A Profiler's Case for Seduction(51)

“Maybe he didn’t want to take a chance at shooting Dora. If I was the primary target, then it makes sense that he wouldn’t have fired his gun then, but would rather wait until the two of us were in the middle of the campus and he had a clean shot at me,” Mark replied.

“I don’t like anyone threatening my men,” Richard said, his voice deeper and with a touch of anger. “We’ll see if we can pull prints from the note. I want the writer of that note found. Whoever it is seems to have information we don’t have.”

“Maybe it’s just another student prank,” Joseph suggested.

“Those weren’t prank bullets that were fired at me the other night,” Mark replied tersely. “And I still haven’t bought into the theory that Melinda Grayson’s kidnapping was some stupid student prank.”

For the next hour the team threw around theories, talked about what little information they’d managed to glean. The frustration in the air was a living, breathing entity that displayed itself in how quickly the doughnuts disappeared from their boxes. Nothing like a sugar rush to attempt to stanch short tempers and the dissatisfaction with how things were proceeding, Mark thought.

The meeting dragged on and on, with the final decision for everyone to look at the case as if it had just been handed to them. Joseph was assigned to redo background searches on everyone involved with both the kidnapping and the murders, Larry was to reinterview everyone who had already been talked to initially when the cases broke.

Lori was to reexamine what little evidence they had and find a chink in anyone’s alibi that had been provided for the time of the crimes.

Richard would coordinate and Mark was left to do what he did best, put together the facts that the team brought to Richard and him and get them a profile that would eventually lead back to Troy Young or to another suspect or person of interest.

It was almost noon when the team went their separate ways, discouraged that they were at a place where they had to doubt and reexamine every move of their own earlier investigation. But Mark knew as well as the others that the smallest overlooked detail often broke a case wide-open.

As he left the courthouse, he realized he needed to find Dora and let her know that it was quite possible she wasn’t being stalked, that it was Mark somebody might be watching and waiting to harm.

Not only would he get to see her again, he’d be able to bring her a small measure of comfort in this new information that took a target off her back.

With only a week and two days to the annual bonfire and homecoming festivities, Mark noted that more red-and-gold banners and signs seemed to have appeared overnight on campus. Go Gladiators signs hung out dorm windows and fluttered from fraternity and sorority house porches.

When in college Mark hadn’t participated in the extracurricular activities. He was too busy being tested and taught to achieve his full potential. When he wasn’t in the classroom he was in the library, soaking up what he could learn about serial killers and their patterns, their thoughts and actions.

By that time he’d known there was a place for him with the FBI and he knew this job was his calling, his reason for being. But Dora had reminded him that there were also other things important to him...like being the man his daughter needed in her life...things like love.

Despite the tense meeting he’d just endured, he was aware of the jaunt in his steps as he walked across the campus to the place where he knew he was most likely to meet Dora coming or going from a class.

He sank down on the bench where he’d sat the first day he’d met her to wait to give her back her pen. His thoughts immediately went to the note on his car.

Who had left it? If they took the note at face value then it was obvious the person who had written it had information to exonerate Troy Young and knew of a specific threat to Mark. The writer had warned Mark, but hadn’t given enough details to allow him to know what was going on.

Why would anyone come after him? There was a whole team of FBI agents working this case, so why single out Mark? His thoughts whirled around in his brain.

Because he’d never believed the theory of the crime that the others believed, a small voice whispered inside his head. Because he’d always maintained and been vocal about the fact that he believed Melinda’s kidnapping was staged and she had something to do with the murders.

Could that be the reason Mark had been targeted? Because somebody in the Melinda camp wanted him silenced? Were the nightmares he’d had starring Melinda his imagination mirroring what was really reality?