Double Vision (21 page)

J
ustice watched the woman he'd been following most of the day slam the door of her red Toyota Camry, the same one with chipping paint he'd followed from midtown, where she'd run errands, all the way here.

Her dark ponytail bobbed with her stride as she walked toward the Harford Suites. If she knew she'd been watched going into the hotel several times now, she might've bothered to put on those detestable giant sunglasses that made her look like a praying mantis–human hybrid. But the girl was blissfully ignorant of her audience.

Justice rubbed his palm on the rough fabric of the truck seat beneath him. When that didn't staunch the itch, he brought his palm to his mouth and moved his hand back and forth across his front teeth, the only thing that even remotely helped. This had to be over soon. He couldn't wait any longer than today. If the itch stayed, he was going to go crazy.

He'd known
they
were angry with him for waiting this long, but the itch had gotten worse just since morning.
No more! Not another minute!

Luckily, it was at that very moment the man burst through the double doors of the hotel. He made his way down the parking lot aisle to his silver Lexus, climbed in, and pulled out of the space. Now was the time to act.

Justice jumped out of the truck and pumped his legs as fast as he could toward the building, turning sharply where, normally, a visitor would've gone through the doors. Instead he went to the back employee entrance he'd noticed, one he'd learned had no special requirements for entry other than knowing it was there.

Once inside, he moved swiftly toward the elevator, but second-guessed himself at the last moment and took the stairs. Elevators were videotaped.

He scratched his arm as hard as he could as he opened the door leading to the third-floor corridor.
Sick.
All he wanted to do was stop and writhe on the ground, let his body graze the industrial carpet until it rubbed his prickly skin clean off.

Can't get sidetracked. He'll be back soon.

It was the same every day. The woman arrived at her married lover's hotel a short thirty minutes after her husband left for his own job. She went in, and the lover came out. He would climb into his Lexus, drive to his child's school, pick up the child, transfer the child to hockey practice, then return to his mistress's arms. The whole process usually took all of twenty minutes, so no time to waste.

He strode through the hallway, stopping briefly as he passed a room-service cart set outside someone's door after they'd finished their meal.
Maybe so.

Cart in tow, he continued toward room 354. He rapped on the door. “Room service,” he said. She'd never know that the man hadn't ordered a bottle of wine or some fruit before he left. She wasn't careful anymore; she didn't worry it was someone she wouldn't want to find her. He knew, because he'd watched.

Sure enough, the doorknob turned. The door opened. Justice shoved the cart hard into the exotic-looking beauty. She fell backward, and he pushed into the room, closing the door behind him.

Before she had a chance to recover from the wind being knocked out of her and scream, he drew his gun, silencer in place. He pulled the trigger once, twice, a third time.

The itching, for one glorious moment, stopped.

“S
o let me wrap my head around this,” Saleda said. “You're saying the Triple Shooter isn't acting alone?”

Jenna shook her head, pushing away the green color that flashed in every time she talked about the Triple Shooter's list of conquests. “Not exactly. I think his
triple shooting
crimes . . . you know, the ones that involve triple shots . . . are his and his alone. But if someone else was involved, it would explain why the grocery store killings were such a divergence.”

Saleda leaned back and folded her arms. “I'll buy it. Maybe. But if someone else is involved and
knows
the UNSUB is the Triple Shooter and just sort of
lets him be
, then—”

“Then we're dealing with a really sick fuck,” Dodd cut in.

Jenna conjured up red in her mind, a red she recognized as the dominant color that appeared any time she dealt with a case involving a dominant team killer and a submissive one, just to see how it felt. And yet, it didn't match. Not quite. The Triple Shooter wasn't a classic subordinate in that he had his own reasons for his kills, his own style, and his own course. In the classic team formulation, the submissive of the two killers was usually goaded into the kills somehow, be it for fear of losing or disappointing their dominant teammate or having a violent streak the more violent, dominant person had cultivated in them. The Triple Shooter, she was sure, had acted alone up until the grocery store. So what changed?

“The target
has
to be the way we're going to blow this thing open,” Jenna mumbled.

“Back to square one then?” Teva asked.

Dodd grunted. “Back to ‘Who's That Sinner' is more like it.”

The phone in the middle of the conference room table rang, its little red light flashing with the promise of news. Jenna's heart skittered as Yancy's face came to mind. If Eldred
was
attacked again, at any moment that phone could tell her Yancy was hurt. Or worse.

“BAU,” Teva answered.

Jenna watched Teva nod, her heart slowing. From the side of the conversation Jenna could hear, it just sounded like the local cops calling in a status report on their roadblocks, more or less notifying the BAU that there wasn't anything to notify them about.

“Sure thing. So if we need any further information about the manhunt as far as the roadblocks, we'll call Hoskings instead of Officer Mullins,” Teva said.

As Jenna watched Teva grab a pen and scribble a phone number on a white pad at the end of the conference table, her own cell vibrated in her pocket. Her pulse quickened as she pulled it out and pressed the button.

A text from an unknown number.

Jenna. Victor. Come to Harford Suites Hotel in lower Peabody. We've got a body, and let's just say it has your number on it.

•   •   •

J
enna crossed under the crime-scene tape in front of the doorway of room 354 at the Harford Suites Hotel after showing her badge to the cop on duty. Dodd ducked under behind her. The two of them had been nominated for this glorious turn of events while the rest hung back and scheduled interviews with some of the potential targets still on the “Sinner List,” as Dodd called it.

A man in a striped tie and gray trousers sat on the couch of the two-room suite, head in his hands. Cops bustled around the room, dusting for prints, and a clerk snapped photos of every nook and cranny.

Feet away, the body of thirty-two-year-old Pesha Josephy lay wide-eyed on the dark carpet. She'd been shot in the chest three times, and the killer couldn't have been more than a couple of feet away from her. Based on the placement of the bullet holes, it had probably been fast. All were right at the heart.

Dodd was already kneeling next to the body. He didn't touch it, but instead, pulled an ink pen from his pocket and held it across from the gunshot wounds, conducting some strange assessment that only made sense to him.

“The UNSUB's getting better at shooting these days. Maybe you should check for recent frequenters of the gun range,” a new voice said.

Jenna looked up from the body to see Victor Ellis stepping through the bedroom door.

“What brings you staties here?” she asked.

“Eh, just in the neighborhood, tired of playing with my radar gun. You know . . .”

“You say that like you're joking,” Jenna sparred.

“Well, only partly. Call came in, we were closest. Bam.” He tilted his head toward Pesha Josephy's body. “She's yours, isn't she?”

Well, that's one way to put it.

“Yeah, it would seem.” Jenna glanced over at the man in the power tie who was slowly rocking himself on the couch. She took a step toward Victor so she could speak more softly. “What about him?”

“Her partner. An affair. He's scared shitless. He'll tell you anything you want to know,” he said. “You can look closer at him if you're worried this might be a crime of passion and copycatted to look like a Triple Shooter victim, but it's not. First of all, this guy has as much stomach to shoot anyone as I did when I was four. Second, check this out.”

Victor led Jenna toward the table where the TV stood. He picked up a pair of evidence bags. “Already bagged and tagged, though it's a little tainted since Power Tie over there ripped them off during his distraught attempt at figuring out whether or not his lovable little mistress might still be breathing, but I knew you'd want to see them. Over the eyes.”

Jenna held the bag up so she could better identify the objects inside. One was a price tag off of a knit skirt that had cost Pesha forty of the last dollars she'd spent.

She squinted into the second bag, trying to identify the contents. It was another tag, one cut out of a garment. She pushed away the purple color trying to flash in, mostly because she wasn't ready to make sense of it.
Not yet.

“I don't get it,” she said. “Where are the threes?”

“Good question. Come look at this,” Victor said.

Jenna followed him into the bedroom. On the nightstand lay a coral-colored clutch purse. Its clasp was silver—a straight bar that curved gently at the edges, three bars beneath it arranged in such a way that the shape formed was clearly some sort of an emblem, even if she'd never seen it before.

“The skirt those tags were pulled from was draped over the chair here,” Victor said, gesturing toward the corner armchair. “Prince Charming in there says Pesha brought in some packages the day before yesterday. She'd done some online shopping, and she'd picked up her purchases from the post office box they were shipped to. He claims she opened the packages and gave the items the once-over. She switched everything from her old purse to that new clutch immediately and started using her new one, but the skirt she laid there on the chair, and she hadn't touched it since. She apparently couldn't take it home because she was planning to wear it for a heavy date of theirs, and it was supposed to be just for Mr. Man-on-the-Side. Sweet, huh?”

“How long have they had this room?”

“For about a week,” Victor said. “And it would seem they use it, um,
regularly
.”

Jenna glanced to the unmade bed, the sheets twisted and furled like they'd had a fight with a gorilla.

“I'll say. So just the purse and the skirt, then?” she replied. “Usually there are three . . .”

“You didn't look real close at those tags, did you, Hardass?”

Jenna pictured the tags in their little plastic baggies again, held them in her mind. She couldn't place what he was talking about though. The price tag had definitely been $39.99.

“What am I missing, Hotshot?” she said, humoring him.

“The skirt. It was from Trinity Place Department Store.”

Whoa.

“I've never heard of it. Where is it?”

“New York City,” Victor replied.

“You're kidding.”

He grinned. “I never kid about fashion.”

When he smiled, the same little lines around his eyes appeared as they had on Hank. Whatever she and Hank had been through, she missed him. Way more than she'd realized she would.

And if she missed him, she could only imagine how his absence would affect Ayana's whole life. It wasn't fair how the world picked and chose who to take away and who to leave and let live. Jenna had seen some of the worst monsters imaginable make it from day to day, but kids like Ayana and Molly didn't have birth fathers in their lives at all. Whatever else was true about her and Hank's relationship, kids deserved a chance to know their fathers as long as they weren't just like Claudia.

Victor shrugged. “You can order from anywhere online these days, I guess.”

But Jenna was only half listening, a thought of her own taking shape. If the items that caused the three alignment had been purchased online, the Triple Shooter couldn't have seen Pesha Josephy buy them in the store of threes—Trinity Place—then followed her to see if she'd committed some immoral act. This time, the MO seemed
backward.

“Did he know these two were playing married hanky-panky on the side and then
look
for the threes?” Jenna muttered to herself, pacing the room. So far it seemed the only way to explain this, but the change in process was so huge that she had no idea what to make of it.
Surely not . . .

“She didn't open the packages that gave the alignment of threes until she was here. The skirt—and its two tags that seemingly made up two of the triggering grouping of threes that caused the UNSUB to unleash on her—never left this room. So even though the purse did, we don't have the right batch of threes. They might fit incidentally, and he might've noticed this and used the tags because he had them on hand, but the threes that never left this hotel room aren't the ones that set him off,” Jenna said, still pacing.

Her eyes roved every inch of the room as she begged them to hone in on the real culprit that had acted as a flag to bring the monster to this place. Industrial sheets, white towels. None of this had been outside the hotel, either.

Jenna's gaze again landed on the coral purse with the three bars—three bars that could very well have acted as one of the group of threes that led the Triple Shooter here. She turned to look at the nervous businessman still whimpering and rocking himself on the small couch.

“You said she carried that purse places, right?” she asked.

He nodded hard.

“Okay,” Jenna said, and she grabbed a pair of latex gloves from the box CSI had set on the nightstand. She snapped them on, then picked up the coral clutch, popped it open. She sifted through its contents: driver's license, debit card, more credit cards than any human should have, a tube of mauve lipstick, a lambskin condom, a vial of eye drops. A circular birth control pill pack. A few dollar bills.

Then she saw a crumpled paper wedged along with a couple of empty gum wrappers under a fine-tooth comb. Jenna snagged it and straightened it out. A deposit slip. A deposit slip dated only a few days ago.

Jenna's head snapped toward the late Pesha Josephy's married lover. “What bank did she use?”

“Huh?” the guy said, mouth gaping like she'd just asked him to subtract Ringo Starr from Blue and then multiply the answer by cats.

“Pesha. Your girlfriend, Pesha. What bank did she go to?”

He pressed both palms over his face, squeezing the sides of his head like he was in pain. “Gah, oh man. I know this. I know this . . . ah! It was the All Trust.”

Jenna's pulse quickened. “Which branch?”

The guy grimaced again as he forced his brain to try to extract the information. He snapped his fingers. “Third Street. I'm pretty sure it was on Third Street.”

Three-bar purse at a bank on Third Street. That's two.

Jenna whipped out her cell phone and dialed Irv.

“And what can I do for my Crayola Wonder today?” the tech analyst answered.

“Get me all security footage from the All Trust Bank on Third Street, inside and out. I'm texting you a picture of, I'm sorry, a dead girl—”

“Aw, come on! You know I stay in this computer room because the bad guys scare me,” Irv cut in.

“Irv, you stay in there because it's air-conditioned and you can play computer games during your downtime,” Jenna sniped.

“That, too, but I do like it here better. Okay, send me the girl's last headshot and I'll find any shots of her in the security footage. Anything else?”

Jenna paused a second, bit her lip. It was worth a try anyway. “Yeah. See if anyone around her seems suspicious—watching her or anything like that. Then cross-reference those images with the ones from the Student Life Center surveillance footage from the college and let me know if you happen to notice if we have any characters who just happen to haunt both areas.”

“Long shot,” Irv replied.

“Everything is in this case,” she said.

“In
every
case,” Irv said, and he hung up.

“I'm guessing we'll find another three at that bank,” Jenna said to Dodd. “But if he saw the threes at the bank, why the tags over the eyes?”

The bizarre purple that kept trying to crop up throughout the case—here, at the grocery store—flashed in again, and the picture of the tags as she'd just imagined them burned in her mind. Suddenly the purple clicked into place. “Victor. The tags. I need to see them again.”

“Sure thing,” he said, and he extended a hand as if to say “After you.”

She rushed back into the sitting room and snatched up the first evidence bag. Sure enough, there on the tag it said
SIZE SEVEN
.

Before she even reexamined the other tag, she was already sure what it would say. But, there it was, as plain as could be. Seven.

Without explaining, she yanked out her phone and speed-dialed Irv. Her veins filled with ice, and for the first time in a long time, she was genuinely afraid.