Double Vision (6 page)

Ten.
“Oh, never mind, Molly. I was just speculating. We should probably get back upstairs, yeah?”

Molly nodded. “Yeah, I guess so.”

Jenna followed Molly back upstairs to the living room, where they found Liam and Raine sitting at the coffee table, looking through papers from the file folder Liam had retrieved from the office. When Liam noticed them, he stood.

“Going through Rita's lease at the apartment she rented to figure out what we're responsible for after the incident,” he said. Then, he frowned at Molly, who had blanched at the mention of her grandmother. “Sorry, Molls. Hey! I bet you didn't think to show Dr. Ramey your new invention, did you? I'm guessing not, since you left it on my nightstand last night. Run up and get it, huh? I bet she'd like it.”

Molly's eyes lit up again. “Yeah!”

She dashed away up the stairs, taking them two at a time.

“Sorry about that. I've been trying my best to get Raine through the logistics of Rita's passing, and Molly through having maybe seen her grandmother's shooter while she was with her at the grocery store, but those two things don't always align in a simple way.”

“Molly'll be okay,” Jenna replied. “Kids are resilient. Do let me know if you need me to recommend a good child psychologist, though. I'd be happy to give you some names.”

Liam Tyler smiled warmly, but he shook his head. “I doubt that'll be necessary, Dr. Ramey. Even if we're stretched a bit thin, Molly has a good support system here at home, and anything else she needs, we've got a counselor at the church she can talk to.”

Molly came thundering down the stairs, holding a Rubik's Cube in her hand. Each of the colored squares on the cube had been numbered in Sharpie marker. Molly began to twist furiously, causing the block to become a mix of different numbers and colors.

“I can't do it by the colors, but once I numbered the blocks . . .” She held up the cube to show Jenna the colors were sufficiently scrambled, then began to work the tiers of the toy, turning them row by row into place. “I can do it, see?”

She held the cube back up, two neat rows of green already aligned so quickly that Jenna could tell the six-year-old would have all the colors back into place within minutes. “That's awesome, Molly.”

“Thanks. I thought it was pretty cool.”

Liam put his hands on Molly's shoulders in front of him. “Anything else we can help you with today, Dr. Ramey?”

The Last Supper
painting drifted through her mind, the talk about numbers and gods and divinity still fresh. There was something to be tapped there. She just didn't know what yet.

“No, thank you,” Jenna replied. “That's all for now.”

T
he man who called himself Justice had followed the brunette with the swishy ponytail ever since the basketball game last night. Now he walked about ten feet behind her, toward the Student Life Center at Woodsbridge Community College. Her gray sweatshirt bearing a blue cougar seemed heavy for the springtime air, the girl's waif-like frame lost in its billows. She went to the high school, the one with the blue cougar. It was where he'd seen her play basketball. Maybe she was taking an advanced course here. That would mean she was smart. Maybe he was following her for no reason.

But the threes.

Itching. Always the itching.

She trotted up the short flight of stairs to the pavilion in front of the Student Life Center, cut down its middle toward the set of four stairs on the other side that led inside. He wouldn't be able to follow her much farther without an ID. He'd have to sit here, wait until she came out.

He reached the end of the pavilion as she scanned her access card against the rubber mat beside the door. In she went, away from his sight.

His feet slowed of their own accord, and for a moment, he stared at the closed glass door where she'd stood only moments before, her long, swishy ponytail whipping behind her as she stepped inside. Then, suddenly, his neck burned. He glanced around, sure people had noticed him, were watching him.

Other students walked in twos and threes around the pavilion and the grassy knoll nearby, laughing, chatting. Some hurried with armfuls of books, eyes only on destinations. On the grounds to the left, a girl and a boy lay together on an orange-striped beach towel, the boy on his stomach reading a campus newspaper, the girl on her back, eyes closed and using his back as a pillow.

No one had noticed him. They wouldn't. It was
them
he had to worry about. Not these people.

He glanced around, saw an empty spot at one of the umbrella tables to the right of the pavilion. Settling down in the chair and angling it for a good view of the Student Life Center's glass door, he couldn't help but wish he'd thought to bring a book, a newspaper, a crossword puzzle. Anything to look a little more like he belonged here.

But she's done nothing wrong.

The man who called himself Justice exhaled the deep breath he'd been holding. It probably wouldn't matter if anyone saw him here or not, because so far, he'd followed the numbers and cleared them. They did not ring true. A little longer to watch, of course. To be sure. But at the moment, it looked like he would get to go home tonight without worrying.

Out of the corner of his eye, he noticed another man, the only other on the pavilion rooted to a spot. The white-bearded fellow with waxy, wrinkled skin leaned next to the low wall that set the pavilion's border. He, too, wore clothing uncharacteristically warm for the season in the form of an old, tattered green army jacket. His hands were neatly folded over his stomach, a lidless shoe box at his side.

The man who called himself Justice pulled the ball cap's visor lower over his eyes to block the sun, aware of the glass door in case the brunette with the swishy ponytail came back out, but his gaze lingered on the homeless man with the shoe box across the way. Students entering the pavilion passed him, mostly paying him no mind, ignoring his requests for change as though they couldn't hear them. Standard. As the man who called himself Justice watched them, he seethed quietly. These people had committed no crimes, but to observe people ignoring another human being, even if that man
was
a beggar, brought a metallic taste to his mouth.

Occasionally a guy or girl would smile at the old man and politely explain that they didn't have any spare money. Once or twice, he even saw someone toss a few coins into the cardboard box. Some decency, perhaps. Something to be grateful for.

He glanced at his wristwatch, a cheap plastic thing he bought at the Dollar Roundup for a buck. The brunette with the swishy ponytail had only been inside ten minutes. Why was he so antsy for her to come out?

Across the way, next to where the bearded man sat, a horde of students spilled into the pavilion, no doubt in the fray of time between class periods. The old codger put his shoe box on the wall, then held on to the edge of the low wall, bent one knee, and used the stone slab to push himself to his feet. Just as he reached for his shoe box, however, a hand knocked into it.

For a moment, the old man stared at the ground, the meager contents of his receptacle strewn across the pavilion stone. Then he turned in the direction from where the hand had come. His face looked sunken, confused.

But the man who called himself Justice had already seen what the beggar was now spotting for the first time. Two students. Females. One girl with a pencil-thin neck and bony cheeks stood a foot away from another girl with wild, frizzy red curls. The bony-cheek girl lingered but hid most of her face behind the book she was holding, embarrassed. But the other? The red-haired girl faced the old man, shoulders squared, cackling. She smirked as her laughter waned. The old man put his hands to his knees as he bent ever so slowly at the waist, reaching for a dollar that had been flung from his shoe box. Just as his fingers brushed it, the pointy toe of a black high-heeled boot clamped over its end.

The scrawny beggar looked up at the redhead from his crouch and shook his head. “Why are you doing this? I just want to pick up my dollar bill here, young lady. No reason to be nasty about it.”

The redhead gave the old man a fake smile, marinated in contempt. “
Your
dollar? Don't you mean the dollar of some bleeding heart kid? One who gave you pocket change you're too lazy to earn, because all you do is sit around a college campus all day asking for handouts?”

She slid the dollar under her boot toward her, then bent and lifted it, held it directly in front of the old man's face. “This dollar? It was never yours, and it's not going to be now, either.”

She ripped the single bill in two, then crumpled the pieces in her hand, tossed them to the ground by the old man's shoe box, which lay on its side. “Come on, Diana let's go,” she said. The redhead whipped around and headed for one of the iron tables adorned with umbrellas, like the one the man who called himself Justice was sitting at now. Her friend, however, stayed behind just long enough to mouth, “I'm sorry,” to the shaky old man.

And that's when the man who called himself Justice saw it. The book the friend carried, the one she had used to hide her face. The screened print on the front said very clearly Latin III. That was one three, and the spine of the book she held under it at her side provided the final two threes: Biology 3300. Three threes.

The man who called himself Justice forgot about the glass door of the Student Life Center and the swishy ponytail of the girl inside it as he slowly turned his head a fraction to catch a better glimpse of the girl with the bush of tousled red curls atop her head. She sat in the black wrought-iron chair, dipping a French fry into ketchup. Diana caught up, pulled up a seat, and stared at the table the entire time the redhead yammered on and sniggered to her.

Today wasn't a waste after all.
They
did
lead me here, it just wasn't about who I thought
.

As he watched, the red-haired girl gestured animatedly to her friend, coughing as she nearly choked on a bite of her sandwich, she was laughing so hard.

That's right, little girl. Live it up. After all, it's time to die.

J
enna brushed through the gaggle of reporters camped out at the local police department, not even venturing a “No comment” to the questions they yelled at her. It was the unfortunate part of having a known face in this job. But she wasn't prepared to say anything to the press. Not until she knew more about what they were dealing with. After all, the grocery store murders deviated strongly from the Triple Shooter's other killings, and she didn't know why. All she did know was that it sure as hell didn't mean he was stable.

When she reached the conference room, Saleda and Teva were already waiting, flipping through pages and pages of Triple Shooter case notes. She'd called them as soon as she'd left the Tyler house to tell them to pull the files and meet her, that she thought she had a lead. Normally she'd never have overstepped Saleda and instructed the team to do
anything
, but in this case, any information about the Triple Shooter's profile was vital. His
old
crimes were where they would catch him. More consistency, more to go on. The grocery store massacre trail was hot, but the pattern was so off that the only way to use it to find him was to figure out where his old style and these new killings converged.

Saleda glanced at her watch when she saw Jenna come in. “About time.”

“Traffic,” Jenna muttered.

“Probably the dozens of roadblocks the locals have set up on every street from here to Saskatchewan, which is cute, ya know. Stopping people to check if they're someone you don't know you're looking for. We have no physical description, getaway vehicle, nothing, but these heroes would rather employ martial law to find a phantom than work with what we have, which is a profile.”

Jenna smirked as she pulled out a chair next to Teva. “Aw, come on, Saleda. Everyone knows the ‘real' cops shouldn't listen to our voodoo shenanigans. ‘Behavioral Science,'” she said, miming scare quotes. She flicked her hand, dismissing the thought. “What a crock.”

Saleda chuckled, shook her head. “For what it's worth, I stationed Porter and Dodd with the head of the local task force so they can at least help vet any suspicious characters stopped for no good reason.”

“Dodd's back already?” Jenna asked.

Saleda waved away the question. “Yeah, they called him in about something regarding the Cobbler case.”

“Wow. I had no idea he worked that one,” Jenna answered. The case was one of the more famous these days. A while back, a killer had murdered twelve people in the Chicago area. The police arrested the alleged murderer after an anonymous tip call sent them straight to the bastard's door. They found ten feet in the guy's freezer. There were twelve victims.

“Yeah, unfortunately for him. It's a dilly. The defense appealed the court's ruling that the defendant is competent to stand trial, citing new psychiatric evaluations suggesting the perp is criminally insane and needs institution, not jail. Dodd went down there to try to stop a reversal. He worked his ass off for that case, and between us, it was the one that almost broke him. He'll die before he sees that psycho let loose. But yeah, he got to say his piece, and then he joined Porter with the local task force leader here. Now we pursue your gut feeling, Jenna. Just don't make me regret it.”

“Oh, you won't,” she said. She opened the Triple Shooter case files in front of them, gingerly laying out pictures of the three early victims in a neat line across the table. “The grocery store killings are the exception, not the rule. The older victims are how we'll find him, by smoking out a pattern. Every kill he commits, he gives us another clue, and sometimes he gives us a retroactive one without realizing it.”

“We've already established that the Triple Shooter kills compulsively. He isn't searching for fame or notoriety. He
is
doing it to
stop
something from happening, i.e, he's paranoid. Paranoia makes him dangerous, unstable. If spooked, he might run farther, hurt someone, take hostages. His pathology would escalate, maybe trigger a spree.”

Teva leaned her elbows on the table, propped her chin on her fists. “Isn't it safe to say he's already
on
a spree?”

“Not anything compared to what'll happen if he gets scared and angry,” Jenna replied.

“Okay, so paranoid, dangerous nut job who may or may not see threes that cause him to kill people. What's up with the religious connection you mentioned on the phone?”

Jenna stood and went for the coffeepot. She poured herself a paper cup, dumped in two sugars, then stirred as she sat back at the table. “I talked to the little girl who was a witness at the grocery store. Kid has a sharp eye, notices things others don't. She's also obsessed with numbers, so I thought maybe I could get a childlike perspective on what the numbers might mean.”

“Anything good?”

“More than I bargained for,” Jenna said. She swallowed the hot coffee hard, the liquid leaving her throat searing.

Jenna took another gulp to stall even as she willed herself to continue. Her suspicion that Molly was pointing her in the right direction might not be seen as valid by most. “We spent time looking at a print of the restored version of
The Last Supper
in her stepfather's study, and she ended up telling me tons about numbers and deities, symbolism. Call me crazy, but I think we should take a harder look at the religion aspect.”

“Why do you say that?” Saleda coaxed.

Jenna stood and continued to sip her coffee, pacing the burgundy carpet. “When someone kills another person, they can have a variety of motivations. Passion, financial gain, revenge, political agenda, self-defense, religious fanaticism—that sort of thing. But this guy, he kills because something sets off his compulsions, typically repetition of the number three.”

“So the threes align, his sensibilities are, what, offended? So he strikes?” Teva asked.

“Not exactly,” Saleda interjected. “Something about the threes lining up has to threaten him or otherwise set off his compulsion. The compulsion isn't the number three alone. Robbery and revenge can be and often are motives, just like Jenna said, but in the case of OCD or schizophrenia, you'd be killing someone because the repetition of the numbers was somehow threatening to you—or because someone told you it was.”

Teva nodded. “Okay. So the threes align, the Triple Shooter gets spooked, annihilates the threat before it can annihilate him. So what about the threes freaks him out?”

“Could be anything,” Jenna said, pacing the room some more. “Molly talked about deities—for all we know the Triple Shooter could think God is pointing an enemy out for him to kill by showing threes near that person.”

Teva strolled slowly past the victim photographs. “We're assuming the deity is the Christian God. Plenty of other religions use threes in conjunction with holiness. Are there any other ‘pious' aspects to this case?”

“Besides the remorse of shutting the eyes, you mean?” Saleda asked.

“I'd call that reverence, not piousness,” Teva countered.

Jenna, however, stood still, looking at her feet as colors flashed in her mind. Eyes, closed. Pieces of evidence over them. Remorse. Eyes closed in remorse. Religion.

Gold solidified in her mind.

“The eyes were covered. Coins. Greeks put coins over the eyes of the dead. It was a tradition, a fare to pay the boatman to take them across the river to the land of the dead,” Jenna whispered.

Both women stared at her, suddenly quiet.

“What?” Teva asked.

“He's not only remorseful for killing them, but he's even willing to pay their passage into the Underworld. The question is, what the heck does this have to do with the threes setting him off?”

Teva chortled. “So this guy thinks Zeus is telling him to smite down anyone attached to the number three?”

Jenna grabbed her satchel and the stack of case folders, and headed for the door. “I haven't gotten that far, but I think it's worth pursuing. We need to find out what all in Greek mythology was associated with the number three. Then maybe we can figure out what's triggering his attacks. I'm going to the community college to talk to the history professor. I'll check in soon.”

And with that, Jenna was out the door.