by Anna Leonard
“Go, do your thing,” Petrosian had said to him when they got out of the car. The cop hadn’t said it rudely, or mockingly, the way some did; more along the lines of “you do your thing and I’ll do my more productive thing.” Profiling was still looked at sideways and suspiciously by a lot of folk, especially outside the agency. Hell, Patrick knew that he occupied a strange sort of niche within the FBI hierarchy itself: he had a master’s in psychology, but he had never been interested in profiling, preferring to play a more active role in chasing down criminals. He might have had a very traditional career; fieldwork landing him in a desk job leading him all the way to retirement and possibly a teaching job after that, except that during his second year in the field he had discovered in himself an odd fascination for—and affinity for solving—a particular kind of crime, specifically animal mutilations, and the criminals who perpetrated them. Those acts, along with a few others, often heralded the beginning career of a serial killer.
A profiler got into the head of an unsub—bureauspeak for an unknown subject of an investigation. He tried to feel where they were going, mentally and emotionally, and sense how close they were to breaking out to human victims. Patrick was less interested in what went on in their heads than in the end result; the instinctive reaction response to that internal stimulus. His skill might have ended up simply as a side talent, except that he was very very good at finding those patterns, even where none seemed to exist. And so, whenever a case with certain elements—domestic animals, ritualistic injury—came up in the reports, the agency tapped him to immediately take a look. Catch an unsub when he was still targeting animals, and save human lives later.
That was the theory, anyway. There was no quantitative proof either way. It could all be hand-waving and luck.
Patrick had, in self-defense, come up with his own theories about sociopaths and the making thereof. Forget the psychology, the biochemistry, the sociology. Jon Patrick was a believer in intent. Not that someone chose to be a stone-cold killer, but that they always had a trigger, something to make all the parts come together from where they lay latent in every single human being.
He focused on the ritual aspect rather than the actual violence—violence was universal in the end, while the steps chosen to get there were individual. Identify a strain of ritual, and determine where that particular mind might go, criminally. Find the pattern break the pattern and prevent a killer from being born.
The problem was that, without enough distinct data points to prove or disprove his ideas, he couldn’t get anyone to take them seriously. And being taken seriously was what Agent Jon T. Patrick was all about. Being taken seriously, and getting serious results.
He was damn good at his job, though, and even if his ideas were unsubstantiated, his results were getting him some notice at higher levels; the bureau cared less about theory than they did about getting results they could use. The suits back in D.C. were marking him as a player of note, and Patrick had goals above and beyond being a field agent with nightmare memories and a passable retirement package at the end. Ambition, to him, wasn’t a dirty word.
His career, if he didn’t screw up, was looking good. It was all good.
This, though…this wasn’t good. He made a circuit of the scene, aware of the technician taking additional photographs and jotting down measurements, observations and verified facts. Good—he would need the daylight shots, too. He knelt beside the small, still bodies, careful not to disturb the black cloth or the blood splatter around it, and pulled a pair of latex gloves from a pocket, sliding them onto his hands His last girlfriend had referred to them as fingercondoms. He had been amused by that: a pity that had been the extent of her sense of humor.
“Poor moggies,” he said again, reaching out to touch one of the bodies. The flesh was firm even in death, meat and muscle over the ribs. The cats hadn’t been abused before being killed. Small mercies. But that put a different spin on the scene, and his unsub. Usually animals were tortured before they were killed. It was all about power in most cases. Power, control, authority. To kill animals that, although helpless, were undamaged, especially in such a methodical, almost ritualistic manner? All it lacked was an athame—a ritual knife—and some candles, and the press would be screaming black magic.
He didn’t believe in magic, black, white, pink or polka-dot. He did believe in the power of belief, though. Believe something, and you could take power from it. Believe in it strongly enough, and it took power over you.
Normal people with normal emotions didn’t kill small cute cuddly animals. This killer was bent at best, and possibly a textbook sociopath, working his way up to more of a challenge.
Despite the violence inherent in the act, though, Patrick got the feeling that this guy wasn’t acting out of unformed rage or irrational fear. He wasn’t striking out in any desperate attempt to be heard, or regain control or any of the usual textbook profiles. There was a cooler, more rational mind behind this. A mind with a list, maybe, or a plan.
Intent. What was his intent? What triggered him to take cats, care for them, kill them, arrange them this way and then just leave them here?
“Is this guy just your everyday boring psycho-nutter,” he said, sitting back on his heels and looking at the bodies. “Or is there something else going on? And if so, what? Where is he coming from, that this is a logical progression?”
What he wouldn’t give to be able to talk to this guy, to unpack his brain and see where the wires went and which ones were crossed….
A noise behind him made him look away, up and toward the door to the backroom. Petrosian and the woman—Malkin—were coming back. The cop looked a little grim around the mouth, issuing soft-voiced directions to the painfully young uniform who had been first on the scene. Ms. Malkin—he tried to read her expression, and failed utterly. It was as though a stone wall had come up, leaving him no opening to see through. Even his charm might not be enough to win her back, if he needed her help with this case.
Then she looked up, and he almost recoiled. Even under the fluorescent lights overhead, there was no mistaking the fury in those wide-set eyes. He had never bought into that whole cliché of flashing or sparkling eyes—eyes were just bits of meat and veins, and they did not shoot anything except glares.
But he would have sworn an oath that Ms. Lily Malkin’s hazel eyes filled with dangerous green sparks as she stared at the dead cats under his hand.
It was scary. It was also, he admitted to himself, pretty damn hot.
Chapter 2
Lily had gone outside to get some fresh air. She was waiting there, watching the cops canvassing the neighborhood, when Patrick and Petrosian finally came out. It was close to 4:00 p.m., and dusk was falling. She loved winter, but getting to it…Autumn just depressed her. She shivered, crossing her arms over her chest, less from the evening chill than the inner one. The spark of attraction that had warmed her earlier was long gone.
She tilted her head, looking for the first evening star. It was an old habit from her childhood, stargazing. But no matter how many times she looked, however much she read about constellations, the sky never seemed quite right to her, the ancient drawings in the sky never familiar. She kept looking, hoping that one night the patterns would suddenly make sense to her. They never did. They didn’t tonight.
“Sorry, took longer than I expected,” Petrosian said, breaking her concentration. “I just need you to give a report, and then you’re done. Okay?”
Normally she did whatever they needed her to do, and went home, or took the cats involved to the shelter for processing. This was different. Everything about this was different. Knowing that there were people who were cruel, who could do things like that; it was different actually seeing it. Experiencing it.
It made her ingrained distrust of the world suddenly seem like a good idea, not a handicap.
“Lily?” Petrosian was watching her, his careworn face filled with regret. “I’m sorry. I needed you to go in without any knowledge beforehand�
��.” He had apologized more to her tonight than in all the time they had known each other.
Aggie and his daughter, Jenny, had adopted three cats from the shelter, two since she had worked there. Max, a red tabby, and Wilma, a calico shorthair. He had been the one to suggest her name when the department first needed a cat expert and had been her contact person ever since then. He knew more about her, simply through observation, than even members of her own family. He knew what he had asked her to do.
“Yeah. Me, too. Sorry, I mean.” Only she wasn’t sorry. She was angry. But without knowing where to direct that anger, it weighed her down and simply made her tired. And cold. The crisp night air seemed to cut into her bones. “It’s okay, Aggie.” No, it wasn’t.
It was very much not okay. But it wasn’t Augustus Petrosian’s fault. “Let’s go.”
There were two police stations in Newfield, one uptown and one down. There was a substation, Lily knew, that was closer, but Petrosian took them to the uptown station instead. Agent Patrick excused himself the moment they arrived to make a phone call, and the detective handed her over to a sketch artist, a tall, rounded woman with a ready smile and ink stains on her fingers and a smudge on her freckled snub nose that made her look too young to be working in the police department. She introduced herself as Julia, and brought Lily to a square table in a small room off the main hallway, out of the flow of traffic. There wasn’t a door to the room, but the chatter, slams and creaks of station activity flowed around them, turning into a babble of white noise.
“All right. Detective Petrosian says you’ve got a scene for me?”
“I thought sketch artists did faces?” Lily didn’t really care, she felt too exhausted by what she had seen to worry about anything else, but it made for conversation. Conversation was easier than thinking. Kinder than thinking.
“Mostly, yeah. But we do whatever it takes to close a case, same as everyone else here. So. What’ve you got for me?”
So much for not thinking. Worse, they wanted her to remember.
Lily sat down at the table, in the chair Julia indicated, and closed her eyes. She had thought—had hoped—that once away from the site, the visual would fade. But the moment she shut out the distractions around her, it came back, and she began to describe it, slowly, trying to hit as many details as possible. Something stuck in her throat as she talked, and hurt, like it was hard-edged and heavy, and the more she talked, the worse it became.
“All right. I think I’ve got it.”
Julia’s voice seemed to come from far away, down a long tunnel. Lily opened her eyes, resurfacing into the noise and bustle of the police station. Julia was putting down her pencils and Agent Patrick was standing behind her, looking down at the sketch with a fascinated expression.
“This is what you saw?”
Lily frowned, confused by his question. He had been there, why was he so surprised? Julia turned the pad around and slid it across the table so that she could see. It was the cattery, but not abandoned now. Each cage was filled with four or five shadowy bodies: adult cats in some and kittens in others, almost all of them with dappled coats. Dishes overflowed with dried kibble, and water was slopped carelessly onto the counters. There was a figure in the middle of the room, but so roughly drawn that it was impossible to determine if it was male or female. Tall and lean: hunched over slightly as though expecting a blow.
“You saw this?” Agent Patrick asked again, his voice intent on the question. She responded almost unwillingly to the urgency in his voice.
“No. Not really. The room was empty.” He knew that. He had been there, too.
“But you described it. Every detail.” His voice wasn’t exactly doubting, but it was skeptical that she could have managed it without prior knowledge, something she wasn’t telling them.
Lily was too shocked to take offense. She looked at Julia, who nodded. “I don’t add anything the witness doesn’t tell me, not until we go to the next stage. Everything there’s what you told me to put down.”
Lily looked at the sheet again, and a sense of familiarity moved through her. Yes. This was what the room looked like. The cats, restless and calling each other. The figure moving among them, taking them away and—sometimes—bringing them back. The smells of food and urine against the stainless steel of the cages, the hint of antiseptic…
There was no way she could know any of that. But she did. As much as she knew anything that happened today. She could even pick out the shadowed forms of the cats that had been selected for death, there, in the far cage, segregated from the others.
“You psychic?” Agent Patrick’s voice had evened out, not making judgments in a way they had to teach in the academy. “Humor the crazy person, and then disarm them” would have been the motto of that class, no doubt. He probably got an A. It should have rankled, but looking at the sketches, Lily just felt tired. He was only doing his job, and part of that job was to doubt everything.
“No.” She looked at him, then down at the drawing again. “It was just how everything was laid out. This is the only way it could have been.”
That didn’t satisfy him, she could feel it in his gaze, in the way he looked at her, and then at the sketch, and then at her again. He didn’t accuse her of lying, but he didn’t quite believe her, either.
She couldn’t explain it. She couldn’t prove it was true, what she described. But it was.
“All spotted cats,” Julia noted.
“Yes.” She was certain of that, too.
“Tabbies, mostly. The slaughtered animals here had white paws. How common is that?” Patrick was staring intently at the drawing, clearly trying to work something out in his mind. He had put aside the question of her accuracy, and was working with the available evidence, no matter how dubious.
“What, mitting?” Lily said. “It’s pretty common, no matter what the coat’s color. Especially if he’d been breeding them—there weren’t that many queens in the room, so the gene pool was small.”
“Queens?” Julia asked.
“Breeding females,” Patrick said, surprising Lily with his knowledge. “A queen can breed every four months, anywhere from three to seven kittens in a litter.”
For a moment, Lily felt that spark running between the two of them again, a spark that had nothing to do with his dark eyes or undeniably masculine appeal—or his interest in her. A cat person. Or at least, one who had done his homework. That tied in to the feeling she had gotten from him at the scene: that he saw more than statistics and splatter.
Aggie had said the agent focused on animal abuse cases, something about him psychoanalyzing killers the way they did on TV shows. But that made her wonder—why was an FBI agent, a profiler, investigating something like this? What made cats important enough to interest a federal agency?
Suddenly Lily felt herself deflate. Of course he was interested in her, a cat person. It was part of his job. Well, that was what she was here for; to help him, however she could, to catch this guy.
“He—whoever was doing this—didn’t have more than three queens in the room, from the size of the cages. But a lot of kittens. You think he was trying to breed for a particular color?” Lily had never really thought about the genetic side of cats before; all she knew about different colors was what was more popular among adopters.
He shrugged. “I’m not ruling out any theories at this point.”
“And what is that point, exactly?” Why are you here? she meant.
Julia touched the sheet, the motion drawing their attention. “I’m sorry. I need to run this over to the detective. Lily, if you want to wait, I can make sure an officer—”
“I’ll make sure Ms. Malkin gets home safely,” Patrick said, cutting Julia off, and then smiling at her to soften his rudeness. “I’d like to ask her a few more questions first, if we can use this desk?”
“Yeah, sure.” Julia seemed flustered at being the focus of his attention, which Lily thought was odd, but then the artist gathered herself back into professi
onal mode. “Will you want a copy of the sketch?”
“That would be wonderful, thank you.”
Lily watched Julia’s slender white hands gather up her pencils and the sketch, then disappear into the swirl of noise around them. Somehow, it seemed distant from her, even now. She had known about the queens, the female cats. How? How could she have known anything she had told Julia to draw? Extrapolation from a few cages and a smell could only go so far, but—
But, stop, she told herself, feeling the old, familiar, unwanted distress crawling back. Stop. Breathe, Lily. Breathe in through the mouth, out through the nose. Breathe, and be still. A lifetime of dealing with panic attacks—she might not need the technique on a daily basis anymore, but it still did the job. Her anxiety level dropped until she felt as if she could manage again.
“Why is the FBI investigating this?” she asked, once her breathing was under control.
“We have varied interests,” Patrick said, sliding into Julia’s seat with a grace that belonged to a more slender man. If he noticed her momentary distress, he didn’t mention it. “Why do they call you the cat talker?”
She shook her head, too worn-out to be either angry or amused at his evasion or the appearance of her hated nickname. “Who told you that?”
“One of the uniforms. Said you could talk to anything feline, get it to do what you wanted.”
“Anyone who said that knows nothing about cats.” Lily looked up finally, and in doing so was caught again by Agent Patrick’s gaze. Dark, yes, and intense, yes, and totally focused entirely on her, in a scary-nice sort of way. Oh. So that was what he’d done to the sketch artist. You could get lost in those eyes, just watching them watch you. It made her nervous. Something, hell everything about him was making her nervous. Like he thought she was one of his suspects, someone to be interrogated, bullied and pushed around.
“Oh?” His tone was smooth, inviting; much smoother than the look in his eyes. That voice was another thing the FBI probably issued its agents on their first day on the job, to go with the suits. And the guns, although she hadn’t seen Patrick’s yet. She didn’t doubt he carried one. There was something about him. That intensity, it had a purpose beyond getting answers. Or undressing women visually. She had seen it before; he was a man with a long-term goal, and Lord help the person who got in the way.