I couldn’t help give into the smile that quirked at the edges of my lips. “So now you believe me, right?”
Faraday scratched his head, still staring at the two photos on his desk—the ones of his brother and his aunt. “I watched you like a hawk,” he said softly. “You never even looked up. You went through a stack of forty photos of people I know you’ve never heard of or seen before, and you couldn’t possibly have researched any of them, and still you didn’t miss a single photo. Ginny was supposed to trip you up, Maddie. And if she didn’t, then I pulled pictures out of other agents’ family photo albums, too. Even if you had researched my entire family, I know you couldn’t have randomly guessed the dates of these other people.”
Faraday then pointed to the camera. “We had an expert in body language watching you, too,” he said. “An FBI profiler in D.C. who’s the best in the business says he can’t explain how you could do that, but your body language suggests you’re not writing down these dates from memory. He says there would have been a momentary pause as you went through each photo to recall the face and the date from your memory—and you didn’t pause once except with Aunt Gin, and he thinks that’s because you realized I’d tried to trip you up.”
Faraday reached down to pull out a folder and laid it on the desk. Flipping it open I could see several photographs—many of them were of Stubby and me from the Jupiter game. “It’s never quite fit,” he said, scratching his chin. “Agent Wallace and I have been round and round on this. From the first interview with Mrs. Tibbolt, she claimed that you never actually came out and threatened her or her son, only that you had predicted he’d die the following week.
“And we interviewed several other clients of yours, too, Maddie. It’s taken us a few weeks to compile a list of them, but the one that really bugged us was Pat Kelly. Remember him?”
I nodded. He was a man I’d read for only a few days before all of this started. He’d been very nice to me, even after I’d given him the bad news.
“He says that he’d come to see you on the twelfth of October. His name was right before the Tibbolts’ in your notebook, which is why we were interested in talking to him. We asked him what you’d said, and he told us how you’d predicted he’d die in May. He then told us that he’d just come from his doctor who’d given him six months to live. Kelly swore he didn’t tell you or in any way hint to you that he had pancreatic cancer. I looked him over real good, Maddie, and I couldn’t tell that he was sick. The guy seemed healthy as a horse.”
As Faraday spoke, I didn’t interrupt. I simply let him work through it, waiting for the moment when he’d finally tell me that he believed me.
Faraday pivoted a picture to me, and I saw it was of me and Stubs, sitting in the stands at the Jupiter game, both of us smiling broadly and looking so happy. I realized either Wallace or Faraday had taken the photo from their seats in the stands, and they’d inadvertently captured the last time Stubby or I had been that carefree.
“Truthfully, Maddie,” Faraday continued, “you and Arnold don’t fit the profile for two serial killers.”
Faraday’s admission left me stunned. “Then why have you been so focused on us?” I demanded.
He sighed heavily and ran a hand through his hair. “We have to follow the evidence,” he said. “And there was a lot that pointed to the two of you.”
“But there has to be stuff that points away from us, too,” I insisted, and for emphasis I waved my hand at the stack of photos that proved I’d been telling the truth all along.
Faraday shrugged, then nodded. “The same guy in D.C. who watched you zip through the photos sent me the psychiatric profile this afternoon of the person he thinks killed Payton Wyly and Tevon Tibbolt, and I’ve just had a chance to read it,” Faraday continued, and he reached for a manila folder at the side of his desk and opened it. “The report says that Wyly and Tibbolt were definitely killed by the same person, and that person was likely to be a lone white male between thirty and fifty-five. A guy with a whole lot of repressed rage. A guy with sick fantasies but above-average intelligence. He’s likely to be adept at keeping secrets, and is very good about hiding in plain sight. He likely has a good steady job, one he’s had for years but secretly hates. He’s someone who has a distorted view of himself, a guy who thinks he’s above most people, and he has a hard time making lasting social connections. He takes his rage out on kids in their teens because he seems to have some sort of sick vendetta against them. They represent some sort of trigger for his anger, and he vents that anger at them by torturing and killing them. My profiler ends the report by saying that it’s highly unlikely either you or Arnold is the murderer.”