“So where did I dispose of it?” Dean asked.
Not a trash can—the police might look there. I forced myself to back up, to walk through it step by step. You make your way through the crowd—to Aaron. You come up behind him. You slice the knife across his neck—quick. No hesitation. No remorse. You peel the plastic off, drop the blade.
Thirty seconds.
Forty seconds.
How long has it been? How long do you have to make your way back to where you were when the lights went out?
You push your way through the crowd.
“The crowd,” I said out loud.
Dean understood before the others. “If I’m a killer who thinks of every contingency, I don’t throw the evidence away. I let someone else do it for me….”
“Preferably after they get home,” I finished.
“He planted the evidence on someone,” Lia translated. “If I’m his mark, and I get home and find a plastic bag in my pocket? I throw it away.”
“Unless it has blood on it,” Sloane said. “A drop, a smear…”
I saw the web of possibilities, the way this played out. “Depending on who you are, you might call the police.” I considered a second possibility. “Or you might burn it.”
There was a beat of saturated silence, brimming with the things none of us would say. If we don’t find it, if we don’t find the person who has it…
Our killer would win.
“We need Beau’s trajectory.” Sloane tapped the pad of her thumb across each of her fingers, one after the other, again and again as she spoke. “Point A to point B to point C. How did he get there? Who did he pass?”
Before. After. Before. After. Sloane went back to switching from one still image to the next. “There are at least nine unique paths with a likelihood greater than seven percent. If I isolate the length and angle of the suspect’s stride after the lights came back on…” Sloane stopped talking, lost to the numbers in her head.
The rest of us waited.
And waited.
Tears welled in Sloane’s eyes. I knew her—I knew her brain was racing, and I knew that number after number, calculation after calculation, all she could see was Aaron’s face. His empty eyes. The shirt he’d bought her.
I wanted him to like me, she’d told me.
“Don’t look at Beau.” Lia broke the silence in the room. She caught Sloane’s gaze and held it. “When you’re looking for a lie, sometimes you look at the liar, and sometimes you look at everyone else. The better the liar, the better the chance that your tell is going to come from someone else. When you’re dealing with a group, you don’t always watch the person speaking. You watch the worst liar in the room.” Lia leaned back on the heels of her hands, the casual posture belied by the intensity in her voice. “Don’t look at the suspect, Sloane.”
Lia might have been trying to spare Sloane from looking—again and again—at Beau, knowing what he’d done to Aaron, but it was good advice. I could see the exact moment it took hold in Sloane’s mind.
Don’t look at the suspect. Look at everyone else.
“Crowds move,” Sloane said, her voice going up in pitch as she gathered steam. “When someone works their way through a crowd, people move. If I can isolate the migration patterns during the blackout…” Her eyes darted side to side. Scanning the footage, she sent the still images to the printer. Before. After. Her fingers grappled for a pen. She looked from the footage to the images and back again, uncapping the pen and circling clusters of people. “Controlling for baseline movements, with a margin of error for individual differences in response to chaos, there are gaps here, here, and here, with slight but consistent movement northwest and southeast among each cluster.” Sloane drew a path from Aaron’s body to Beau’s final position, then ran her finger back over the path she’d drawn.
You drop the knife. You make your way back through the crowd, light on your feet, never hesitating, never stopping.
“Pretend you’re picking pockets,” Dean told Lia, his gaze fixed on the path Sloane had drawn. “Who are your easy marks?”
“I’m insulted you think I would know,” Lia replied, not sounding insulted in the least. She brought her fingertip to the image and tapped one long, painted nail against first one person, then two more. “One, two, and three,” Lia said. “If I were picking pockets, those would be my marks.”
You’re weaving through the crowd. It’s dark. Chaotic. People are fumbling for their cell phones. You keep your head down. There’s no room for hesitation. No room for mistakes.
I looked at the three people Lia had indicated. You just killed a man, and you’re going to let someone else dispose of the evidence. From the beginning, I’d seen our UNSUB as a planner, a manipulator. You knew exactly which mark to choose.
“That one.” I pointed to the second of the two marks Lia had chosen. Late twenties. Male. Wearing a suit jacket. Mouth pursed in distaste.