Cold Silence (A High Stakes Thriller) (50 page)

In the months Billy had taken care of her, he had never mentioned dating anyone. As much as she hated the idea of sharing him, she knew it was good that he had found someone. Casey sat at the table and looked around. "Did you bring the paper?"

Billy turned and raised an eyebrow at her.

She shrugged and looked away. "Just curious."

He returned to the dishes. "I didn't think you'd like today's paper."

"Why?"

He shrugged.

"Why didn't you think I'd like it?" she asked again.

He didn't meet her gaze. "I just didn't."

"No, Billy. You had a reason. What was it?"

Billy cringed. "Some crazy guy killed another kid."

"A serial killer?" she asked.

He eyed her again.

"Do they think it's a serial killer?" she pressed.

He gave a curt nod and turned his back, flipping on the radio to end her questions. He tuned to his favorite jazz station and hummed along.

Casey paged through the
GQ
Billy had brought, using her knuckles to turn the pages. Since she'd left the Bureau, Casey hadn't been interested in the outside world. While Amy and Michael had been living there, they'd tried to entice her with the evening news or the paper.

But everything about it reminded her of what she'd had—and what she'd lost. She pushed Amy from her mind. Having her daughter grow up without her was one thing she forbade herself to think about. She could handle memories of that night, Leonardo's voice, even the pain, but she couldn't think about the way she had pushed Amy and Michael from her life.

Billy's methods of drawing Casey back into reality had been much more successful. Though she knew they were ploys, she had to respect his ingenuity. At first, he brought the paper and kept it sticking out of his bag. Every few days, he'd watch the news while he folded laundry. But he only did it when Casey wasn't in the room. If she came in, he turned it off. Not abruptly as though it were forbidden, but always with some comment about the "crazies," or "stupid show," or "don't we have problems enough."

When he was on the phone, she would catch snippets of news from his conversations or from the radio while he cooked. Eventually, she lost interest in the novels she'd been devouring, growing hungry for real news.

Now she couldn't help but wonder what this local killer was doing. For years, she'd been enthralled with multiple serial offenders, studied them. It had been her life. The attack had killed that. But recently she felt the tentacles of her old life begin to puncture her fear and wrap around her again.

Billy leaned against the sink and dried his hands.

"Tell me about it," she said.

He glanced down at the magazine and furrowed his brow. "What?"

"This crazy fuck killing kids."

He shook his head, waving her off.

She pulled a piece of paper from a notepad on the counter. "I'm serious."

His eyes widened.

"Tell me, damn it," she snapped, smacking her pen on the table. She gripped it in her left hand, the way she had practiced, and poised to write.

Billy pulled a chair back and sat, crossing his foot over one knee. For more than a month, he had been trying to get her to tell him about her work for the Bureau. But she hadn't wanted to. It hadn't interested her. Suddenly, now, it was starting to.

"What do you want to know?"

"Start with the criminal act—everything you can remember."

"The criminal act?"

"Seven steps to profiling," she explained, shoving aside her own excited reaction at having an opportunity to explain what she had done as a profiler. She had loved it. "First step is evaluation of the criminal act—he killed children—how? What weapon did he use? That sort of thing."

"Okay, let's see."

She looked at the paper. "But not too fast. This left-hand shit is a royal pain in the ass."

"Nicely put."

"I was putting it politely. Do you want to hear the bad version?"

"That's not necessary." He crossed his hands in his lap and nodded. "Okay, let's see. He's killed two kids so far."

"Male or female?"

"Two girls."

"Race?"

"One was white, one was black."

Casey wrote as quickly as she could move the pen. "Doesn't sound like the same guy."

Billy looked down at her notepad. "Why not?"

"Not usual to have different races, especially not in child killings." She rolled her hand. "Keep going."

"Well, maybe the papers are wrong."

"How old were they?"

"The kids?"

She glared.

"Oh, let me think. About the same age, I guess. Ten or eleven."

"And the abduction?"

Billy nodded, remembering something. "Both from shopping areas."

"Malls, grocery stores, what?" she asked, feeling herself fall into the rhythm of a witness interrogation. She watched his body language, read his crossed leg, and remembered how a person's body language often told more than his words.

Billy glanced at the ceiling. "The first girl was in the Galleria Shopping Center on Sutter, I think. The second was taken from near Union Square."

"Where were the kids from?"

He furrowed his brow. "One was a tourist, I think—visiting from someplace like Michigan or Wisconsin—somewhere in the middle. I'm pretty sure the other grew up in the East Bay."

Casey continued writing. "How were they killed?"

Billy scrunched his nose. "Bled to death."

"Same M.O."

"What's an M.O.?"

"Don't you watch TV?"

Billy's eyes widened. "Not with violence."

"M.O. is modus operandi—how they kill. It tells you a lot about the killer's purpose. For instance, shooting someone is less common in sex crimes because it's not intimate. Drowning is very personal, especially if you have to hold them under versus throwing them off a boat with bricks tied to their feet. That's more execution-style. Regular drowning tends to be the result of personalized rage. Bleeding to death could be from stabbing wounds or gunshot wounds. It's not very specific."

Billy leaned forward, looking both enthralled and revolted. "Personalized?"

Casey nodded, smiling inside. People's response to her work had always run the spectrum from awe to fear and disgust. "Personalized means the killer's anger was directed at someone in particular, and he took his anger out on that person. Most killers attempt to depersonalize their victims by mutilating them. Allows them to avoid seeing them as people and treat them as objects instead."

"Oh, this guy did that, too."

She looked up from her notes. "Did what?"

He waved his hand. "Depersonalized them."

"Really? How?"

He raised his eyebrows and shook his head. "Some really strange stuff."

"Tell me."

"I don't remember the details. The kids were found wearing party hats."

Casey wrote down the words "party hats."

"That's not depersonalizing them. The party hats are more of a signature, something the killer does to stimulate his own satisfaction that isn't necessary for the crime. Both kids had party hats?"

He nodded. "So what do you think?"

"There's not enough to go on."

"Have you ever had a case like this before?"

She thought about Leonardo and his penchant for cutting people up. His victims had bled to death as well. She shook her head, pushing the thought away. "It doesn't work that way. This type of killer doesn't work by normal motives and reason. We can't base one case on a previous one that looked or felt similar."

"How do you do it, then?"

"You start with what this killer did. I'd get the specifics on the crime scene, the victim, police reports, and the medical examiner's report, and work through them in that order. Once I'd pieced it together, I could start developing a profile."

"Can you take a guess?"

She frowned. "Not really. I'm sure I'm missing too much information, but it doesn't seem to fit. His whole thing with the hats. That's clearly organized." Just like Leonardo had been. She suppressed the thought like nausea.

"What do you mean 'organized'?"

"An organized killer plans his captures and killings very carefully. Probably brings his own tools for the kidnapping, stages the bodies," she continued, looking at the few notes she had scribbled.

"And?"

She looked up to see Billy staring at her, wide-eyed. She shrugged and shook off the strange sensation that something wasn't right. "It's weird is all. It doesn't make sense for an organized killer to risk taking a child in a crowded place. Normally those sort of abductions are committed by someone who knows the child."

"You think he could know both children?"

She shrugged, downplaying the fact that Billy had just told her one was a tourist. If that bit of information was correct, it seemed virtually impossible that he could have known both children. "I'm sure the police are looking into it."

She looked back down at her notepad, frustrated at how little information she had. She wondered what the detective on the case was doing, how he or she was attacking the evidence. Suddenly, a tiny part of her ached to be back in the game.

Studying her notes again, she puzzled. Something wasn't adding up. The sensation reminded her of the Cincinnati case. The killer's methodology had been so mixed. It had taken them nearly three weeks to confirm all four killings had been the same killer. A chill jetted across her shoulders, leaving a tiny wake of shivers. She shook them off and pushed the paper away.

Dropping the pen, she began to stretch her already cramped fingers. It was a waste of time. She wasn't an FBI agent anymore. She would never be an agent again.

"Glad it's not my case," she said, sensing it was something less than the truth.

Savage Art

by

Danielle Girard

~

To purchase

Savage Art

from your favorite eBook Retailer,

visit Danielle Girard's eBook Discovery Author Page

www.ebookdiscovery.com/DanielleGirard

~

Discover more with

eBookDiscovery.com

As one of four children, Danielle Girard grew up in a house where the person with the best story got heard, and it’s probably no surprise that fast-paced suspense stories have always been her favorite. Girard’s books have won the Barry Award and been selected for the RT Reviewers Choice Award. Two of her novels have been optioned for movies. Visit her website at
www.daniellegirard.com
.
 

Table of Contents

Cover

Dedication

Acknowledgments

Prologue

Chapter 1