Chapter 16
Tori switched off the blow dryer and flicked her hair back, shaking it out. She couldn’t get over the look on Kiara’s face when she’d walked in, taking in the obvious overnight situation.
Great. She’d probably just torpedoed five months of Blade’s happiness.
It didn’t take a psychiatrist to know that women didn’t like it when their boyfriend’s best friend was another woman. Especially when that woman ended up wearing his clothes at seven in the morning.
God designed men and women to be in relationship. A symbiotic way of meeting each other’s needs. And it was only natural for men and women to be drawn into something beyond friendship when they spent extended time with someone of the opposite sex.
The cut on her arm burned like a brand. She shook two Tylenol from the bottle Blade kept stashed in the drawer and sucked water from the tap to swallow them both.
The mirror reflected back dark hair and dark eyes. Complete opposite of the woman Blade loved.
One day, Kiara would draw that line. One day the ultimatum would come.
Maybe that day was today.
Blade would choose Kiara. How could he not? The man had earned peace after everything life had thrown at him. A quiet home. Kids chasing a golden retriever through a backyard. Dinner that didn’t come from a takeout bag. She could step aside for that.
She just hadn’t pictured Kiara as the one handing him that dream.
Kiara was too . . . soft. Too removed from the ugliness he faced every day. He needed someone who understood the darkness, who could stand beside him in it.
Someone like—
Tori froze. “Like me?”
She shook her head. Stupid. The two of them? That was crazy talk. She had to pull her thoughts back to work. That’s what mattered right now.
She cracked the bedroom door, peering through the narrow gap. Blade leaned against the counter, sipping his coffee with his shoulders locked in a straight line that screamed damage control. Kiara was nowhere in sight.
“Coast clear?”
“Yep.”
She settled back at the island and opened her laptop. The same man who could stare down armed suspects without blinking had been wholly derailed by a pastry bag and whatever had happened with it.
“I’m sorry. That was—”
“You were right.” He set the mug on the counter and stared at the dark swirl inside. “Except I didn’t end it. She did.”
Her mouth wouldn’t form words. Ended it? That gentle, perfect woman?
“What? No, Blade—”
“It’s fine.” He turned toward the sink, rinsing his mug. “Better this way.”
“It’s not fine. You love her.”
“Love? No.” He slapped the water faucet off and spun around. “And I want you to drop it, Tori.”
The finality in his tone slammed the door shut on any argument she might make.
But she knew him. The dismissal was his way of shoving the pain down deep where it couldn’t interfere with the job. It was eating him alive, and she couldn’t let him stay in that headspace. She needed her partner sharp, focused. They had work to do. A brother to find, Florek’s murder to solve.
Time to speak the only language they both understood.
She grabbed her legal pad and placed it on the counter in front of him. The lattice diagram she’d sketched earlier covered the page. Boxes and arrows connecting their three active cases.
“Look at this.”
His eyes locked onto the diagram, and she watched him shift into work mode.
“We’ve got three cases,” she said, pointing to the labeled boxes. “Crew murders, Florek homicide, stalker. All connected one way or another.”
She tapped the stalker box. “The file says Nikos showed aggression, obsession with knives, paranoia. My stalker has similar traits and attacked me with a knife both times. But he didn’t just attack—he studied me first.”
Blade leaned closer, his focus sharpening. “The waiting. The watching.”
“Exactly. Classic paranoid behavior but organized. Methodical.”
“The file says Nikos has schizophrenia. But stalking requires control. Planning. How does that fit?”
“That’s what bothers me.” Tori traced the arrow connecting the boxes.
“Paranoid schizophrenia with homicidal ideation doesn’t usually present as methodical stalking behavior.
Most cases show disorganized thinking, impulsive violence, auditory hallucinations driving the aggression.
My stalker waited weeks. Learned my patterns.
Chose specific moments to approach. That’s not psychotic break behavior. That’s calculated predation.”
“Either the diagnosis was wrong—”
“Or someone wanted us to think it was right.” The pieces clicked into place. “What if the psychiatric evaluation was fabricated? What if they needed a reason to disappear a four-year-old witness who saw something he shouldn’t have?”
“You don’t think Nikos is your stalker anymore?” Blade asked.
“Actually it still fits.” She tapped the Crew name on her paper. “Two children witness the horrific murder of their parents. One child develops dissociative amnesia. Complete memory block of the trauma. The other child becomes obsessed with blood and knives.”
“And his sister.”
She nodded. “The early-onset schizophrenia diagnosis is incorrect at best. A lie at worst. Something to hurry the case along. Made it easier to disappear him without questions.”
“It’s hard to believe a four-year-old could overpower two adults and stab them to death.
Even with that alphabet soup of psychiatric labels they slapped on him.
” Blade leaned across the counter and grabbed Kiara’s pastry bag, pulling out something that looked half donut, half croissant. He offered her the bag.
She normally avoided pastries and sweets. Not worth the sugar crash that always left her sluggish. But the buttery smell was irresistible. She picked one with whipped cream and a strawberry on top. Fruit was healthy, right?
“Dissociative amnesia protects the psyche from unbearable trauma. That’s how my brain coped.” She licked sugar from her thumb. “But Nikos’s brain processed it differently. Instead of blocking the memory, he fixated on it. The violence became his baseline normal.”
Blade nodded, chewing. “Makes sense. So, what’s our next move?”
“Investigation’s your department. I analyze behavior.”
“Right, except we’re not supposed to know any of these details.
Sealed file and all that.” He wiped his fingers on a napkin.
“But I’ve got two ideas. First, we talk to our favorite tech nerd, Jett.
Maybe he’s got some new software up his sleeve that can help us track down what name Nikos’s using now. ”
“And the second?”
“The Damien problem. Every call, letter, visit between us gets monitored. We can’t just walk in there and tell him we’ve seen the file and ask him about the second murder book.”
He was right. The urge to call Damien this morning had been strong. She’d even pulled up the prison’s number on her phone before second-guessing herself. Every word would have been recorded, analyzed, flagged for review. “So what’s your big idea for that one?”
“We use the same methods criminals use.” Blade grinned. “It’s called the Privilege Channel. We use the attorney-client privilege to pass information to Damien and back.”
“That’s genius! I could kiss you, but I’d need a stepstool.” She punched him in the arm instead.
He laughed, rubbing his bicep. “We’ll set it up.”
Tori pointed back to the Florek box. “Now let’s get a plan for this one too. What do we know so far?”
“Knife attack, personal and prolonged. No forced entry. Valuable items left behind.” Blade reached for her pen. “May I?”
She handed it over, and he started filling in details around the Florek box. His handwriting was clean, angular. Cop writing.
“Defensive wounds suggest he fought back,” Blade continued, scribbling. “Blood spatter shows the killer paused mid-attack. And the scene presented like a crime of passion slash rage.”
“But it wasn’t.”
“No. Too controlled. Too calculated.” Blade dragged a line from Florek to Stalker. “He followed the same drill. Watched the mark. Mapped the hit.”
“Attacked with a knife.” Her mouth stopped working. Breath snagged, half formed. The question shoved through anyway. “Could the stalker have killed Florek?”
Blade stilled, eyes cutting toward her, then he scrawled another note—trace link: Florek/Crew.
“Wait—no. I didn’t know Donald Florek.”
“Doesn’t matter,” Blade said. “Could’ve been nothing more than the wrong glimpse. Grocery store. Parking lot. Stalker sees, twists it, decides it means something.”
“I don’t talk to strange men in grocery stores or parking lots.”
Blade dragged his pen across the page, blocky strokes, jotting: Verify her claim.
Her mouth twitched before she could stop it. “Your handwriting—so dramatic. Like every letter’s bracing for a fight.”
“Better than your bubble letters.”
“Those are not bubble letters.”
“They look like they belong in a middle school girl’s diary.”
“Shut up.” But she was smiling now, and so was he. The tension in his shoulders had eased.
She took the pen and drew another arrow, this one connecting the Crew and Florek boxes to a central point labeled Fractals. “Sullivan mentioned patterns. Dr. Stone identified the symbol as Keplerian.”
Blade studied the diagram. She could practically see the gears turning.
“Can you pull up those photos you took at Florek’s house and drop them to my iPad?” he asked, already pushing back from the counter.
“Sure.” Tori minimized her timeline document and opened her photo gallery. The crime scene images filled her laptop screen, graphic thumbnails of the violence that had torn through Donald Florek’s living room.
Blade jogged down the hall, his footsteps slapping against the tile. A drawer screeched open, then slammed. Plastic rattled. Something dropped, thudded, got shoved aside. He reemerged a beat later, iPad gripped in one hand.
“Why does the battery always seem to be dead on this thing?” He held up the iPad, squinting at the black screen. “I can’t find my charger.”
“Who needs the babysitter now?” Tori grinned, reaching for her laptop in her bag and grabbing a cable. “Here, but I want it back.”
He plugged in the cable and then jammed it into the port.
The screen lagged, black and stubborn, until the tablet finally lit.
His lock screen filled with a color photo of him and Kiara framed by a bleeding sky over water.
Her gaze snagged on the image. She dragged her eyes back to the icons, locking her focus on the job instead of the picture.
Blade climbed onto the chair beside her. She could smell his soap. Something clean and masculine that made her hyperaware of his proximity.
She pushed the photos across to his tablet. Blade picked up his stylus, unlocked a drawing app, and the screen lit with a grid of tools.
“Okay, let’s see what we’re working with.” He flipped through the gallery of photos she’d sent. He tapped the wide shot of Florek’s living room and overlaid one from the original crime scene. The overturned furniture, blood spatter, and Florek’s mangled body filled the screen in high resolution.
Tori watched as he created a new layer. His fingers moved across the screen like he’d done this a thousand times before. He pulled up the Keplerian fractal image Gino had sent earlier.
“I can lower the opacity and create an overlay,” he explained, adjusting settings with quick taps. “See if there’s any correlation between the symbol and the scene layout with and without the victim.”
The fractal appeared as a translucent geometric pattern over the crime scene photo. Blade used a combination of the pencil and his fingers to resize the overlay, making the Keplerian fractal larger and smaller, testing different proportions and angles.
Tori leaned closer. “How do you know how to do this?”
“I dabble in drawing.” His voice carried a hint of defensiveness.
Her eyebrow hitched up, the kind of lift that pinned him in place without a word.
“What? It relaxes me.” He shrugged, still focused on the screen. “Gives my hands something to do while watching TV.”
As he moved the fractal image around the crime scene, rotating and adjusting, something began to emerge. The geometric lines seemed to align with elements in the room, but not quite.
“Hold on.” Her pulse quickened. “Can you zoom in on the lower part of the photo?”
Blade tapped the screen, enlarging the section that showed Florek’s body and the surrounding furniture.
“Here, let me—” She reached for the screen, her fingers brushing his as she pinched to zoom further.
“Twist to rotate,” he instructed. “Like this.”
Their heads bent close together as they worked, adjusting the overlay.
She felt her eyes going wider as the pattern began to align.
The Keplerian geometric lines traced along the positioning of Florek’s body, followed the edge of the overturned couch, connected to the coffee table’s corner, drew a perfect line along the fireplace mantel, and terminated exactly where the bloodied book had been placed.
They both stopped and straightened, the significance hitting them simultaneously.
The Keplerian image overlaid nearly perfectly with the crime scene. Every major element—body, furniture, evidence—fell along the fractal’s lines forming a hexagon with additional internal lines forming triangles.
“What did we just stumble into?” she whispered.
The crime scene hadn’t been the result of a frenzied attack or even a calculated murder designed to look passionate.
It had been choreographed. Arranged according to a specific mathematical pattern that required advance planning, precise measurements, and an understanding of fractal geometry that went far beyond casual knowledge.
Blade’s jaw tightened as he stared at the screen. “This wasn’t just murder. This was . . . art.”
“Sick art.” Tori’s stomach churned. “Someone killed Donald Florek and then arranged his body and the scene according to this pattern. They turned his death into some kind of geometric statement.”
“Which means our killer isn’t just methodical.” Blade saved the overlay image to his tablet. “They’re educated. Sophisticated. And they wanted us to find this connection.”
“Why?”
He met her eyes, and she saw the same realization reflected there. “Because they’re not done.”