A Profiler's Case for Seduction(8)

Maybe she just wasn’t the dramatic type. Maybe she’d somehow managed to remain cool and calm despite her dire circumstances. He picked up the remote and clicked Play to watch the next video that they’d received from the kidnappers.

There were a total of four DVDs sent by the captor or captors. The worst one showed Melinda being beaten by a figure dressed all in black and wearing a ski mask.

Mark didn’t know how long he sat watching the videos again and again, trying to figure out the question that had yet to be answered. There had never been a ransom demand—there had never been a demand for anything. So, why kidnap and beat a woman, videotape the crime, send the videos to law enforcement and then simply release her? It didn’t make sense and things that didn’t make sense bothered Mark.

The consensus among the other agents was that it was probably a student prank that had somehow gotten a bit out of control. The fact that she was missing at the same time the murders had occurred was merely a weird coincidence.

Mark didn’t believe in coincidences, weird or otherwise. He still believed the gray-eyed woman had something to do with the murders, that the whole kidnapping thing had been orchestrated for show and nothing else.

He frowned as he realized his mistake. Melinda didn’t have gray eyes. Hers were green. Dora had gray eyes, and the whisper of sweet flowers clinging to her.

A glance at his watch let him know it was just after noon. He had no idea what Dora’s class schedule was like, but a desire to find her and talk to her rose up inside him. He knew that if her schedule at the bookstore was the same as yesterday, she would be heading there around four.

As he walked down the long wide steps of the courthouse, he was accosted at the bottom of the stairs by a reporter who had become a familiar irritation to the entire team.

Paula Craddock, ace reporter for KVXT, a Dallas television station, stood ready to shove her microphone in his face. Mark had always tried to be kind to the media, mostly because his ex-wife had been part of that industry. But, after three weeks of media frenzy, it was becoming more and more difficult to keep a smile on his face whenever he encountered a reporter.

“Any break in the murder case, Agent Flynn?” She hurried toward him as he hit the sidewalk.

“No comment,” he replied.

She fell into step beside him, her photographer hurrying to keep up with them as Mark started walking down the sidewalk to where his car was parked. “Surely you have something you can tell the viewers. It’s a well-known fact that you’re one of the FBI’s brightest profilers.”

Mark turned to stare at her and finally gave her a tight smile. “And that’s what makes me smart enough to say ‘no comment.’”

As he picked up his pace, Paula sighed in frustration. She and her photographer hurried back to the bottom of the courthouse steps, where Mark knew she would take up residency, hoping to get something of substance for the latest on this tawdry, explosive murder case.

Mark got into his car and drove the short distance to the Darby campus. His brain was still engaged with the mystery of Melinda’s kidnapping and the murders.

It had always been easy for Mark to lose himself in the head of the killer. Sometimes it scared him a little how good he was at picking up vibes from the insane, the evil that could reside in people. But not this time. The note cards left with each man were calling cards of a sort from the killer they sought, but Mark couldn’t get a handle on what had compelled the killer to leave them behind. There had been no prints on the note cards, and that particular kind of card was sold in dozens of stores, including the campus bookstore.

Had the killer simply decided to off men with unsavory secrets...secrets that might not have been uncovered without their murders and the note cards that labeled each victim?

Certainly Mark had worked grave sites where multiple victims had been found before, but usually those burial sites had been created over months or years, not in a single twenty-four-hour period.

He found an empty parking space along a tree-lined street near the campus and got out to walk the rest of the way. He was lucky that his team understood that for the most part he was a lone wolf. His specific job required him to do less of the actual investigation work and more of the mind-game tasks that always came with catching a killer.

This was the first time he was having trouble connecting with the killer or killers. He couldn’t help but believe that the mere logistics of murdering three men and dumping their bodies suggested more than one person at work. They just didn’t have enough information for him to do his job effectively.