Dodd was already kneeling next to the body. He didn’t touch it, but instead, pulled an ink pen from his pocket and held it across from the gunshot wounds, conducting some strange assessment that only made sense to him.
“The UNSUB’s getting better at shooting these days. Maybe you should check for recent frequenters of the gun range,” a new voice said.
Jenna looked up from the body to see Victor Ellis stepping through the bedroom door.
“What brings you staties here?” she asked.
“Eh, just in the neighborhood, tired of playing with my radar gun. You know . . .”
“You say that like you’re joking,” Jenna sparred.
“Well, only partly. Call came in, we were closest. Bam.” He tilted his head toward Pesha Josephy’s body. “She’s yours, isn’t she?”
Well, that’s one way to put it.
“Yeah, it would seem.” Jenna glanced over at the man in the power tie who was slowly rocking himself on the couch. She took a step toward Victor so she could speak more softly. “What about him?”
“Her partner. An affair. He’s scared shitless. He’ll tell you anything you want to know,” he said. “You can look closer at him if you’re worried this might be a crime of passion and copycatted to look like a Triple Shooter victim, but it’s not. First of all, this guy has as much stomach to shoot anyone as I did when I was four. Second, check this out.”
Victor led Jenna toward the table where the TV stood. He picked up a pair of evidence bags. “Already bagged and tagged, though it’s a little tainted since Power Tie over there ripped them off during his distraught attempt at figuring out whether or not his lovable little mistress might still be breathing, but I knew you’d want to see them. Over the eyes.”
Jenna held the bag up so she could better identify the objects inside. One was a price tag off of a knit skirt that had cost Pesha forty of the last dollars she’d spent.
She squinted into the second bag, trying to identify the contents. It was another tag, one cut out of a garment. She pushed away the purple color trying to flash in, mostly because she wasn’t ready to make sense of it. Not yet.
“I don’t get it,” she said. “Where are the threes?”
“Good question. Come look at this,” Victor said.
Jenna followed him into the bedroom. On the nightstand lay a coral-colored clutch purse. Its clasp was silver—a straight bar that curved gently at the edges, three bars beneath it arranged in such a way that the shape formed was clearly some sort of an emblem, even if she’d never seen it before.
“The skirt those tags were pulled from was draped over the chair here,” Victor said, gesturing toward the corner armchair. “Prince Charming in there says Pesha brought in some packages the day before yesterday. She’d done some online shopping, and she’d picked up her purchases from the post office box they were shipped to. He claims she opened the packages and gave the items the once-over. She switched everything from her old purse to that new clutch immediately and started using her new one, but the skirt she laid there on the chair, and she hadn’t touched it since. She apparently couldn’t take it home because she was planning to wear it for a heavy date of theirs, and it was supposed to be just for Mr. Man-on-the-Side. Sweet, huh?”
“How long have they had this room?”
“For about a week,” Victor said. “And it would seem they use it, um, regularly.”
Jenna glanced to the unmade bed, the sheets twisted and furled like they’d had a fight with a gorilla.
“I’ll say. So just the purse and the skirt, then?” she replied. “Usually there are three . . .”
“You didn’t look real close at those tags, did you, Hardass?”
Jenna pictured the tags in their little plastic baggies again, held them in her mind. She couldn’t place what he was talking about though. The price tag had definitely been $39.99.
“What am I missing, Hotshot?” she said, humoring him.
“The skirt. It was from Trinity Place Department Store.”
Whoa.
“I’ve never heard of it. Where is it?”
“New York City,” Victor replied.
“You’re kidding.”
He grinned. “I never kid about fashion.”
When he smiled, the same little lines around his eyes appeared as they had on Hank. Whatever she and Hank had been through, she missed him. Way more than she’d realized she would.
And if she missed him, she could only imagine how his absence would affect Ayana’s whole life. It wasn’t fair how the world picked and chose who to take away and who to leave and let live. Jenna had seen some of the worst monsters imaginable make it from day to day, but kids like Ayana and Molly didn’t have birth fathers in their lives at all. Whatever else was true about her and Hank’s relationship, kids deserved a chance to know their fathers as long as they weren’t just like Claudia.
Victor shrugged. “You can order from anywhere online these days, I guess.”
But Jenna was only half listening, a thought of her own taking shape. If the items that caused the three alignment had been purchased online, the Triple Shooter couldn’t have seen Pesha Josephy buy them in the store of threes—Trinity Place—then followed her to see if she’d committed some immoral act. This time, the MO seemed backward.
“Did he know these two were playing married hanky-panky on the side and then look for the threes?” Jenna muttered to herself, pacing the room. So far it seemed the only way to explain this, but the change in process was so huge that she had no idea what to make of it. Surely not . . .
“She didn’t open the packages that gave the alignment of threes until she was here. The skirt—and its two tags that seemingly made up two of the triggering grouping of threes that caused the UNSUB to unleash on her—never left this room. So even though the purse did, we don’t have the right batch of threes. They might fit incidentally, and he might’ve noticed this and used the tags because he had them on hand, but the threes that never left this hotel room aren’t the ones that set him off,” Jenna said, still pacing.
Her eyes roved every inch of the room as she begged them to hone in on the real culprit that had acted as a flag to bring the monster to this place. Industrial sheets, white towels. None of this had been outside the hotel, either.
Jenna’s gaze again landed on the coral purse with the three bars—three bars that could very well have acted as one of the group of threes that led the Triple Shooter here. She turned to look at the nervous businessman still whimpering and rocking himself on the small couch.
“You said she carried that purse places, right?” she asked.
He nodded hard.
“Okay,” Jenna said, and she grabbed a pair of latex gloves from the box CSI had set on the nightstand. She snapped them on, then picked up the coral clutch, popped it open. She sifted through its contents: driver’s license, debit card, more credit cards than any human should have, a tube of mauve lipstick, a lambskin condom, a vial of eye drops. A circular birth control pill pack. A few dollar bills.
Then she saw a crumpled paper wedged along with a couple of empty gum wrappers under a fine-tooth comb. Jenna snagged it and straightened it out. A deposit slip. A deposit slip dated only a few days ago.
Jenna’s head snapped toward the late Pesha Josephy’s married lover. “What bank did she use?”
“Huh?” the guy said, mouth gaping like she’d just asked him to subtract Ringo Starr from Blue and then multiply the answer by cats.
“Pesha. Your girlfriend, Pesha. What bank did she go to?”
He pressed both palms over his face, squeezing the sides of his head like he was in pain. “Gah, oh man. I know this. I know this . . . ah! It was the All Trust.”
Jenna’s pulse quickened. “Which branch?”
The guy grimaced again as he forced his brain to try to extract the information. He snapp
ed his fingers. “Third Street. I’m pretty sure it was on Third Street.”
Three-bar purse at a bank on Third Street. That’s two.
Jenna whipped out her cell phone and dialed Irv.
“And what can I do for my Crayola Wonder today?” the tech analyst answered.
“Get me all security footage from the All Trust Bank on Third Street, inside and out. I’m texting you a picture of, I’m sorry, a dead girl—”
“Aw, come on! You know I stay in this computer room because the bad guys scare me,” Irv cut in.
“Irv, you stay in there because it’s air-conditioned and you can play computer games during your downtime,” Jenna sniped.
“That, too, but I do like it here better. Okay, send me the girl’s last headshot and I’ll find any shots of her in the security footage. Anything else?”
Jenna paused a second, bit her lip. It was worth a try anyway. “Yeah. See if anyone around her seems suspicious—watching her or anything like that. Then cross-reference those images with the ones from the Student Life Center surveillance footage from the college and let me know if you happen to notice if we have any characters who just happen to haunt both areas.”
“Long shot,” Irv replied.
“Everything is in this case,” she said.
“In every case,” Irv said, and he hung up.
“I’m guessing we’ll find another three at that bank,” Jenna said to Dodd. “But if he saw the threes at the bank, why the tags over the eyes?”
The bizarre purple that kept trying to crop up throughout the case—here, at the grocery store—flashed in again, and the picture of the tags as she’d just imagined them burned in her mind. Suddenly the purple clicked into place. “Victor. The tags. I need to see them again.”
“Sure thing,” he said, and he extended a hand as if to say “After you.”
She rushed back into the sitting room and snatched up the first evidence bag. Sure enough, there on the tag it said SIZE SEVEN.
Before she even reexamined the other tag, she was already sure what it would say. But, there it was, as plain as could be. Seven.
Without explaining, she yanked out her phone and speed-dialed Irv. Her veins filled with ice, and for the first time in a long time, she was genuinely afraid.
“Yellow, Jell-O, mellow. What else dost thou have for me?” Irv answered.
“Irv, when you’re done with the other stuff I need you to look into the other Triple Shooter victims, and pass along word to Saleda, Teva, and Porter to start digging, too. Find out if the other victims—the single victims, not the grocery store—had a seven involved with their deaths anywhere. The number seven.”
She only half listened to his assent, too busy paying attention to the drumming of her own heartbeat in her ears. She didn’t know what the third three the Triple Shooter had seen was, but now that the purple she’d been seeing for so many days without recognizing it had finally manifested into a clear-cut association, none of that mattered.
Seven. Jenna associated the number seven with this very purple she’d seen. There’d been seven victims at the grocery store. The Triple Shooter had deliberately stopped at the seventh, but he hadn’t killed his intended target. Now here were sevens again, and she was almost sure that when the team dug into his past victims, they’d find sevens hidden in the scenes or circumstances there, too. This killer wasn’t only preoccupied with the number three. He was seven-obsessed, too.
But it wasn’t the number that had Jenna’s blood down to the same temperature Pesha Josephy’s was now. It was the other thing she kept associating with that same shade of violet. Until now, she’d not only failed to place the color association, but she had somehow managed to overlook that the same color had appeared in connection with this case over and over again. Her gut usually put puzzle pieces like this together for her, but this time her internal assembly line had malfunctioned disastrously.
Maybe she’d missed it. Maybe the oversight was the result of fatigue or the confusion of the case as a whole before they’d realized that another perp was somehow in play. That alone was probably skewing her perceptions, even those of her oh-so-reliable color dictionary.
But as Jenna hung up with Irv, she knew that none of those reasons were why she’d not seen the connection. She held the phone in her hand, staring at it. Another phone call might be in order, but to whom and for what, she wasn’t sure. It had to happen, but the situation would have to be handled with care. Right now, she didn’t have any idea of the best way to protect, the best way to explain . . . the best way to move.
She hadn’t seen this connection because it was too hard to fathom. And she hadn’t wanted to.
The gunman fired at the seventh victim. Seven. Purple.
The same color she had seen every single time she’d been in the presence of little Molly Keegan.
41
After updating Dodd and then calling Saleda to fill her in on the development, they all decided that as much as Jenna’s heart might be telling her to run, snap up Molly Keegan, and put her into witness protection, that course of action wasn’t the way to go. Yet, anyway.
Still, as Jenna dialed her next contact, her stomach clenched painfully. The thought that that sweet, precocious little girl could’ve been the target of a mass shooting cut straight through her.
No time to think like a mom. Be a cop. Figure out who did this.
The phone rang four times without answer, and Jenna left a quick message and hung up. She dialed Yancy.
That was the problem, though. All of the Triple Shooter’s victims had been adults. First, they needed to figure out how Molly lined up with threes and sevens—or they with her. Another big question that needed answering: who else was involved in the grocery store massacre to make the shooter change MO? That led to maybe the most important question of all: if they were right, and the shooter changed MO because someone else was involved, then why was that mystery person involved? There were only a handful of reasons for being associated with a mass killing, and the most likely among them happened to be that you wanted someone dead. They’d been trying to identify the Triple Shooter’s true target inside the grocery store, but what if another of the patrons was a target, too? What if another patron was the target of the mystery person involved with the Triple Shooter? Which patron were they? Even though the mama bear in Jenna was coming out, the truth was, if Molly was the Triple Shooter’s target, she was most likely safe. His pathology made it highly unlikely that he would come back to finish off a victim. She wouldn’t have known this right after the grocery store shootings, since if he was frustrated enough and killing a particular target was his first priority, it was possible he would obsess over it and not move on until he’d succeeded. And yet he’d clearly moved on. Brooklyn Satterhorne was dead, signifying one specific regarding the way he determined his targets and carried out his rituals in killing them, and that was that even if they were preordained to die by higher beings in his mind, his ritual did not include the need to complete one before moving to another.
In certain types of pathologies, killers might hold a grudge against an escaped target, but this pathology just didn’t ring true of the Triple Shooter against the rest of his profile. That disorganized cornflower blue. Brooklyn Satterhorne hadn’t been part of some large-scale plan that also still involved Molly. Brooklyn became a victim because the Triple Shooter was finished with the grocery store and had seen his next set of threes. He would then become fixated on that set of threes, the last completely out of mind. After all, he wouldn’t live up to being the obsessive that his profile suggested if he was still thinking of Molly. Stalking and killing Brooklyn because of her threes was passionate. It showed commitment that required unbroken attention.
Eldred Beasley’s face popped to mind, his confusion as he rubbed the knot on the side of his head from where the intruder had bashed him.
The accomplice,
on the other hand . . .
Yancy’s voicemail picked up.
“Shit,” Jenna muttered.
At the beep, she left a message for him to call, but as soon as she hung up, she composed a text message:
Need to meet with Eldred. When?
“Any word?” Dodd asked, stepping back into the bedroom from where he’d been questioning the ill-fated Pesha’s married squeeze.
“Left two messages, sent Yancy a text. I still say Eldred wasn’t the accomplice’s prime target, because if he was, how hard could it be to kill a weak old man in an assisted living home any time you wanted?”
“Maybe he doesn’t like getting his hands dirty. He couldn’t even finish the job when he broke in to silence the guy,” Dodd answered.
“But then why involve the Triple Shooter and wait for a grocery store? If Eldred is the man the accomplice wanted dead, and the accomplice clearly didn’t want to kill Eldred him – or herself, why not hire someone to kill him? Or hell, if convincing the Triple Shooter to go on a homicidal rampage is his thing, convince him Eldred Beasley . . . I don’t know . . . double dipped his tortilla chip in the communal salsa and needs to be punished for breaking that unwritten rule of society,” Jenna said.
Dodd laughed. “I’m not sure Eldred has enough teeth for tortilla chips. Besides, I always double dip. It’s stupid to only get to enjoy dip on a third of the damned chip. Germs boost immune systems.”
“He must have needed to use the grocery store for some reason. The numbers did line up, so easy enough to lure the UNSUB to the place. The Triple had to have had a target there, too, or else UNSUB B could’ve talked the Triple Shooter—”
“UNSUB,” Dodd said.
“—the UNSUB into thinking the person UNSUB B wanted dead . . . well, it’s like what we were saying about Eldred. If UNSUB B wanted the other UNSUB to kill Eldred, it wouldn’t be too tough. Just make the maybe-the-Triple-Shooter-UNSUB think Eldred didn’t have a copy of Emily Post’s Etiquette in his book collection. If maybe-not-but-probably-the-Triple-Shooter didn’t have a target at the store, too, UNSUB B could’ve convinced him he did.”
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