That would take ages. And Catherine would be staring at him the entire time. “No. I’ll pay three hundred. For all of them.”
The man considered it, then nodded, looking pleased.
He took out three bills from his wallet. Daniel always insisted they carried enough cash with them. Plastic created a trail.
The bag with the papers was heavy, but it didn’t matter. It felt good to be doing something about Catherine’s stares. “Let’s go home,” he told Daniel.
CHAPTER 68
“We need to review the case from the start,” O’Donnell said.
Zoe nodded. She was right. Their current path led them nowhere. They had to contemplate other possibilities.
The three of them sat in the situation room by themselves. It was Sunday morning, and several members of the task force hadn’t shown up yet. Zoe wondered if Albert Lamb was at church, preaching. If the congregation had gathered. She’d wanted to go there herself, see the service, but O’Donnell insisted they stay away, that after the previous day, their presence would be problematic. Bright had sent a detective who wasn’t related to the case to watch the proceedings and take a few pictures.
“Let’s entertain the possibility that Glover’s partner, our unsub, doesn’t belong to the church at all,” Tatum said.
An instant tug of rage. She almost snapped at him. Of course the unsub belonged to the church.
Except maybe he didn’t. Did they actually have a shred of proof that he was a member?
A profiler’s job essentially wasn’t finding the killer. That was always the police’s role. A profiler needed to point the police in the right direction. To reduce the group of suspects from everyone to a manageable crowd. But if the profiler made a mistake, if a part of his profile was wrong, the killer could be outside the tight group of suspects. And the cops would ignore him because he didn’t fit with what the profiler had said. The worst possible thing to do then would be to cling to the existing profile.
“Okay,” she said. “Let’s assume I was wrong. The unsub is not part of the church community.”
Tatum looked startled as she said it, almost as if she’d spoken in an alien language.
“In that case,” O’Donnell said, “Glover chose Catherine as the victim for his reasons. Maybe she knew something about him. Maybe she’d seen him return to Chicago, and he was worried she would tell someone.”
“And he met his accomplice somewhere else,” Zoe said. “Like on the dark web.”
“We know Dracula2 was on the dark web,” Tatum said. “That’s where the vampires forum is.”
Zoe waited for the rush of ideas to manifest, but all she felt was frustration. She tried imagining it: Glover approaching a stranger on the dark web, abandoning all his real-life charm, replacing it with chat acronyms and emojis. And convincing a stranger to go on a killing spree with him. Sometimes, an idea felt so wrong its presence in your brain was almost like a pebble in a shoe. It distracted you, everything else becoming hard until you got it out.
“I don’t like it,” Tatum said. “It doesn’t fit. Glover wouldn’t put the cross on Catherine. He would take it as a trophy. And if the unsub didn’t know her, he wouldn’t have done it either, because he wouldn’t be aware it existed.”
“And those crime reports,” O’Donnell said. “They do intersect with the area of the church.”
Zoe exhaled, relieved. “So we think he’s in the church.”
“It does fit. But he wasn’t on the list of names you gave me,” O’Donnell said.
“Maybe he was and just had a good poker face,” Tatum suggested.
“He is spinning out of control. It’s very unlikely he could withstand a prolonged conversation, not to mention a police interrogation,” Zoe said. “Could you have missed his odd behavior when you interviewed him? A facial tic? A stutter?”
“No,” O’Donnell said sharply. Zoe recognized that tone well. She used it often enough when people suggested that she’d messed something up.
“Let’s assume he wasn’t, then,” Tatum said hurriedly. “Who else do we have?”
“All the other people on the list are very unlikely,” Zoe said tiredly. “But we can go over each one and discuss why.”
“What about people who aren’t on the list?” Tatum said.
“There are names on Patrick’s list that don’t appear on the list you got from Albert,” O’Donnell agreed.
They had the lists printed out in three copies, and each of them went over them, looking for discrepancies.