A Profiler's Case for Seduction(24)

They’d interviewed spouses of the dead men, neighbors and friends. Mark himself had conducted a long interview with Senator Merris’s aide, Frank Kellerman. He’d found the thirty-eight-year-old man to be angry and closemouthed despite the fact he was cooling his heels in jail for the kidnapping of Peter Burris’s baby and sister-in-law. He refused to shed any information that would help the ongoing investigation of the murder of his boss.

Dead ends, and Mark had seemed to have lost his ability to crawl inside the killer’s mind. They didn’t even have enough information to formulate a viable profile that fit both the kidnapping and the murders.

The usual murder suspect would be a Caucasian male between the ages of twenty-eight and forty. The consensus was that all three men might have known their attacker and were taken by surprise. Certainly the killer had been privy to the secrets that the men had in their lives before their untimely deaths.

It was late afternoon when Mark found himself once again in front of the video equipment, playing and replaying the images of Melinda Grayson with her captor and trying to forget the alarming nightmares he’d had about her the night before.

He watched all four of the videos that had been sent to law enforcement three times and then leaned back in his chair and rubbed his gritty, strained eyes.

Dora. This was about the time of day she’d be making her way to the bookstore. In the brief kiss they’d shared she’d tasted just like he thought she would, like warm sunshine on his lips.

What he’d like to do was walk over and hang out, talk to her and maybe buy her a cup of coffee again after she was finished for the night. But he wasn’t going to do that.

Two weeks before homecoming and in his heart he knew Dora had no information that would move the investigation forward. He could pretend all he wanted that he needed her as an informant, but the truth was it had nothing to do with his job—as a man, he wanted her.

That wasn’t fair to her. She’d told him she had no place for romance in her life and the last thing he wanted was to be a meaningless distraction from her studies. She could definitely become a distraction to him in his duties, and he couldn’t allow that to happen.

With a disheartened sigh, he leaned forward and punched the remote to watch the videos yet again. He was still there an hour later when Richard found him.

“Richard, I want you to see something.” A thrum of excitement raced through Mark’s veins, an excitement he was afraid to embrace in case he was seeing something that really wasn’t there.

Richard eased down in the chair next to him. “You’ve got to get away from these videos, Mark. You’re driving yourself crazy,” he said not unkindly. “You need some distance, to get out of this room and try to get an insight into things through another avenue.”

“Just wait.” Mark hit the rewind button and waited until he was at the beginning of the loop of the four videos. “For the first time I think I noticed something that I hadn’t noticed before. I just want you to focus solely on Professor Grayson. Don’t take your eyes off her while you watch,” Mark instructed.

Richard released a long-suffering but tolerant sigh. “Okay.”

Mark hit the button to play the videos. Neither of them spoke as each scene played out. When the screen went blue Richard leaned forward, a thoughtful frown on his face. “Play it again.”

When it had played once again Richard leaned back in his chair and raked a hand through his salt-and-pepper hair. “She flinched,” he said as he looked at Mark with a vague surprise. “Each time before her captor hit her, she flinches, as if she’s expecting the blow.”

Mark nodded and allowed his excitement free rein. “Exactly, and yet she’s blindfolded, so she wouldn’t see the hit coming, there’s no reason for her to flinch and prepare for the blow.”

“Unless the whole thing is scripted,” Richard said thoughtfully. “I can’t believe that I’m starting to buy into what I thought was your very own personal delusion.”

Mark laughed. “All the times I’ve watched these scenes before, I’ve been focused on the surroundings, the person in charge. I’ve been trying to find something that would point to where the video was shot and something to identify the captor. I hadn’t really focused my whole concentration on the victim.”

“But, playing devil’s advocate here, she might have flinched just because she was afraid of being hit, unsure of if or when an attack might come.”