It’s most of why Eddison is being careful to pace behind Vic.
“Landon Burnside lived off the grid. No state-issued ID, no car, no credit cards, no bank accounts, no property. Worked odd jobs for cash, rented the mother-in-law suite for cash in a friend’s house.”
“But?”
“But the friend was a cousin, and our guy’s name was actually Landon Cooper. Did two and a half years of a seven-year sentence for statutory rape and assorted charges. Was supposed to register when he got out, instead he skipped state and turned up in Colorado. DNA came back this morning to confirm his identity.”
“Any chance he detoured through San Diego two years ago?”
“No; he was still locked up. He just got out fourteen months ago. He only served time the once, but he went to trial a couple other times, and had complaints that never made it that far. Garden-variety creep”—all three agents cringe—“who likes teen girls a hell of a lot more than teen girls like him. He was in prison in Michigan when Aimée Browder was killed.”
“What if he was killed to protect Priya?”
Ramirez and Vic both swivel in their chairs to look at Eddison, and even Finney is silent on the phone.
Eddison shrugs. “Asking seriously: what if the bastard killed Landon because he was bothering Priya?”
Ramirez is still staring, looking somewhat sick, but Vic’s clearly had the thought already. “Walk us through it,” he suggests.
“I could buy the flowers being taunts, if anyone else got them. Any other family member, any other victim. But it’s just Priya. The deliveries are about her, not the murders. If we look at the flowers as gifts . . .”
“He was courting her, and when she moved away, he killed Aimée because it was as close as he could get to Priya,” Ramirez says.
“Whatever motivates him to kill, it isn’t sex; only half of his victims are raped, and even that seems more about punishment than sex. He sees something else in them, and whatever that thing is, he sees Priya as being better. He wants Priya for something the others were never even considered for. She means enough to him that he actively looks for her not once, but twice. And he finds her.”
“So he starts courting her again,” Ramirez picks up, the flow familiar from a thousand other conversations, when the teasing falls away for the sake of work, and they’re so close to being on the same page on a case. “Flowers, cards. But then there’s Landon. If he’s watching her, he knows Landon is bothering her.”
“How?” asks Finney.
“Because he’s watching, too. He knows when the Sravastis are out of the house, knows when to make the deliveries or have them made. Deshani’s schedule is fairly fixed, but Priya’s changes based on her mood. And we know the psychology of these kinds of gifts: he’ll want to see the reaction to them.”
“He sees Landon because he’s already following Priya.”
“And that’s where Landon crosses the line this guy has drawn. He thinks of Priya as his, and Landon was encroaching.”
“It’ll be a few days before the official autopsy results are in,” adds Finney, his voice crackling through the speaker, “but the Huntington ME feels pretty comfortable loosely mapping out the events. Landon had been dead roughly three weeks when he was found, probably since just after Eddison’s visit. He didn’t have heat, so the cold slowed decay, but eventually the smell started filtering into the rest of the house and the cousin went to investigate. First came a couple of subduing blows, and there’s evidence of some kind of restraint. Rope, probably. Once he was tied up, he was castrated.”
Eddison knows that, the local lieutenant told him that, but it still makes him wince.
“Guy wasn’t neat about it, either,” Finny continues. “He wanted it to hurt. There was a hell of a beating after, just to let it really sink in, before he went at Landon’s throat. It’s messy, strong, full of rage. This guy was pissed.”
“Same knife?”
“Impossible to know. They’ll make casts, but the decay will make it hard to be definitive. It’s similar, at the very least.”
“And nothing left behind.”
“Just Landon. Took the rope with him, even.”
“So why hasn’t he tried to go inside Priya’s house?” Ramirez asks. “Clearly he can take care of the cameras, but there’s no sign that he’s tried to go in, even when Priya has been home alone. Why not?”
Scrubbing at his face, Eddison bites off a growl. He jerks his chin at the bright stack of case folders. “The answer’s in there somewhere. Something we haven’t connected because he’s seeing something we’re not.”
“Finney?” says Vic. “You have the freshest eyes when it comes to these cases. Anything jump?”
They can hear the click of keys and the shuffle of papers, Finney going through his copies of the case reports and his own notes on them. “Maybe.”
The agents at Quantico wait, but he doesn’t immediately continue. When the silence stretches into discomfort, Ramirez throws her pen at the speaker. “Well?”
“What makes him decide whether or not to rape?”
“We’ve never known,” Eddison answers automatically.
“Look at Leigh Clark,” Vic says. Neither of his partners reaches for that folder; they don’t need to see those pictures. “Of the girls, hers was the most vicious attack. If she’d somehow survived, she would have almost certainly had permanent damage from the rape alone. What was it about her that made him lose control like that?”
“Her parents held back in their statements. They didn’t want to say anything bad about their daughter, but most of the other interviews mentioned that Leigh was a wild child. Sex, smoking, drugs . . . so the extra viciousness was a punishment?”
“Zoraida Bourret was treated gently, her throat was slit while she was unconscious, and unconscious not from a blow to the head but from partial asphyxiation.” Vic’s thick fingers drum on the table. “Every statement in that folder says she was a good girl, family first, never went out with anyone because she was needed at home.”
“But Natalie Root wasn’t a virgin,” Eddison points out. “She was only a few months out from a pregnancy scare, and she was left unmolested.”
“And Rachel Ortiz,” adds Ramirez. “She was raped, but the ME said she was almost definitely a virgin before the attack.”
“But we’re looking at facts; he’s deciding based on his perception of them.”
“I’m starting to see why none of the bosses want to split you three up,” Finney observes dryly. “But let’s play: if he was watching the girls to pass judgment on them, then he watched Priya five years ago. She and her sister were incredibly close, so for him to make any meaningful evaluation of Chavi, he saw a lot of Priya, too.”
“And he fell in love with her.”
“Isn’t that a jump? Especially if we’re saying this isn’t about sex?”
Ramirez shakes her head. “I said love, not lust. Like courtly love: it’s supposed to be chaste, pure. And think about it, Priya doesn’t date. She isn’t friends with boys. She does her schoolwork, she plays chess with a bunch of veterans, she stays in with her mother. If it’s perceived purity he’s hung up on, you can’t really do better than Priya.”
“Then wouldn’t he have attacked her after I was there?” Eddison points out, an ache gripping his chest.
“You didn’t spend the night.”
“No, but we were alone in the house for a few hours before Deshani came home. And we walked to and from chess together the next morning.”
They all absorb that in silence, then Finney clears his throat. “You were protecting her. In nosing around Landon, you were protecting Priya. He probably saw you as an ally.”
Ramirez glances to Eddison, the corner of her mouth jumping slightly. “And anyone who’s seen you and Priya spend time together wouldn’t see you as anything other than family.”
He flips her off rather than answer, though she’s not wrong.
“So when he gets up to date on the flowers, what happens then?” Finney asks. “Do we think he’s going to approach somehow? Attack her?”