Chapter 33
Miranda thought about the words. What would make a man do this.
What would make him focus on a woman like Aimee Gibson specifically.
Or the women Dani had found—if they were connected.
But in her gut, she suspected they were.
Geographically…they were just too close.
It just so happened they were over state lines, giving a bit of jurisdictional distance, and making it a happy hunting ground for their killer.
Women in the midst of their child-rearing years.
Career building years. Old enough, sophisticated enough, to know who they were, and what they wanted.
Confident? Very likely. Or at least secure and stable in their lives.
“Why the women? That’s where we need to focus now.
If we go on the theory that this is a serial killer.
We had a nine-year-old girl targeted, a thirty-six-year-old woman, and potentially a thirty-two-year-old woman who just happened to be away the night her father was killed.
All the women were mothers. Of daughters. ”
Pierce was still up pacing. That beautiful man was agitated—and feeling guilty. This Asher brother tended to take things personally. He embodied the protector type, and when he failed at that, it hurt him. “Like Aimee and Terra. But what does that mean?”
“It means something to him,” Knight said.
Miranda looked at him for a moment. Her partner had his suit jacket off, and his sleeves rolled up.
He wasn’t wearing the glasses tonight. The gray of his eyes matched the gray of the tie still hanging loose around his neck.
She was surrounded by two very beautiful male animals.
Both definitely alphas in their own way. No missing that.
But each was programmed far differently.
Alphas. Male programming. Something tickled the back of her head.
She knew a lot of men who could be described as alpha in some sense.
Law enforcement almost guaranteed that. As did the men her sister and cousins seemed to attract.
A woman couldn’t grow up in Masterson County and not see alpha male in action.
But a truly alpha male was one who was in control—not of the people around him, but himself.
“Control. It still is about control with this guy. What if part of his problem is that he could not control women? Specifically, women with daughters? Mommy didn’t protect you.
That’s what he implied to that little girl.
And he took Terra, after torturing Aimee.
Aimee did not protect Terra. At least not in his head.
So…what woman in his life didn’t protect a girl?
Was the girl his daughter, or a stepdaughter?
A child he was responsible for? One he had trusted the woman—most likely the girl’s mother—to protect and she’d failed? ”
“And this child ended up dead,” Knight said flatly. “And in his mind, it was her mother’s fault. And he was reliving how he would punish that woman over and over again?”
“We’ve seen stranger motives,” Miranda said. “What if it was always about him lashing out not at just one woman, but all women? Or using the other women as a substitute for the woman he was really angry with?”
“Who?” Pierce asked.
It was Knight who answered. “The woman who let his daughter die.”
“A daughter within the age range of eight to fifteen. We need Dani to cross-reference our entire pool of male interviewees who would have been the right age to have fathered children within twenty years of the Gibson murders. With death certificates, in Kentucky, Indiana and Illinois. I don’t think he has traveled further than the tri-state area.
” Miranda started tapping notes into her phone.
Dani would see the notes in the morning and would know what direction to take.
If the woman hadn’t already started. Dani was just that good at being two steps ahead of them at times.
“And divorce filings. Because I do not think a man with this much rage at a woman who he blames for the loss of his child would have stayed married to her this long.”
“So this whole thing could be because he blamed another woman for what happened to his child. And he lashed out at everyone else? Including the Gibsons. I will never understand that kind of evil,” Pierce said.
“Chances are, and if you are lucky…You won’t ever brush up against this kind of evil ever again.” Knight told him.
“I have four more days now. It’s all the ISP will give me to make this work. After that…I’m done. It’s over. I’ll have done all that I can possibly do.”