Critical Instinct

by Crouch, Janie

  She appreciated his attempt to put her at ease, but she was afraid when he actually saw the pictures he wouldn't be able to find any humor in any situation.

  "I hope you still feel that way once you see these. My only defense is, that until Teresa Cavasos, I didn't know that these were actual real people. Real women. I thought that maybe it was my subconscious playing out some issues from my attack."

  She pulled back from his arms and led them into the living room where she brought the portfolio, wide horizontally and vertically but without much depth. It was meant to store different sized papers or canvases to be carried.

  She didn't know why some of the paintings were larger and some were smaller any more than she knew why she drew these to begin with.

  The portfolio was on the coffee table. She opened it and looked over at Brett.

  “I’ll admit I’m a coward and couldn’t go through them. I haven’t ever gone through them once I put them in here.”

  He just nodded.

  “I’m going to go get some water and let you look through this on your own for a while."

  She didn't want him to have to hide his reaction from her. Wanted to give him the opportunity to look through things objectively without her in the room.

  Plus, she knew what was in there. She didn't want to see the pictures of these women again. They were burned into her mind forever.

  He trailed his knuckles down her cheek again. She nodded. "I'm just going to stay out. Call me when you're ready for me to come back in."

  She didn't wait for him to answer. She didn't go into the kitchen like she planned, knowing that was just going to drive her crazy, wondering what he was thinking in there.

  Instead she headed to where she'd always gone when things were too much. Her art studio.

  * * *

  "Paige, stop."

  It took her a second to focus, to figure out what was going on. She’d been so deep into her painting that she's lost track of everything around her.

  It wasn't the first time it happened but usually it was because she was lost in the joy of her art.

  She looked at the easel in front of her. She'd painted what any neutral observer would've called a black hole. Umbra, penumbra, and antumbra --the different types of shadows-- filled the entire canvas.

  She wasn't exactly sure when she had switched to this. She’d been trying to lose herself in painting, anything, but hadn't been able to do it. Even painting the auras of Chloe and Adrienne, which she knew from absolute memory, had been impossible.

  And then the dark aura had taken over.

  Paige knew what this was. This was her painting of the man who had attacked her. This is what she saw when she tried to remember him. The blackness. The shadows.

  Brett was standing behind her with his hand gently grasped over hers. She felt the stiff muscles of her arm as he lowered her hand down to her side.

  "Are you all right?” His deep voice was a whisper in her ear.

  "I think so." She set the paint brush in a jar of cleaner on the table by her easel. "That's him. That's what I remember when I think of the day that I was attacked. Instead of seeing his face, I just see this.”

  She felt Brett's hands come up and begin rubbing her upper arms, his long fingers easing her tight muscles.

  "You need to eat something. And definitely drink some water if you haven't had any this whole time."

  She spun her head back slightly to look at him. "How long has it been?"

  "Almost five hours."

  No wonder she was so stiff and tired. She sometimes got caught up in painting like this but usually had a bottle of water and some fruit within easy reach of her easel. Her mind had learned to take care of her physical body –grabbing whatever hydration or nutrients she needed- so that she could continue long hours of painting.

  But she hadn't planned on long hours of painting today.

  She fully turned so she could face Brett. "The drawings. Did you see them all? Will it help you in any cases?"

  “Let’s eat a little and then we can go over it. But yes, your pictures are definitely going to be helpful."

  In the kitchen they worked together to make some soup and sandwiches. Neither of them said much as they ate, both caught up in their own thoughts.

  After cleaning the dishes Paige didn't resist when Brett led her back into the living room. She had to face those pictures. Knew he would have questions about them. It was time.

  Most of them she hadn't seen since the day she drew them. She didn’t know the order or the dates, but now wished desperately she did.

  "I haven't studied these pictures. I just want you to know that. I don't know much about them and haven’t looked at many of them since the mornings I found them and then just put them in the portfolio.”

  She was relieved when Brett nodded. "It's understandable. Some of them are pretty graphic in their violence."

  Paige hardly recognized her living room as they walked through the entryway. Brett had moved the couch all the way back to get more space to lay out the pictures.

  The drawings, there were well over one hundred of them, were laid out in very specific groupings all over her floor.

  "Wow." She murmured.

  "I found some sticky notes in your kitchen drawer and used them. I hope that's okay. Normally I wouldn't do something like that with artifacts involving potential cases, but I figured we were never going to log these into official evidence."

  Paige walked closer to the pictures trying to figure out the patterns Brett had used. “That’s fine.”

  “The first thing you should know, if you don’t already, is that you drew every single picture more than once.”

  Paige’s eyes flew to his. “I did? I knew I drew them again if I destroyed them, which is why I started to keep them. But I drew them all more than once?”

  “Yes. Every single one. Most at least half a dozen times.”

  At least that meant she hadn’t drawn a hundred dead women.

  Brett took a step further in the room. “The yellow stickies have numbers on them. I didn’t want to lose the order you had them in the portfolio, just in case that means something.”

  She looked around more carefully. ”But you don't have them laid out in the order that I drew them, right?"

  "No, they are laid out by victims. I tried to group together each woman that you've drawn as best as I could. Although some I'm not sure about."

  The pattern was obvious now that he laid it all out on her living room floor. What Paige had assumed were dozens of women that she drawn were actually less than ten in total. If you eliminated the repeats she’d just drawn them in different stages of an attack. So she hadn't recognized that some of the drawings of the women with no bruising were the same women with the bruising. Alive and dead. The same women.

  Brett had grouped the drawings according to victims.

  "It looks like you drew two or three pictures of each victim. One before the trauma and one after the trauma for all of them. And then the third picture for some of them is obviously once they are dead."

  Brett's voice was not cold, but he obviously had been trained to look at this from a professional point of view. Paige didn't have that same training. She struggled to hold on to the contents of her stomach.

  In most of the later pictures the bruising was so severe Paige couldn't believe Brett had been able to recognize them as the same woman as before the attack.

  Paige walked to the first grouping of pictures. "How can you tell that this is the same woman? In the before picture she's wearing what's obviously a lower cut dress and in the after picture" –after meaning the woman had been beaten to where she was unrecognizable– "she's wearing a collared shirt."

  Paige didn't wait for Brett to answer. She studied the other groupings of pictures more closely. "It's like that with a lot of them. Is there some detail I’m missing? How are you able to group these pictures together?”

  "Because four of them, including Teresa Cavasos, are all
murder cases I've been looking into."

  Paige shut her eyes. So that confirmed at least four of the women she’d drawn were dead. There was no reason to believe any of the other ones were still alive either.

  "More than that," Brett continued, "I think all of these women were murdered by the same person. And that he meant to murder you too, but you got away."

  Chapter Twenty-Three

  Brett gave Paige a little bit of time to look over the pictures as he grabbed his phone to call Alex, even knowing he would’ve already gone home by now.

  "I need you to meet me at the station in a few minutes."

  "Wagner, you know we’re not dating, right? This is two nights in a row you're dragging me out of my apartment."

  Brett chuckled. "Just do it. Get a conference room where we can spread out and make sure Captain Ameling is gone. I'm going to be bringing Paige with me."

  “This is sounding dirtier and dirtier. “

  “In your dreams, Olivier. We’ve got a serial killer on our hands. I'm sure of it now."

  Alex whistled through his teeth. "All right, I'll see you in a few."

  Brett walked back to where Paige was still studying the pictures.

  "I can only recognize some of them because of their files,” he told her. “If I hadn't already seen pictures of them like this I would never be able to reconcile them with the earlier pictures either. There's no reason to think you should've been able to."

  "I really had hoped I was just crazy. That my brain was broken after the attack or whatever. That I just had something dark inside me that needed to get out while I was sleeping and I was just drawing violence against pretend women.”

  He knew it had to be hard. "I wish they were just figments of your imagination too." Not only because of the loss of human life but because it would've made Paige feel so much better.

  "Don't you think it's really freaky that I did this? Aren't you tempted to arrest me or question me further?"

  Brett took her hand and led her out of the room.

  "No. Not at all."

  Her eyes narrowed as she looked at him. "How can you say that? There has to be some sort of doubt. That I had to be present at these crimes or something like that."

  Brett sat her down at the table so that he could face her eye to eye.

  "This is why I left last night. I had to work through what I saw to be my three options."

  "That I was a criminal had to be one option."

  Brett nodded. "Yes, that was an option. Actually, honestly, it was really less that I thought you were involved in the crimes and more that I thought you could've hacked into the Portland PD computer files or something."

  Realization dawned in her eyes. "That I saw the pictures and then drew them. That I lied about being asleep when I did it."

  Brett could see the possibility of it hurt her. But this conversation was necessary. He had to let her know that he had considered all the options, but when it was all said and done, he trusted her.

  "Yes. That was actually the most logical choice. Nobody could blame you if you needed law enforcement attention focused back on you. "

  He hated that tears welled in her eyes.

  "You thought I was crazy."

  Brett smiled at her gently. "Actually, wanting attention made you not crazy. Believing you drew murder victims in your sleep? That made both of us a little crazy. I needed something that was a possible logical explanation."

  "I can't blame you for that. I know I'm telling the truth and it still sounds completely nuts to me."

  "It was less about believing you and more about it going against everything I knew about law enforcement. If you could do this, Paige.” Brett gripped her arms gently, wanting to make sure she knew how difficult this was for him. “If I accepted that you could draw murder victims in your sleep, then it had to change how I looked at law enforcement in general.”

  Paige nodded. “Adrienne’s husband said the same thing when he first worked with her."

  "Yeah, I talked to Conner Perigo today.”

  "To see if I was a nut case?"

  Brett chuckled. "No. More to deal with what I was just saying. I needed someone to tell me that there were other ways of solving crimes than just the way I've always done it."

  "So you believe me because Conner said I wasn't a murderer."

  She wasn't understanding him at all. "No, the opposite. The reason I called him was because I knew I could trust you. That you were not a murderer, crazy, or someone just seeking attention."

  "Really?"

  "Yes. I knew I had to either be all in –completely believe in you– or just walk away altogether. Once I decided I trusted you? Then it was just a question about how to best use the information you could provide. While also protecting you."

  Brett had no idea how much his faith in her had meant to her until that moment.

  "Thank you," she whispered.

  He reached over and grabbed her hands. "Thank you for trusting me. I can't believe you've carried this burden alone for so long. No more. We're going to use your gift to catch a killer.”

  “I hope so.”

  * * *

  As planned, the homicide area of the Portland police department was almost empty by the time Brett arrived with Paige. Brett wasn't exactly sneaking her in, there wasn't anything illegal about what he was doing, but he knew Captain Ameling would throw an absolute fit if the other man knew Paige was here.

  Which was nothing compared to the seizure he would have if he saw Paige's pictures.

  Alex was waiting for them when Brett ushered Paige into the conference room.

  "I feel like I'm doing something risqué," Alex chuckled. He turned to Paige, shaking her hand. “Glad to see again the lady who is going to get both of us fired."

  Paige turned alarmed eyes to Brett. "I don't want anyone to get into trouble."

  Brett slipped an arm around her shoulder, to reassure her, but also because Alex hadn't let go of her hand yet and was still smiling charmingly at her.

  “Nobody’s going to get fired. But Olivier may get a punch in the jaw if he doesn’t let go of you.”

  Alex grinned and dropped her hand. "And trust me, we’ll take the risk of getting in trouble if it means catching a killer. So what have you guys got?"

  Brett took out the drawings and began placing them in groupings around the conference room table.

  He had to give Alex credit, the man took the drawings pretty well.

  While he studied them, Brett went to his desk to get the files he’d been working on last week. When he came back he was able to place a file on top of three different groupings of pictures.

  "Victim A, Charlotte Winters. Victim B, Heather Brown. Victim C, Alexandra Dobbs. All three of these women have been murdered in the last two years."

  Alex picked up the pictures Paige had drawn of victim A and compared it to the case file. He then did the same with victim B and victim C. There was no doubt that these pictures and cases belonged to the same women.

  "No arrests for any of them. Different causes of death and no seeming connection between the victims," Alex said.

  "That's basically what Ameling told me when I thought these might all be the work of the same killer."

  Alex shrugged. "Honestly, outside of the fact that Paige drew them all I don't see much connection between them either."

  "Let's try to identify the women in these other drawings and see what we’re looking at once we've got all the information."

  It took hours and it was why Brett had taken the chance at bringing Paige and the drawings into the station. Only here could they access the information and databases they needed to try to identify the other women based solely on a picture.

  Because most of them had been declared missing before they were murdered, they were all in the facial recognition database. Four hours later they had identified the women in every picture Paige had drawn except for one.

  "OK, we’ll come back to her in a minute," Brett said. "Let's see
what patterns we can find with the others."

  They had a total of eight dead women. Alex and Brett had rearranged the piles on the table and arranged them in chronological order.

  "I know you think this is all the same killer," Alex said, looking over the photos again. "But it's possible that Paige is just drawing women who die." He turned to Paige. "Which still sucks for you, so I'm sorry. I can't imagine that drawing these are any fun."

  Paige had helped them in any way she could for the last few hours, but as they became more and more certain that all the women were dead she had withdrawn. She was now sitting in a chair at the side of the room.

  "I'm not really consciously aware of what I'm drawing when I'm drawing it. It's only afterwards that I realize how gruesome it is."

  "Regardless, it still has to be jarring."

  Paige nodded, not saying anything further. Brett knew for a fact what a toll it took on her, at least physically. The fact that she hadn't ever looked back through these pictures attested to the toll it took on her emotionally. How could it not?

  She looked exhausted. He moved over to her and kissed her on her forehead. “I’ll take you home soon, okay? We've got the identity of these women and that's what we needed to do in stealth. The rest Alex and I can work on without you here.”

  "I'm all right. Let's see if we can spot a pattern. I'm good with patterns."

  Brett knew he would need to get her out of the station in the next couple hours just to make sure no one came in early and spotted her. It was better to keep Paige out of everyone's line of sight as much as possible.

  The three of them took a “before” picture of each of the women and placed them on a whiteboard in the conference room, ending with Teresa Cavasos. Underneath, they put the date of death, the cause of death, and the location of death. Pertinent details about each woman –age, marital status, height and weight– followed underneath.

  Then they all leaned back against the conference room table and studied the white board.

  "Let's start with the obvious," Brett said. "All women, between the ages of 25 and 35, all relatively similar in stature and weight."