She was thinking—painfully hoping—that maybe Aaron wasn’t like their father after all.
“Sloane,” I said, “can you hack the FBI database and pull up the New York file?”
Having a flawless memory herself, Sloane didn’t quite grasp the utility of rehacking a file she’d already read, but she did as I asked and set the DVD aside. Her fingers flew across the keyboard. After several seconds, she paused, then hit a few keys, then paused again.
“What’s wrong?” I asked.
“The program I wrote earlier,” Sloane said, “it finished its search.”
“Let me guess,” Lia put in. “It returned the Nightshade case, which we, under threat of exile, cannot so much as breathe on.”
“Yes,” Sloane said. “It did.”
Lia tilted her head to one side. “Why doesn’t that sound entirely true?”
“Because,” Sloane said, turning the computer around so the rest of us could see, “that’s not the only case it returned.”
Sloane’s search hadn’t yielded one case. Or two. Or three.
“How many are there?” I asked, my throat dry.
“Going back to the 1950s,” Sloane replied, “almost a dozen. All serial murder, all unsolved.”
I leaned back against the counter, my hands gripping the edge. “Nine kills each time?”
“I set the search to return anything over six,” Sloane said. “With the thought that some victims may not have been discovered or linked to the same UNSUB.”
“But all of the victims in each case were killed on one of the twenty-seven Fibonacci dates you identified,” Dean said.
Sloane nodded. Without waiting for another question, she began skimming the files. “All over the country,” she reported. “Three in Europe. Stabbings, beatings, poison, arson—it’s all over the map.”
“I need pictures,” I said. “Anything you can get, from any file that’s not Nightshade’s.” Judd had forbidden us to go anywhere near the Nightshade case. But the others…
All of those victims. All of those families…
I had to do something. Nothing I did could possibly be enough. “This many cases,” I told Dean, “going back that far…”
“I know.” He met my eyes. Dean’s father was one of the most prolific serial killers of our time. But this was so far beyond even him.
All over the world, going back sixty years—the chances that we were dealing with a single UNSUB were dwindling by the second.
“How good is this program?” Lia asked Sloane.
“It’s only returning files that fit the parameters.” Sloane sounded mildly insulted.
“No,” Lia said. “What’s the return rate?” Every muscle in her face was tight. “How many is it missing?”
The numbers lie, I realized, following Lia’s train of thought. Oh, God.
Sloane closed her eyes, her lips moving rapidly as she went over the numbers. “When you take into account the number of databases I don’t have access to, the likelihood of old records being digitalized, the role the FBI has played in the investigation of serial murders over the years…” She rocked slightly in her chair. “Half,” she said. “At best, I might have gotten about half of the cases from 1950 until now.”
Almost a dozen had been unfathomable. Twice that? Not possible.
“How many?” I said. “Total victims, how many are we talking?”
“At minimum?” Sloane whispered. “One hundred and eighty-nine.”
One hundred and eighty-nine dead bodies. One hundred and eighty-nine lives snuffed out. One hundred and eighty-nine families who had lost what I’d lost. Lost like I’d lost.
One hundred and eighty-nine families who had never gotten answers.
Dean called Agent Sterling. I couldn’t stop thinking about the look on Judd’s face when he’d talked about Scarlett’s murder. I couldn’t stop thinking about my mother and the blood on her dressing room walls and the nights I’d spent waiting for the police to call. They never did. I waited, and they never called—and when they finally did, it wasn’t any better. The days since they’d found the body—they weren’t any better.
One hundred and eighty-nine.
It was too much.
I can’t do this.
I did it anyway, because that was what I’d signed up for. That was what profilers did. We lived through horror. We submerged ourselves in it again and again and again. The same part of me that let me compartmentalize my mother’s case would let me do this, and the same part of me that couldn’t always fight the memories meant I would pay for it.
Profiling came with a cost.
But I would pay it again and again and again to make it so that even just one child never came home to blood on the walls.
Our in-suite printer nearly ran out of ink printing off the pictures of the bodies—and that was only for the case files Sloane had managed to fully access.
Mapping out the progression over time, several things became clear. Old and young, male and female. The victims ran the gamut. The only group not represented was children.
No kids. I wanted to cling to that, but I couldn’t.
The next thing that became clear, to my profiler’s eye, was that some sets of victims were more homogeneous than others. One case might involve only female victims with long blond hair; another might show clear signs that the murders had been those of opportunity, with no patterning to the victim choice at all.