She swings by her desk to grab the loose leaf tea and strainer she keeps in her drawer, then heads to the kitchenette.
There, she notices that the Bunn coffee brewer on the countertop is giving off a burnt smell. The carafe is grimy and the filter basket is caked in crud. As usual, someone has left behind maybe a quarter of an inch of black liquid and put it back on the burner without bothering to make a fresh pot, leaving that task to whoever comes along and is desperate enough to drink the last of the bitter brew.
In a few hours, the scenario will play itself out yet again, and again . . .
Forever and ever, amen, she thinks as she fills her mug with hot water.
And Stockton wonders why she sticks with tea.
Leaving her mug in the microwave to heat, she heads into the bathroom.
Her mind is on the case and all the weighty implications—-and responsibilities—-that come with it.
If a predator isn’t stopped in its tracks, he—-she, it, any predator—-will be compelled to kill again. It will happen over and over . . .
Forever and ever, amen.
The ladies’ room door opens as she stands at the sink washing her hands.
“Hey, Sully.”
“Hey, Brick.” The female detective who just joined her in the ladies’ room is never called by her real name: Flora. She’s far more suited to her nickname, which she earned growing up in the South Bronx long before she joined the NYPD. She’s over six feet tall, tattooed, and is rumored to have killed a man—-or two—-without benefit of her weapon. Nobody messes with Brick. If she likes you, you’re golden. If she doesn’t . . .
Luckily, she likes Sully, and it’s mutual.
“I hear you and Barnes are calling in the Feds,” she says from behind the door of a stall.
“Bad news travels fast. Yeah. Barnes came across a case in Erie, Pennsylvania, that matches the MO and then we found a -couple of others.”
“Erie. I was there once, visiting my cousin who lives there. The weather’s shitty. It snowed like hell.”
“Yeah, well, winter’s a bitch. Especially on the Great Lakes . . .”
“It was June.”
“Mother Nature—-also a bitch.”
“No kidding. I guess it wasn’t as bad as what happened there last spring. Remember the ice storm?”
“Where, in Erie?”
“Yeah. All along the lake up there. My cousin lost power for almost two weeks.”
Ice storm. Sully remembers. It was epic. All over the news. “When was that?”
“March. I remember because she was supposed to visit me for Saint Patrick’s Day but her flight was canceled.”
Sully narrows her eyes at herself in the mirror above the sink, simultaneously remembering something and forgetting all about her mug of hot water in the microwave.
“Gotta go,” she tells Brick, and hurries back to find Stockton.
“I thought you were getting tea and—-”
“When was the regatta?”
“What?”
“The regatta? Newport? You said—-”
“July. Yeah, I know, too early for hurricane season, but that storm was—-”
“July what?”
“I don’t know . . . mid--July. Why?”
“The storm. I just want to check something.” She sits at her computer and enters Rhode Island storm July into the search engine.
A moment later, she’s got it. “Barnes, give me the date on that Virginia case. Where was it, near Richmond?”
“Yeah, just outside. Why?”
“I need to check something.”
A minute later, she’s learned that there was a major snowstorm in the Richmond area a few days before a young woman named Emily Hines went missing. Her body—-slashed, head shaven—-didn’t turn up until the spring thaw.
“So maybe our perp isn’t a crazed barber,” Barnes says, as she adds the storms to the whiteboard. “Maybe he’s . . . what, a weatherman? A storm chaser? Is that what you’re thinking?”
“I don’t know. There was nothing major going on when Julia Sexton was killed.”
“It was raining.”