said, glancing up from his laptop.
“I know, but I was hoping they would have seen something. Anything.” Milla dropped down into her desk chair with a defeated sigh; it wasn’t like his partner to be so despondent.
“The killer was there,” he told her.
“Where?” Her brow scrunched in confusion.
“The woods. While we were there. He must have hung around to watch us discover the body.”
“You saw him?” Milla’s violet eyes grew wide and she bolted upright in her chair.
“No, of course not. If I’d seen him, he’d be in custody now, wouldn’t he?”
“Then how do you know he was there?”
“I felt him watching me.”
“How do you know it was the killer and not just someone out walking who happened to stop and try to see what was going on?” Milla asked as she relaxed back into her chair.
How could he explain that he knew because the same darkness that lived inside the killer lived inside him too?
Like recognized like.
The only difference between him and the killers he hunted was that he had learned how to channel his darkness into tracking psychopaths and locking them away. If he didn’t have his job and an outlet for his own personal demons, he would likely find himself on the other side of the law.
“I just know,” he said vaguely.
Milla nodded, her eyes saying she knew there was more to it but wasn’t going to push the issue. “How does that change our profile?”
“Everything we learned today affects our profile,” he reminded her. “When Kelly Mac was found torn to shreds we assumed that it was either personal or random. When we didn’t find any similar crimes and there were no signs of robbery, we settled on personal. We wasted almost two weeks going through every single aspect of her life, grilling her family and friends, looking for a motive.”
“Only we never found one,” Milla inserted.
“Right … what we found instead was a second victim. When Teresa Mateo went missing, we saw a connection. Two librarians—both murdered in identical scenarios. It made sense that there was something between them that had led to their murders.”
“Only, again, we never found a connection.”
“Until now. Now we know that the only connection is the fact that they’re all librarians.”
“Why would someone want to kill librarians?” Milla looked both confused and repulsed by the notion.
He had long ago learned not to let emotions and preconceptions guide the way you thought. Librarians were just as much a target as anyone else. There was no reason they should be excluded when they were talking about a sociopath.
“Right now, the only reason we need to know the why is to find the who. At the moment, the facts are that someone has been breaking into libraries after hours when there is only one person there, abducting that person, then donning a set of dentures and claws and ripping them to shreds.”
“So he has a particular grudge against libraries or librarians?”
“Possibly, or he thought they were an easy group to target.”
“So far, he has only killed women. Do you think that’s a deliberate action and a choice he’s making or merely convenience in that there just happened to be women at the libraries he hit?”
“Deliberate,” Dante answered without hesitation. “While you were interviewing the couple who found the body, I checked in with the other libraries in the area. The one closest to where Kim Johnson worked, there was a man there last night, after hours, finishing up some paperwork. He reported finding a back door that should have been locked wide open.”
“You think the killer went there looking for victim number three, but when he saw it was a man, he went somewhere else?”
“That’s exactly what I think.”
“All right, so he targets female librarians. Age doesn’t appear to be an issue to him. Kim was fifty-two, Kelly was only twenty-four, and Teresa was forty-seven. Ethnicity and looks don’t seem to matter to him either, we have a Caucasian, an Asian, and a Hispanic victim.”
“It’s not the women themselves that are important to him; it’s just that they are females librarians.” His brain was swirling with possibilities, but so far, they couldn’t settle on any one thing. “We also know that he seems to think of himself as an animal of some sort—a beast, you mentioned earlier—and I think that would appeal to the man we’re looking for.”
“Despite the frenzied attack on the bodies, everything else he does seems precise and clearly thought out,” Milla said. “He targets low risk victims, and he manages to remove them from where he abducts them and get them to another location without being seen. And he doesn’t leave behind any forensics.”
“Both organized and disorganized. He’s able to hold it together, do what he has to do, but then he lets himself go, morph into what he probably sees as his true form. When he’s done and they’re dead, he’s able to pull it back together and attempt erasing any parts of himself that he might have left behind.”
When he was finished mauling his victims, the killer poured bleach all over them. While bleach didn’t necessarily destroy DNA, it could mess with it enough that getting a clear reading on it was difficult. Crime scene techs had—and still were—going over each of their three bodies, collecting all of the DNA that they could, and if they were lucky, they would eventually get a hit, but so far, any DNA discovered hadn’t been usable.
“The thing that confuses me the most,” Milla said, “is what he leaves behind at the scenes of the abductions.”
That had been baffling him too.
It was unusual, specific, certainly out of the ordinary, and obviously was something very personal to the man they were looking for.
“When we find out what that means, we’ll have our guy,” Dante said. There wasn’t a doubt in his mind that they would get this killer, because anything less wasn’t just unacceptable; it was completely out of the question.
6:56 P.M.
* * *
He lay on the grass, staring up at the stars.
He liked it out here, away from all the houses and streetlights and car lights. The sky seemed so big, millions of stars stretched out across the great black expanse, twinkling and sparkling like someone had thrown billions of tiny diamonds up into the universe.
This was what life was about.
Quiet moments just relaxing watching the stars shine, the wind blowing gently across his face, the grass tickling the back of his neck—these were the moments when the fire inside him dimmed a little.
It never lasted.
How could it?
He had been betrayed by two people he loved. They had destroyed him; they had turned him into the beast he now was.