A Killer's Mind (Zoe Bentley Mystery #1)(52)

“Why did he slash her throat?”

Zoe chewed her lip. That was a very good question. Everything else could be explained by the fact that the victim had contacted the police. The killer had panicked, killed the woman, and put her in the trunk, fleeing the crime scene. Realizing there were roadblocks everywhere, he had driven up to the alley and dumped the body.

But why slash her throat? It wasn’t his MO; he always strangled the victims.

“I don’t know,” she finally admitted.

“I think it’s a different guy, Zoe.”

“Well,” she said, irritated, “you have a right to your own opinion, Agent Gray.”

Tatum sighed and stood up.

Zoe blocked the interaction with Tatum from her mind. The man was needlessly contrary and wasn’t helping. She focused on the body. Around her, others were trying to figure out what had happened, tracing forensic evidence, perhaps finding a breadcrumb that would lead to the killer. Their job was to look at the past. Her job was to study the past, sure—then look at the present and the future.

What was the killer going through right now? What would his next move be?

This had not gone as he had planned. The body was not posed, probably not even embalmed. As far as this killer was concerned, the killing was not the point. It was the time after the killing that mattered. That was what he fantasized about.

And he hadn’t gotten it. His fantasy had not been fulfilled this time. His need was still there. Perhaps even worse than before.

Serial killers usually had a learning curve. The killer had a fantasy. He killed, trying to fulfill the fantasy, but it didn’t work as well as he hoped it would. It didn’t match the fantasy. So he would think of ways to improve his actions so that the next murder would work out better. Killed again. Improved his methods even more. Killed again.

This was something people rarely understood about serial killers. Most people assumed killers had a constant signature. But often, the killer changed his methods and signatures to accommodate the elaborate fantasies in his mind.

This killer obviously adapted. His techniques became more refined with each murder. How would he adapt this time?

They’d nearly caught him. He was scared. He would need time to regroup, to understand what had happened and what had gone wrong. He knew the big screwup was leaving the phone with his victim, so they could be sure that wouldn’t happen again. But that wouldn’t be enough. Next time he grabbed someone, he’d kill her faster, not give her time to contact anyone. And he might change his target as well. He knew they thought he was targeting prostitutes. So he would search for a different victim—still vulnerable but not a working girl.

“Hey,” Martinez said, crouching by her side. “Are you okay?”

“He’s going to strike again,” Zoe said. “And he’ll adapt. We won’t be able to find him through his future victims anymore. We’ll have to find him by tracing the breadcrumbs he left in his past crimes. His past mistakes.”





CHAPTER 39

He gazed at the shower’s porcelain floor, watching the foamy water, pink with blood, swirling into the drain. There was something mesmerizing about it—the translucent white, pink, and red bubbles crowding the dark hole, sliding inside one after the other. A sob emerged from his throat, uncontrollable.

It had all gone so wrong.

He had thought that by the end of this evening, they would be together. Served him right for trusting a woman before the treatment. He should have finished her last night as soon as he had her. Instead, he’d decided to wait, and this was what happened.

He was alone.

Finally, the water running down his body became colorless, transparent. He switched the water off, stepped out of the shower, and grabbed his towel.

The shirt and pants he had worn, soaked in that woman’s blood, were in a tied trash bag on the floor. He considered burning it, but that sounded like a hassle. Would anyone really go through a tied trash bag? He resolved to dump it in a public trash bin once he went out. Removing the evidence from his house was good enough.

He still found it difficult to believe the cop at the roadblock had let him drive through with his clothes looking like that.

He plodded to his room slowly. He could almost feel the oppressive emptiness of the apartment. No one but him in the bedroom. If he sat down to drink a beer, he would do so alone. No one to talk to about his day, to hear how he had evaded the police, slipped right through their fingers.

He put on a pair of jeans and a plaid button-down shirt and took a look in the mirror. His reflection stared back at him. He looked closely at his face and neck, made sure there was no speck of blood he had missed. There wasn’t.

That bitch. And the cops had been looking for her; he was sure of it. They knew he had taken her. How?

Because they knew what he was looking for. Girls on the streets. Whores. Next time he stopped by a street corner, there might be a police stakeout waiting just for him. He felt a shiver of fear. And he wanted to talk to someone. Wanted a sympathetic ear, someone who would listen to his terror. There was no one.

A visit to the fridge earned him a cold can of beer. He walked over to his apartment’s balcony and watched the view from above. It was hardly a luxurious home, but the view wasn’t half-bad, considering the rent. Chicago’s buildings blocked the view of Lake Michigan, but he didn’t care about that. You couldn’t really see the lake at night, only a black shape. It was much better to look at the windows, some of them alight even at this late hour. The city never really went to sleep. And somewhere in it, there was someone for him.