Which also made it difficult to prosecute him.
But in each, he made a mistake that it was clear he didn’t know he was making.
He called his victims “poodle” as he was violating them.
I’d considered writing a book based loosely on him, but I didn’t get too deep into research before I gave up on it. It was far too disturbing, and I didn’t want to have any hand in lionizing those behaviors. Obviously, I wouldn’t have written it like that. But what many find distressing, others could find titillating, and I didn’t want to play a part in that.
I made another mental note: Get down to Googling Bohannan.
But since I was sitting on the man himself…
“You profiled Catlin?” I asked.
“I investigated a lot of crime and profiled a lot of people when I was with the Bureau, baby. I was with them for seventeen years.”
“Right,” I said.
“I don’t read any of that shit. The mail the FBI receives for me. They get it. They open it. They catalog it. They flag anything that needs flagged. They tell me if there’s something I need to know. Now I’m reading it. All of it.”
“Fabulous,” I muttered.
“If it helps us find this guy, I don’t give a fuck,” he said.
“Of course,” I replied, then asked, “Have you been able to profile him, even a little?”
Not a second passed before Bohannan launched in.
“He’s intelligent. He might be ex-military, but that’s doubtful. He won’t like being told what to do, and he’ll take pains to guard against anything he might fail at and washing out of the military because he doesn’t respect authority will not be on his agenda. Also, there might be too much competition there. Too many things to excel at, someone is going to be better at something than him, and he can’t have that. He doesn’t work well with his attention scattered. Eye on one goal. Though it could be a lesson he learned along the way. More likely, he grew up hunting and spending a lot of time outdoors.”
He took a breath.
And kept going.
“He’s definitely killed, but not messing with easy targets, like a family pet. It’d be about the hunt. The quest. The test. Big game. Bears. Nice trophies. Wolves or big cats. He’s fit. He’s adaptable. He’s accomplished. He was a star athlete. He’s an excellent marksman or a prize-winning fisherman or a successful bonds trader, all of those or none of those. He’s good at not just something, but a lot of somethings. He’s bested people who thought they were better than him. Every challenge he’s found and surpassed hasn’t done it for him. So he’s pursued bigger ones. More extreme ones. He has no interest in the kill, except for the response it will garner in me. He intends to play against me until he breaks me, publicly humiliates me or makes me give up, and then he’ll move on to a bigger, more extreme challenge.”
I was struck dumb, for a number of reasons.
That was good, because Bohannan wasn’t finished.
“He has no sexual problems, though he might be into domination, but maybe not the good kind. That said, he won’t cross a line. He’ll find partners who get deep like he does, and he’ll get explicit consent. That is not going to be the misstep he makes. Women are easy prey, so he fulfills his base instincts and gets off on games. He’s young. Not in his twenties, probably mid-thirties, which intensifies his feeling of superiority, tasting so much success at his age. Even if he rigs the game by focusing solely and obsessively on only one thing at one time. Though he could be in his early forties, but not older. He’s likely attractive. Probably very much so. He had a functional family who was proud of him, maybe too proud. But it isn’t on them. He was born not wired right.”
Holy cow.
That was a lot.
And he still wasn’t done.
“The next kill won’t be soon. I hope to fuck I’m right, but we got time. He’s savoring this. Getting off on every second. Every reaction. He wants to prolong it. He wants the suspense. He wants the control. He’s not from Misted Pines. He’s not local. But he’s here and he came for me. Besting me on my turf is not only part of the kick, besting unknown terrain is an added bonus. Making it even better, he’s not unaware of the shit he’s stirring. He was at the meeting at the city chambers. He’s managed to get his hands on every one of those videos. He could have even been watching as that party in the woods turned bad. He’s loving it. He’s not the puppet master. He’s making himself a god. And that’s what he needs.”
When he stopped talking and didn’t start again, I noted, “So, you don’t have a little profile, you have a profile.”
The beard twitched up again.
“You left that town meeting because you didn’t want to feed his ego,” I surmised.
He dipped his chin. “He got off on that circus. He wanted me to watch. Wanted to watch me do it. But I’m not a puppet and he’s not my god.”
I decided not to dig deeper into that because it gave me the serious heebie-jeebies knowing the killer was there, with all of us, the entire town, but more specifically, anywhere near Celeste, Jess, Jace, me…and he was there to watch not only what he’d wrought, but Bohannan.
“More extreme challenge than becoming a serial killer so people will hunt him like he’s a serial killer?” I asked.
“He’s already figuring out what’s next when he beats me, and he’s assured he’s gonna beat me. He’ll flip that coin. He’s made himself prey. His next challenge, he’ll be the hunter. And he won’t be after eight-year-old girls or college freshmen.”
I shuddered.
Bohannan wrapped his arms around me, pulled me close and watched me closer.
“You get, he’s probably watching. And I’m not talking about just the town council meeting.”
Oh, I got that.
I’d been completely in denial about it.
But I got it.
Bohannan gave me a squeeze.
“If the last couple of days were days he watched, it’s driving him fucking crazy I’m more interested in stringing your lights than breaking my back trying to find him. Jace and Jess too. They’re bonuses for him that might even be why he picked me. I trained my boys and they’re good at what they do. We’re a great team. So if he beats me, he doesn’t just beat me. He beats an entire team. Men, real men in his estimation. Typical alphas, who, once he takes us down, will make him leader of the pack.”
“Will he…” God, I didn’t want to think it, much less say it. But I had to know the answer. “…get frustrated and target you or one of the twins another way?”
“That would be a cheat. I matter to him. Jace and Jess do too. Alice didn’t matter. She was a laboratory mouse. An experiment. What he did to her was gruesome, but inexpert. Malorie didn’t matter. She was a pawn, important to the game, but easily expendable. Though, this isn’t chess. He’s not guarding his king by sacrificing his queens. This is a duel. He thrusts, I’m supposed to parry, until he forces me to thrust, and he parries.”
One could say he had a definite handle on that.
But this brought us to something else I wanted to know about.
“What do, um…Jace and Jess…do?”
“I think you realize there’s not a soul on this planet who won’t open up to one of them.”
I blinked.
“They’re the best investigators, and interrogators, I’ve ever come across. And I don’t take credit for that. They just had that in them. I was a decent investigator. I can get a bead, and I’m a trained profiler, so I didn’t suck at interrogating, but I’m intimidating, and that never helped. Profiling was my gig. I found a home in it, for better or worse. But you got a witness who doesn’t want to talk, Jace or Jess will get them comfortable. You sniffed out your last line of inquiry and are stumped, Jace or Jess will look at what you got and find three new trails to go down. I taught them what I know, and they just ran with it in ways I’d never guess. It’s fuckin’ uncanny.”
I was careful when I asked, “Why don’t they become police or follo
w in your footsteps and join the FBI?”
“Because they make four times as much as consultants than they would if they had a badge.”
I raised my brows. “So they’re twenty-seven-year-old investigative hotshots with utterly no official law enforcement training or experience?”
“You can spark a kid’s curiosity in a lot of ways, Larue,” he replied. “My father used to make me explain Confucius quotes to him. He’d get pissed and shout at me if I didn’t understand it. ‘A lion chased me up a tree, and I greatly enjoyed the view from the top.’ Great quote. Two lessons. Be calm and get in a good position to reflect on your problem. Above all, stay positive. Or think of your competition like lions, use them to drive you to the top, and take time to revel in your success. No way I’m gonna figure that out when I’m nine.”
Nine?
I winced.
“‘If you’re the smartest person in the room, you’re in the wrong room,’” Bohannan continued. “I did the same thing with my boys. I didn’t fire Confucius at them and make them explain it to me. I taught them Confucius, and that there were other great minds out there they could learn from. And in teaching them, I made them hungry to learn. They learned. They keep learning. And they know, when they’re the smartest in the room, they need to find another room.”
“So you figure one day, they’ll leave you,” I noted quietly.
“I hope one day they will, so they can keep learning. And keep helping people.”
“Outside multiple betrayals, a divorce and a decade and a half, there’s another reason I’m over my ex,” I told him.
Knowing what was coming (he could hardly miss it, but also, I was suspecting he was kind of a genius, so he wouldn’t), he started sliding back down on the bed, again taking me with him.
“Yeah?” he asked. “What’s that?”
“I’m kinda falling in love with another guy,” I told him.
He rolled us so he was on top.
“I know him?”
“He’s the smartest one in the room.”
His nostrils flared.
His head dropped.
He kissed me.
Later, when we were both naked, and he was moving inside me, slowly, his mouth on mine, one of my hands in his hair, the other one clenching his ass, my knees high, my thighs hugging him, I understood my man, who was good with both actions and words, was giving me actions now.
He was making love to me because he was falling in love with me too.
This was great.
This was marvelous.
This gave him my June Cleaver act for at least until they caught this killer, and then we’d be figuring out if Bohannan could cook too.
And it would have remained great and marvelous if my phone hadn’t started ringing.
No one got through but a select few, and none of those select few had any reason to phone me at that hour.
Unless it was important.
Or an emergency.
Shit.
Bohannan knew this, so he reached for my phone and took it from the charge pad I’d set up on what was now my nightstand.
“Fenn,” he muttered.
I wasn’t going to talk to my daughter with my man inside me, and he knew that.
So he slid out, rolled to his back, tucked me to his side, and I took the call.
“Hey, lovely, everything okay?” I greeted.
“Okay, Mom,” she said cautiously. “I’m gonna send you a link but I wanted to phone you before instead of springing it on you in a text.”
My eyes found Bohannan’s.
His brows knitted ominously.
“What?” I asked.
“Well, your secret is out about your new home among the pines. And the killings are no longer a local story. And your relationship with the famous profiler handling them isn’t either. And…uh…” a loaded beat, “did you know Cade is married?”
Well.
Shit.
Forty-Five
Heart to Hearts
We both put our pajamas back on before I opened my texts to grab the link Fenn sent.
And I sent it to Bohannan so he could read it with me.
I was two paragraphs in when he bit off, “Fucking Dern.”
And yes.
The article had Dern written all over it.
Evidence of that was that it alluded to the fact I’d picked Misted Pines to escape my stalker because I’d found it safe, due to his reputation as a stalwart law enforcement officer who ran a tight ship.
Sadly, a miracle had not happened, and Bob Welsh’s activities didn’t fly under media radar. Those activities were far too shocking and involved far too many famous people for that ever to happen.
Therefore, it wasn’t lost on me Bob Welsh had garnered no small amount of media fascination because of what he did and why he did it.
But for the most part, Alicia and Russ weathered that storm not only because they came home and were accessible, but because both of them were far more famous than me. Though they did it by making no comment (Michael used it to get himself a few television interviews).
I was in Misted Pines, and no one knew I was there (until now), not to mention I had other things going on. Although I kept my finger on the pulse, stayed in touch with Alicia and Russ, Agent Palmer kept me informed if I needed to be, and Welsh’s two victims frequently came to mind, I hoped they were doing all right and was poised to help if asked, it didn’t really faze me.
And as with everything like that, once the bloom went off the rose of that story, it disappeared and would probably not reappear (because he’d pleaded guilty and would not stand trial) until (or if) one of the women came forward to tell their story or when someone got hold of it to do a documentary and/or movie for Netflix.
So even though, for all involved, one way or another, that would never be done, for all intents and purposes (for now), it was.
To be honest, the fact I was in Misted Pines wasn’t very interesting.
The fact, after over a decade of being single and meticulously guarding my privacy, I’d hooked up with a lauded ex-FBI profiler who was helping with the local case of the deaths of two girls…
And that profiler looked like Bohannan.
That was going to be an issue.
But Bob Welsh wasn’t the first time I’d learned the lesson that the twenty-four-hour news cycle was perhaps one of the top (if not the top) detrimental things to happen in society in the last few decades.
There was just not that much news.
Since there wasn’t, you had to make that much news.
And when you couldn’t make it, you had to have someone talking about it. Which spawned more interview shows than there were people who were interesting enough to be interviewed (so you had to make them interesting), and talking head news commentary shows, both of which existed mostly to tell people what to think.
When people should think for themselves.
Or alternately pay more attention to living their own lives.
So in the end, I knew Leland Dern’s desperate ploy to save face and attempt to convince the few supporters he had left that he was who he wanted them to believe he was would be an annoyance for Bohannan and me.
But it would be brief.
Bohannan tossed his phone on his nightstand before I got to the end (so he was also a speed reader) and he had his palms to his forehead when I was done.
“Okay, honey, now I’m the expert in this, so you get to listen to me.”
He dropped his hands, turned his head and studied me…no, examined me, like he didn’t know what species I was.
Then again, he didn’t get this.
Sure, he had books written about his profiling prowess.
But he didn’t have TMZ sniffing around constantly.
“This will be a thing. A day. Two. That’s it,” I shared. “I’m not a public person anymore. Not really. No one knows I publish books. I’m known. I’m a fascination. I get it at the same time I don’t. It’s a nuisance. B
ut whenever some interest in me crops up, it passes quickly. In other words, this, too, shall pass. We just live our lives like normal and in no time, it’ll go away.”
I scooted to him and put my hand on his chest.
“Honestly. I don’t even have a PR person anymore. I never engage, and if you don’t give them something to devour, it starves the insatiable beast and they can’t have that happen, so they go away to find something else to make a meal of, and it never gets to be a big deal. We won’t engage, and they’ll go away.”
“When you file for divorce, shit comes of that, Larue,” was his weird reply. “You can be combative and have mediation. You can go at each other and end up in court. But you file for divorce, and you get divorced. If you don’t get divorced, you sue for divorce.”
“I’ve been divorced twice, Bohannan,” I reminded him. “California law and Washington state law are probably very different, but still, I know the drill too well.”
“She refused mediation. She refused to even get an attorney. I sent papers, she didn’t sign them. I served her with papers, she didn’t sign those either. It was going to end up in court. I called her, she said she wouldn’t show. I can’t divorce her in absentia, I know where she is. She doesn’t have to agree to divorce me, but she has to agree to the legal and financial shit. I honestly didn’t know if it was going to get ugly or just take time and money. In the end, I got pissed and thought, fuck it. She likes male attention, that’s what our damage was all about. I wasn’t looking for anybody. But she was going to find someone to give it to her, and if that got serious, she’d get serious about divorcing me. Before that happened, I didn’t know Nance was gonna kick it and some hot chick with a stalker was gonna buy his house and lay claim to me.”
“Hot chick with a stalker?” I teased.
I knew in an instant he wasn’t feeling playful.
The Girl in the Mist: A Misted Pines Novel Page 26