Chapter 7 #2
She paused. “You would’ve thought that he already knew my nails were painted. He would’ve seen them at the trailhead or at the parking lot if he’d been watching me. So, he wasn't checking whether they were there.” Another pause. “He was checking something else.”
“What do you think he was checking?”
She was quiet for a moment. Her jaw did something specific.
“Whether they were still intact,” she said slowly.
“Whether the trophy or whatever the nails mean to him was still there. Whether I was still qualified.” She looked up at Marcus.
“He'd already decided to finish it. He just needed to confirm I was still worth finishing.”
The room was very quiet.
“That's what I think,” she said. “I don't have evidence for it. That's just what the gesture felt like.”
“I think you're right,” Marcus said.
They worked for two more hours as she walked him through everything.
The two old incident reports Delvecchio had pulled, which had turned out to be nothing.
About her theory of a controlled attacker profile, the fingernail connection she'd made the night the Angela Porter alert had come through.
He listened the way good investigators listened, which was completely, without interrupting except to clarify.
He told her about the other cases before he spread the corridor map on her kitchen table.
He watched her trace the route with one finger, the way he'd done the night before in the hotel room.
“He travels it on a schedule,” she said.
Marcus nodded. “Yes. That’s what I believe, too.”
“Professional travel. Not random.”
“That's where I am, too.”
She looked at the map for a long moment and then at him. “You already know what kind of professional.”
“I have a hypothesis. Nothing I can support yet.”
“But you're close.”
“Getting there.”
She nodded and looked back at the map.
He watched her look at it and thought about the nine files on his hotel room bed and the legal pad question he'd written at the top.
What moves a person through nine cities on a schedule?
He was closer to the answer than he'd been yesterday.
He just needed the access to pull the service records that would prove it, and the access required a task force, and the task force required the department's formal buy-in, and all of that was coming. It was just going to take time the bastard’s victims didn't have.
“I want to be on this,” Haven said. She wasn't looking at him. Still looking at the map. “Not as a witness. As an investigator. I won’t jeopardize the case. Everything I do can be double checked so there is no bias.”
He nodded. “I know.” He was worried about that too but had come to the same conclusion.
Having her in on the investigation was more vital than any paperwork or explaining they’d have to do to explain her presence.
He’d already contacted Guardian’s legal department, and they were doing the work to get her onto the team.
Whatever precautions he had to take would be done.
“I have information nobody else has. I have the only physical description. I know what his approach pattern looks like from the inside.” She looked up then. “And I have reasons that are mine, and I'm not going to explain them.”
“You don't have to,” Marcus said. “I’ve already requested your transfer to the task force through Guardian. It should go to your department this afternoon.”
She stared at him, her brown eyes wide with surprise. She blinked. “Oh.”
“Your sergeant will have it by the end of the day,” he said. “Admin leave ends when the department processes the paperwork. Probably tomorrow morning.”
She looked at him for a long moment with an expression he couldn't entirely read. Not gratitude exactly. Something more like respect … maybe. The look of a person who'd been working alone and just realized they didn't have to do that anymore.
“You know … you could’ve led with that,” she said.
He could have, but that wouldn’t have let him see the victim before he saw the cop. Judging by her analytical mind, she was one hell of a cop. “I needed the interview information first.” He paused. “And I needed to know if you were ready.”
“And?”
He smiled at her. “I think you were ready six days ago,” he said. “You just didn't have anyone to work with.”
* * *
He was in the car and three blocks away when he pulled over.
Not because anything was wrong. Because he needed a minute, and he was honest enough with himself to know it.
To say he was impressed was probably the understatement of the decade.
Haven Stone had built a coherent investigative theory from a kitchen table with limited database access and a head injury.
She'd identified a behavioral profile, connected the fingernail detail, and by the end of two hours had independently arrived at the professional travel hypothesis from a completely different angle than he had. She was precise and furious. She was also someone who'd learned to keep those two things in separate rooms. Add that to the fact that she’d almost gotten killed a week ago and hadn’t let that fact change a single thing about how she worked through the case.
But it was more than that. The woman herself was …
hell, there was that intangible something to her that drew him to her.
He’d never had that reaction to a person before.
Sure, he’d been attracted to women before, but never like this.
He was probably being stupid, and yeah, he was running on little sleep and a lot of stress, but Haven Stone had made an impression on him that no one had ever come close to doing before.
He picked up his legal pad.
She's the key.
He wrote it. Looked at it. Then he wrote one more line underneath it, which he didn't usually do.
Don't screw this up. There was more than one reason he wrote those words. She was special, and he was smart enough not to ignore those thoughts. That woman made a hard impact on him. He noticed.
He put the car in drive and pulled back into traffic.