Profiling a Killer

by Nichole Severn

  She didn’t move, didn’t even seem to breathe, and admiration knotted in his gut. Most suspects hadn’t been able to handle the intensity he radiated during interrogations, and Dr. Flood—Aubrey—had given every single one of them a run for their money by facing off with him. She peeled away and headed straight from the scene toward his vehicle.

  A smile tugged at the corners of his mouth as he followed her. Damn, she was something else. Warmhearted and friendly dosed with a strong helping of defiance and drive. Hell of a combination. Nicholas hauled the crime scene tape over his head and maneuvered through the civilians who’d parted to let her pass.

  A strong grip latched on to his arm, and it took everything inside him not to reach for his weapon. He spun to face the man who’d grabbed him and wrenched away from the six-foot, redheaded photographer he’d noted earlier. Nervousness radiated from the man in waves, his hands shaking around his camera as he spoke. “You’re Agent James, right? With the FBI’s Behavioral Analysis Unit? You must be here to investigate a violent homicide if they called your unit in. I remember you from the X Marks the Spot Killer case.”

  “You’re familiar with that case?” Onlookers and civilians shifted around him, hoping to hear insight as to what’d happened in their very own neighborhood. “What’s with the camera?”

  “Oh, I’m training to be a crime scene photographer for the Seattle Police Department. Simon Curry.” He lifted the camera slightly, an old-looking device that’d seen better days, before extending his hand. Curry withdrew as Nicholas merely stared down at the photographer’s hand. “And I’m not just familiar with the X Killer’s case, I’m familiar with you, too. I’ve been studying your career since you started with the BAU, Agent James. The work you’ve done here in Seattle with serials is changing the way the FBI investigates violent crime.” Disbelief widened the man’s small eyes, and he stumbled back a step. “If you’re here, that must mean you believe this is a serial case.”

  Gasps echoed around him, followed by a rush of whispered murmurs and questions. This wasn’t his area. Caitlyn Yang, the public relations liaison between Seattle PD and the BAU, handled what information to reveal to the public and the timeline when that information would be made public. He raised his voice over the mass but doubted anything he had to say would ease the panic buzzing around him.

  “All right. We are at the beginning of this investigation. The FBI is not ready to conclude that the death that occurred in front of this building this morning is the result of a serial working in the area.” He caught sight of Aubrey Flood through the crowd, her light gaze steady on his, and a calm washed over him. “Once we have more information, so will you, and that’s all I’m willing to say on the matter.”

  He wound his way through a barrage of questions and shouts and headed across the street toward his SUV. Unlocking the door remotely, he rounded the front of the vehicle and wrenched open Aubrey’s door for her. Once inside, he collapsed into his own seat behind the wheel. He twisted the key in the ignition, keeping her in his peripheral vision as he pulled away from the curb. “You okay?”

  “I think they were more interested in you than they were me.” Aubrey slid her palms down her thighs, staring out the passenger-side window. “I left my car parked in Kara’s lot. It’s probably going to get towed, since I don’t have one of those HOA stickers. She offered to get me one, but...”

  “It felt like lying.” Her honest nature wouldn’t have let her take advantage of her sister’s offer. “I’ll have Agent West ensure it’s secure and drive it back to your apartment as soon as he, Dyson and Agent Striker are finished at the scene. The farther you’re away from your residence and vehicle, the better until we find out why Kara was targeted.” An uneasy sensation surged through him, and he raised his gaze to the rearview mirror. A single figure stood in the center of the street as the mob of civilians dispersed along the scene’s perimeter tape. Simon Curry lifted his camera toward his face, and a flash filled the mirror.

  * * *

  NOTHING AND EVERYTHING had changed since she’d found that map taped to her apartment door this morning. Her building looked exactly the same. Contrasting shades of gray highlighted six floors of lofts a mere two blocks from the heart of the city. But where she’d woken with enthusiasm and confidence for the day, hollowness had taken control. Kara was dead, and there hadn’t been anything she’d been able to do about it.

  The Space Needle demanded attention out Aubrey’s passenger window as Nicholas pulled into her underground garage. She handed the agent her fob to the gate and sat back in her seat as the vehicle crawled forward into darkness. Kara hadn’t just died. Her younger sister had become a homicide victim, something Aubrey dealt with day in and day out as the city’s chief medical examiner, but this... This was different. This was personal. “The doorman should be able to tell us whether or not Koko came here when we get to the lobby.”

  “The building has a doorman?” Nicholas’s eyes narrowed as he pulled the SUV into her assigned parking spot for her loft. His tone had leveled again. Nothing like the intensity he’d used in Kara’s apartment. More inquisitive. He shoved the vehicle into Park. “Makes me wonder how the killer managed to get to your apartment.”

  The blood drained from her face and rushed directly to her chest, a flight-or-flight response automated by the body when faced with danger and fear. She hadn’t thought of that. She wasn’t an investigator in the way Nicholas was. She had experience with a serial killer’s work through a single case, but it’d been years since she’d had to deal with emergency situations like this. Aubrey set her hand against the passenger-side door. He was right. She’d been so focused on what’d happened to Kara, her brain hadn’t caught on to the fact the killer had walked straight into this building and directly to her door. He’d known where she lived, when she would be home. How? How had he known where to find her?

  “You’re looking a little pale there, Doc,” Nicholas said.

  “I’m dizzier than a donkey trying to dance.” She focused on the way he called her “Doc,” on the slight inflection in his voice when he spoke to her compared to his team or even those people at the perimeter of the scene. Her heart picked up the pace as he took a brick from the invisible professional barrier between them. Doc. No one had given her a nickname before. “I just need a minute.”

  “I’ve got to start writing down the stuff you say for future reference.” Nicholas shouldered out of the vehicle. Faster than she thought possible, her door disappeared out from beneath her hand, and he was reaching over her for the seat belt. A combination of salt and man filled her lungs, and she breathed in as much as she could to hold on to his scent a bit longer. Strong enough to overpower the odor of decomposing bodies and formaldehyde. Soothing. Reassuring. “Come on. I’ve got you.”

  The seat belt released as he compressed the latch, and then his hands were on her. Strong, calloused—as though he reveled in manual labor in addition to catching psychopaths—comforting. She wound the straps of her purse around her hand. Butterflies twisted her stomach as Nicholas helped her from the SUV and closed the door behind her. Hand leveraged on the vehicle’s frame above her head, he leaned into her while giving her the opportunity to slide out of his reach. “Most people never see a body in their lifetime. Sometimes it takes a while for the brain to process that kind of trauma.”

  “I feel like you should be aware of the fact we met during the X Marks the Spot Killer’s victims’ autopsies.” The sarcasm earned her a smile that tightened her insides and brought the feeling back to her fingers. The world washed away into overhydrated watercolors under his focus.

  “You’re right. You’re not most people.” The curl of his mouth deepened the laugh lines etched from the middle of his nose and cut through the sharpness of his cheekbones. Thick eyebrows, matching his natural hair color, shadowed his gaze as he shifted his weight between his feet. He lowered his arm from above her head, and instantly, the sp
ell was broken. Curling his hand into a fist, he tapped the side of the SUV as though punishing himself for letting her see the softer side of his personality. “That doesn’t change the fact that the body you found this morning is someone you knew. Someone you loved. It’s going to take time to work through the emotions that come with losing your sister like that, and you’re going to need someone to help you through it.”

  She locked her back teeth against the urge to claim otherwise, to deflect her obsession with being everything for everyone but herself, to make it easier for the agent to remain comfortable and detached from her. But as easily as Nicholas James presented an intense, secretive and isolated mask to the world, he’d spoken from experience. He’d lost who she imagined to be one of the few people he’d let see the man hiding under that defensive mask. While Cole Presley—aka the X Marks the Spot Killer—hadn’t been murdered as Kara had, and had in fact been the one to do the killing, Nicholas had lost that connection all the same. Aubrey broke eye contact, clearing her throat. “Coulter Loxley.”

  Nicholas took a step back, seemingly reminded of where they were and why. “Coulter Loxley?”

  “The doorman. He would’ve been the one on shift last night when the killer came up to my apartment. We should talk to him, see if he remembers anything and ask if he’s seen Koko.” Aubrey clutched the straps of her bag tighter, the leather protesting under her grip. She checked her watch. “The only problem is he won’t be on shift for another two hours.”

  Nicholas nodded. “In that case, I want to check your apartment to make sure there aren’t any signs of a break-in and have you pack an overnight bag for a few days.”

  “Right.” Because a killer had brought her into his sick mind game by tacking a map leading to her sister’s body to her door last night. Her throat tightened as she led the way toward the elevators and hit the ascend button. Seconds ticked by, maybe a minute when neither of them moved or said a word. What else was there to say? The elevator dinged before the car doors slid open, and they both stepped in. She scanned her key card that would give the elevator permission to stop at her floor, then leaned against the handrail surrounding them from three sides. Pressure to break the silence stretching between them, to make a connection with the man so familiar with murder, spread through her. Aubrey clutched her bag in front of her, the steel of the elevator doors reflecting her vain attempt to protect herself back at her. Diverting her nervous energy to the LED panel above the doors, she silently counted off the floors as they rocketed to the top floor. The penthouse.

  “Does every resident have one of those cards?” he asked.

  “No. Just the ones who live on the sixth floor.” She studied the card, almost as though reading his mind. The killer would’ve had to have had one to gain access from the garage. “But visitors can access the floor from the stairs once they’re past the doorman.”

  Silence descended once again.

  “You said the X Marks the Spot Killer case is what inspired you to join the Behavioral Analysis Unit,” she said. “How old were you when you decided you wanted to hunt killers for a living?”

  His muscled shoulders rose on a strong inhale. He stared straight ahead, never deviating from his own reflection in front of him. “Six.”

  “Most kids that age want to grow up to be cowboys and astronauts or robots.” The pull on her insides increased as the elevator dared to defy gravity. “There must’ve been a specific moment or event that made you feel profiling serial killers was the right path for you. Before you realized who your next-door neighbor was, I mean.”

  The tic of his external carotid artery just below his jaw increased. He dropped his chin a fraction of an inch and exposed her awareness of his every move. “I heard a woman scream.”

  A woman’s scream? Regret cut through her as the implications of that single statement registered. Had he known who lived next door to him, even as young as six years old?

  “I ran to the window to see what’d happened, but it was too dark. Every night afterward, for years, I’d wonder who it came from, why it occurred. I asked neighbors if they’d heard it that night. I started writing down their statements and seeing if my dog could pick up traces of blood around my house.” He folded his hands in front of him. “Never found out what happened, but I knew then what I wanted to do with the rest of my life. I wanted to keep people from screaming like that ever again.”

  “Was it...” Aubrey licked her lips, trying to come up with another reason a woman might’ve been screaming in the middle of the night. “Do you believe it was one of Cole Presley’s victims?”

  The elevator dinged, pulling her back into reality as the car settled and the doors parted. Light fractured through massive windows and crawled across light gray hardwood flooring laid out in long strips designed to increase the visual size of the loft.

  “I’ll never know. I never found evidence he’d killed any of his victims in his home.” Nicholas stepped off the elevator into her apartment and scanned the space like the good agent he was supposed to be. “It’s unlikely the killer didn’t know you’d need a key card to access this floor, which means he had to have come up the stairs to deliver the map he left on your door.”

  “The front door is around the corner.” She motioned to her right as she stepped off the elevator and set her purse on the entryway table nearby. “The building’s head of security should be able to give you any surveillance footage from last night if you ask nicely.”

  “I’ve already got Agent West working on it.” Hands on his hips, he accentuated the shoulder holster and weapon under his jacket as he took in her living space. Nicholas turned toward the short hallway leading to the front door, and she followed. Unlocking the dead bolt, he compressed the door handle down and crouched to put the lock at his eye level. “It’s just you here? No one else has a key? An ex-boyfriend, maybe?”

  “Is that your way of asking me if I’m single, Agent James?” She kept her smile to herself, but tension crept across her back the longer he didn’t answer. “No. There’s no one else. I live alone.”

  He straightened, pointing toward the security ring on the outside of the door. “See these scratches here? Someone picked this lock recently, and I have good reason to believe it was your sister’s killer.”

  * * *

  SHE’D STOPPED BEING afraid of the monsters a long time ago.

  Special Agent Madeline Striker couldn’t look away from the little girl at the edge of the perimeter tape. Five or six years old, long, dark hair, brilliant, knowing eyes. The same age her sister had been the last time Madeline had seen her.

  It wasn’t because the monsters weren’t real. The violence that’d led to the end of Kara Flood’s life—and so many others during her five-year career with the Behavioral Analysis Unit—testified to that fact. They were out there, waiting for the right time to strike, working their mind games and preying on the innocent, but they couldn’t control her. Not anymore.

  She’d dedicated every day of her life to seeing how the pieces fit together, to connecting the dots in lost-cause abduction cases in an attempt to bring home as many victims as she could, but this case... They hadn’t been prepared for this. It’d taken the entire BAU to identify and stop Cole Presley from taking another victim, but all they’d managed to do was create another monster. A copycat.

  “Dr. Flood’s vehicle is secure.” Dashiell West slid into her peripheral vision. Dark, styled hair caught in the breeze coming off the sound. The five-o’clock shadow around his mouth and running up his jaw had grown thicker over the past few hours, highlighting the exhaustion under his eyes and in his voice. The tinkling of keys reached her ears as he tossed them her way. “You okay with following me to the ME’s apartment to drop it off then giving me a lift back to the office?”

  She caught the keys against her chest, forcing her gaze from the girl. To prove she could. A young woman matching the X Killer’s preferences h
ad been strangled and mutilated in front of her own apartment building eight hours ago, and no one had seen a damn thing. This wasn’t an abduction case, but the clock was ticking down all the same. Copycats followed patterns, same as their role models. Whoever’d gotten to Kara Flood last night had already killed one victim. It was only a matter of time before he targeted another. “Yeah.”

  “Striker, you okay?” West leveled dark chocolate eyes on her. The former hotshot from the tech development arena had only been with the unit for two years after a former colleague had set out to ruin his career, but he’d been a vital addition to the team ever since. Cybercrimes, decryption, hacking—if a BAU case involved computers, it involved Dashiell West.

  Reality caught up. Madeline glanced in the direction where she’d last seen the girl, finding the section of tape where she’d been standing empty. She swept the scene, but the girl had most likely been whisked back to the safety of her home with parents who’d do anything to keep her close. Gripping her hand around the keys her partner had thrown, she shook her head as though the past would dissolve at her command. “I’m fine. Have there been any developments on the Seattle PD side?”

  Faint barking broke through the ringing in her ears.

  “Last I heard, their crime scene unit was taking a casting of a footprint they found in the soil around one of the trees lining the street,” he said. “Could be our guy, but considering how careful the killer was to not be seen by witnesses and how there isn’t much evidence to collect, the chances are low.”