Chapter Seven
While the others split off to tackle their assignments, Sean grabbed his laptop from the Mustang and headed back inside.
The conference room the sheriff had claimed for the task force already felt different from the day before.
It had taken on that charged, lived-in feel that investigation spaces always developed once a case gained momentum—coffee rings on the table, legal pads scattered across the surface, and pens everywhere but never within reach.
Above it all, tension hung in the stale air.
The room had everything they needed. Dry-erase boards covered one wall, corkboards on another. Plenty of space to map victims, timelines, locations, and suspects. At the moment, most of it still sat blank.
That wouldn’t last long.
As he waited for the department’s IT tech to link his laptop to the sheriff’s network, Sean got busy.
He pinned photographs of the three victims across one corkboard in neat rows.
The top held images of the women as they’d been in life—smiling, dressed up, full of energy.
Beneath those came the crime scene photos. The bottom row held the autopsy shots.
The contrast was heartbreaking.
Three women who’d gone out expecting nothing more dangerous than a night of drinks and laughter.
He turned to the dry-erase boards and began listing details beneath each name. Age. Hair and eye color. Last known location. Time last seen. Blood alcohol level. Body recovery site. Condition of remains. Signature elements.
Patterns lived in details. The more he wrote, the more the information began arranging itself into something that should have made sense.
It didn’t.
By the time he capped the marker, close to an hour had passed.
The muted clicks of keys and the occasional shuffle of cables broke the silence as the IT tech finished connecting Sean’s laptop to the department’s system and confirmed network access for the task force computers.
After thanking him, Sean dropped into a chair at the conference table and logged into the FBI’s National Data Exchange.
Most agencies could feed their major case data into the system, but not all. Some smaller departments still lacked the budget or workforce, but enough participated to make the database one of the bureau’s best tools for linking crimes across jurisdictions.
Serial offenders repeated themselves. Methods evolved. Confidence grew. Mistakes changed shape. But the core behaviors usually remained.
If this wasn’t where the pattern had begun, there could be other victims buried somewhere in the system.
Sean entered the known parameters: blonde females in their twenties or thirties, ligature strangulation, carved torso, and a penny placed on the forehead. He programmed the search to flag any homicide matching at least three of the four markers and launched the scan.
The system would need time, which gave him room to tackle the second part of his assignment—profiling.
He wasn’t a behavioral analyst, but he’d taken enough bureau courses over the years—and worked enough violent crime cases—to know how to build a foundation. Sometimes, all it took was asking the right questions.
What kind of offender escalated from straightforward strangulation to repeated resuscitation?
Why the pennies?
Why the carving?
Why leave two bodies where discovery was almost guaranteed, then place the third in partial concealment?
His fingers drummed against the tabletop as he pondered it all.
There was one person he trusted to help him work through those questions. He pulled out his phone and scrolled to Dr. Suki Ralston’s number.
Stationed at FBI headquarters in Quantico, Virginia, Suki held a Ph.D.
in criminal psychology and was one of the sharpest minds he’d ever worked with.
A native of Hawaii, she was petite and dark-haired, with soft caramel skin that turned heads the moment she entered a room. Most men noticed her looks first.
Sean had learned fast that there was far more to her than that.
She had a fun personality, a deep love of her work, and a wicked sense of humor that often surfaced at the exact moment a brutal case threatened to swallow everyone whole.
Her profiles were razor sharp, and in the three cases they’d worked together over the past two years, every one of them had proven frighteningly accurate once the suspects were caught.
Long hours and too many late-night strategy sessions over takeout had forged an easy friendship between them. More like siblings than anything else.
He’d spoken to her two weeks ago while packing for the move north. They’d made tentative plans to grab dinner while he was still technically on vacation.
That idea felt a long way off now.
The fluorescent lights hummed overhead as he pressed send and leaned back in his chair, his gaze drifting to the victim photos pinned across the board as he waited for her to answer.
The call connected after the third ring. “Hey, hot stuff, what’s up?
Her voice always carried a spark that managed to cut through whatever darkness he happened to be dealing with. Despite the grimness of the morning, Sean smiled. “Aloha, Doc. How ya doing?”
“Great. How’s your vacation going? Have you gone stir-crazy yet?”
“Actually, I’m working.”
“What? You’ve got to be kidding me.”
When he told her he wasn’t, she groaned. “Didn’t anyone teach you the definition of a vacation, Malone? You’re what—not even one week into a four-week break? How the hell did you manage that?”
He gave her the condensed version of how he got pulled into the case, then spent the next several minutes outlining the murders. As he talked, his gaze moved over the timeline he’d written on the board, making sure he didn’t leave out any major details.
“So, that’s it in a nutshell. So I called my favorite shrink to see if she could work up a full profile for me. I’ve only got the basics.”
“Favorite, huh?” Her warm laugh brought a smile back to his face. “Flattery only gets you so far.”
He leaned farther back and propped one ankle over his opposite knee, letting himself relax for the first time all morning. “Uh-oh. What’s it going to cost me this time? A king’s ransom?”
“Nah. Just dinner, maybe dancing.”
“Dinner, yes. Dancing only if you don’t mind getting your feet crushed. I’m a lousy dancer. At least that’s what my prom date told me.”
Suki laughed. “What? A stud-muffin like you doesn’t have rhythm?”
His grin widened. “Oh, I’ve got rhythm, baby. Just not on the dance floor.”
The two shared a laugh, the sound easing some of the tension that had been pressing against Sean’s shoulders since dawn. Their conversations always carried that easy flirtation, playful and harmless, yet it had never crossed into anything more.
He often wondered why he never asked her out.
If Suki had been six or seven inches taller, she could’ve been a supermodel.
He wouldn’t deny the woman was gorgeous.
But somewhere during those long weeks working side by side, she’d become something far more valuable than a passing attraction—a friend.
One he had no interest in losing over a relationship he already knew wouldn’t last. His track record made that painfully clear.
Add in the complications of getting involved with someone from the bureau, and the answer had always been simple enough to leave alone.
“Anyway,” she said once her laughter faded, “I’ve got a meeting in the morning at headquarters, but my afternoon is light and can be cleared.
I’ll fly down after the meeting, and you can show me what you’ve got.
I’ll grab a hotel room somewhere and start on the profile after you treat me to dinner. Sound good?”
Sean’s gaze drifted out the conference room windows to the back employee parking lot. The gray clouds still smothered the sunlight, but they were supposed to pass by mid-afternoon.
“That’d be great, but you don’t need a hotel room. You can stay in the spare bedroom at my uncle’s cottage.”
“You don’t have to put me up. I’ll be fine in a hotel.”
“I don’t mind, and there’s plenty of room. Besides, you haven’t seen the place yet, and I know how much you love the beach. No more arguments.”
A soft huff came through the phone. “Okay, but if I get in your way, feel free to kick me out. Where should I meet you tomorrow?”
He gave her the address to the Dare County Sheriff’s Department. “Call when you’re close, and I’ll meet you here.”
“Perfect. Talk to you then.”
After he ended the call, Deputy Montgomery stepped into the conference room. The younger man looked almost too pleased with himself for someone standing in the middle of a homicide task force.
“Got some good news for you, Agent Malone. Patrol found Stuart Crowell.”
Sean straightened in his chair.
“Apparently, he ran after spotting them. Had burglary tools on him too. They got him, though. Should be pulling into the sally port about now.” Montgomery hitched a thumb toward the hall. “Detective Lynch is already heading to booking. He asked me to tell you to meet him there.”
That got Sean moving.
As he got to his feet, Montgomery held out a flat plastic card. “The sheriff told me to give you this. It’ll unlock most of the department doors, so you don’t have to keep asking one of us. He said you can lock this door, too, if you want. The system will record any entries.”
Sean slipped the electronic passkey into his pocket. “Appreciate it. How do I get to booking?”
“End of the hall, down the stairs, then right and a quick left. You’ll see the sign.”
Before leaving, Sean locked his laptop after making sure the database search kept running in the background.
It felt excessive inside a sheriff’s department, but caution had become second nature.
Until they found the source of the leak, trust only went so far.
He gave the conference room one last glance—the victim files spread across the table, timelines scrawled on the whiteboard, and photographs pinned in orderly rows—then locked the door behind him.
The murmur of voices and ringing phones followed him downstairs.
By the time he reached booking, the air carried the stale scent of old coffee and faint body odor drifting from the holding cells.
He’d spent enough time in police stations to know that smell never disappeared, no matter how often the place was cleaned.
Brad and a booking sergeant stood waiting near the processing counter when the heavy sally port door rumbled open. Moments later, two mud-splattered patrol deputies marched in with their prisoner between them.
Stuart Crowell was exactly the kind of small-time troublemaker Sean had expected—thin, pale, clothes hanging off him in damp, filthy folds. His hands were cuffed behind his back, and mud caked him from boots to hairline.
The deputies escorting him were in even worse shape.
The sergeant took one glance at the trio and barked out a laugh. “I can’t wait to hear this one. What the hell happened?”
Neither deputy answered until they’d shoved Crowell into a holding cage and removed the handcuffs. They stepped out and let the metal door clang shut behind them.
The older of the two jerked his chin toward the prisoner.
“We spotted this genius coming out of an alley off King Street. As soon as he saw us, he bolted toward the high school. We caught him on the football field, which, thanks to a busted sprinkler line, was one giant mud pit.” He looked down at his ruined uniform pants, then at his partner’s.
“So now Crowell’s getting resisting added to the list.”
The other deputy snorted at his partner. “Johnson, man, I know you’re not big on cursing—which in this line of work makes you a rare breed—but at a time like this, feel free to go off on the guy.”
Everyone laughed except Crowell, who glared through the bars, muddy snot dripping from the end of his nose as if everyone else was somehow to blame for how his morning had gone to hell.
Still grinning, the sergeant said, “You two go get cleaned up and into fresh uniforms before you do anything else. The detectives want to talk to him first anyway.”
Crowell spoke for the first time since entering the station. “Hey, what about me? Don’t I get to clean up too? I’m freezing. This is false arrest. I know my rights!”
The two arresting deputies and the sergeant barked in unison, “Shut up!”
Johnson handed the sergeant a plastic bag containing a wallet, a pack of cigarettes, and a few other items. “Here’s his personal property. The burglary tools we found on him will be logged as evidence.”
“Hey, that’s my stuff,” Crowell whined. “You can’t take my stuff. I have rights, you know.”
Sean had dealt with enough petty criminals to know that complaining was always part of the routine. Sure enough, everyone in the booking area snapped, “Shut up!”
Their suspect muttered under his breath but had enough sense to keep quiet after that.