“I think we may have caught a lucky break,” the voice said without a greeting.
It was R.J. Tully, her sometimes partner when the FBI sent two instead of one. A rare occasion these days.
She pushed hair out of her eyes, blinked to focus on the red digits of the hotel’s alarm clock.
“It better be lucky. You woke me up.”
“Aw geez! Sorry.”
Tully had to be the only law enforcement officer she knew who said things like, “Aw geez holy crap.” It made her smile as she fumbled in the dark to turn on a light.
“I thought you never sleep,” he followed up, giving her a chance to wake up.
He knew she had been battling a stretch of insomnia for over a year now. Getting shot in the head two months ago didn’t help matters. Technically it was called a “scraping of the skull alongside the left temporal lobe.” Unofficially it hurt like hell and the throbbing pain that still visited her head on a regular basis was a bitch. Otherwise she was okay. At least that’s what she kept telling people.
“What’s the lucky break?”
“Got a phone call from Omaha. Homeless man. Stabbed. Looks like our guy.”
She stood up from the bed, rubbed the sleep from her eyes and started turning on lamps. She’d been in the Kansas City area trying to dig up something, anything. But the victims here, and the evidence, were already two weeks cold.
“What makes them think it’s our guy?”
“Blitz attack. No other injuries. Single stab wound to the chest, just under the rib cage. Preliminaries suggest a long, double-edged blade.”
That sounded about right.
For four weeks she’d been chasing this guy halfway around the country. It started at the end of October when John Baldwin, the SSA in charge of BAU II, asked her to take a look at a slice ’n go down in Nashville. Maggie was still recovering from her own injuries but she owed Baldwin a favor and told him she’d take a look. Lieutenant Taylor Jackson sent her every scrap they had on the case, which included witness interviews, security video and even a driver’s license. Unfortunately the video footage showed only a flash of white at the bottom of the screen, the bill of a white ballcap. The driver’s license ended up being an excellent fake and the witness interviews didn’t turn up anything too interesting except that the man in question “smiled too much.”
Just when Maggie believed there wasn’t enough to go on, something odd happened. Her boss, Assistant Director Raymond Kunze, head of the Behavioral Science Unit at Quantico brought her the case – the exact same case. He insisted she and Tully make it their top priority. Kunze had been sending Tully and her around on wild goose chases for almost a year. Maggie was immediately suspicious. Why this case? What was the political connection? Who did Kunze owe a favor to this time?
She hated that she was right. Turns out the senior senator from Tennessee was a personal friend of the Nashville victim’s father. It didn’t take much digging for Maggie to discover this wasn’t a one-time “slice ’n go.” She and Tully had found another two victims in New Orleans. According to NOPD Detective Stacy Killian, both were homeless, one a new mother, the other a business man.
Searching ViCAP she discovered what could be as many as ten to twelve victims. Different cities across the country. Similar victims. Same MO. All of them quite possibly the work of one killer she and Tully nicknamed the Night Slicer.
Now Maggie paced the hotel room listening to Tully give her more details. She could hear him rattling paper and knew the notes he had taken were probably on a take-out menu or a dry cleaning receipt – his usual notepads, whatever was handy.
“Here’s the thing,” Tully said. “Omaha’s M.E. believes this one happened earlier this morning. Internal body temp says within last six hours. Night security guard claims it had to be around two o’clock.”
“Two o’clock in the morning? That’s only a few hours ago. How can he be so sure?”
“He knows the victim. Says the guy…” more paper shuffling. “Says Gino usually picked up a dozen extras of the Sunday Omaha World Herald right off the dock. He’d sell them on the street to make a few bucks. But first, he’d bring the security guard a copy and they’d drink hot chocolate.”
“That all sounds very nice but since when do we determine time of death from a security guard’s Sunday morning ritual?”
“Thing is, they found him between two-thirty and three this morning. He already had his dozen newspapers. The Sunday edition didn’t hit the loading dock until two-o-five.”
Tully went silent. He was waiting for it to settle in and Maggie finally understood the lucky break.
“So we’ve got a fresh kill,” she said. And then the realization hit her. “And less than twenty-four hours before he slices number two and leaves town.”