A woman stepped out of the house and approached them, looking at him quizzically with intense green eyes. “Terrence. You remember me?”
He did. It was her. “Of course. You’re the profiler, Zoe Bentley. We met. And Daniel told me about you.”
“Where is Daniel?”
He laughed and pointed at the guest room window. “He got away. Fled through the window.”
“That window is latched from inside,” Zoe said. “And we had a cop covering the windows. No one got out.”
He frowned. A movement in the corner of his eye drew his attention.
It was Daniel leaning against the house, grinning. Terrence tried to catch Daniel’s gaze. Tried to signal that he should get away before the cops noticed him.
“Who are you looking at, Terrence?”
He ignored her. “Run,” he told Daniel. “Run.”
“There’s no one there,” Zoe said. “And Rhea Deleon has been dead for more than a day.”
There was no point in talking to her, or to any of them. Only Daniel really listened to him. Only Daniel understood him.
“You have to run,” he told Daniel over and over.
But his friend just smiled.
CHAPTER 70
Zoe’s throat still felt scorched, and when she took a deep breath, she began coughing. The paramedics who’d arrived at the scene had given her oxygen for the smoke inhalation. She’d stubbornly refused to go to the hospital for tests, saying she was fine. Tatum, whose arms were burnt, had been evacuated.
Now she stepped back into Terrence Finch’s house, moving aside to let two men with a stretcher through. The air inside smelled of smoke and rot, and Zoe’s breathing became even shallower.
O’Donnell stood in the living room, watching grimly as the men moved the body onto the stretcher. Zoe approached her.
“She was crawling with flies,” O’Donnell said. “And the smell . . . and Finch seemed certain she was still alive.”
“He was delusional,” Zoe pointed out. “And was probably hallucinating as well.”
“You must see this kind of thing every day.”
“No. A psychotic serial killer is actually a rare occurrence. And most are caught very fast. The only reason we didn’t catch Terrence Finch sooner was because he was constantly coached by Rod Glover.”
“Dr. Terrel will do the complete autopsy tomorrow morning, but the victim’s face was covered with smudged food, and there was some of it in her mouth. It looks like he tried feeding her after she died.”
“When can we question him?”
“He was severely burnt and inhaled a lot of smoke. I doubt he’ll be able to talk to us before evening.”
The familiar impatience rose in Zoe. She wanted to talk to him now. She needed to hear why they’d photographed those murders. And where Rod Glover had gone.
“What was he burning?” she asked, looking at the charred scraps of black paper that were scattered everywhere.
“Newspaper. We found a pile of Chicago Daily Gazette copies. He ripped the first page of each one. It had a picture of Catherine Lamb. We found a few unburnt crumpled pages under the couch.”
The Chicago Daily Gazette. This fire could be a direct result of her own work with Harry Barry. “All the same page?”
“Yup.”
Zoe watched the photographer take shots of a few brown stains on the floor.
“It’s blood,” O’Donnell said. “There’s blood almost everywhere. The bathroom, Terrence’s bedroom, the living room. Oh, and over here.” She walked over to the fridge and opened it. In the fridge door were a few vials full of thick crimson liquid.
She turned to the photographer. “Did you photograph the fridge interior yet?”
The photographer glanced at her. “Not yet.”
“Do it now.” O’Donnell held the door open, moving aside.
The photographer took a picture, moved sideways, took another picture. Then shuffled aside again for a third one. Zoe thought of the sideways footprints she’d seen in the crime scene photos and of her original interpretation—that it was the result of some sort of obsessive behavior. If she hadn’t made that mistake, would Rhea Deleon have still been—
She forced the thought away. Plenty of time for self-flagellation later.
“In Terrence’s bedroom we found something that looked like a sort of rodent’s limb. Probably belongs to one of the hamsters taken from the pet shop.” O’Donnell sounded satisfied. Another puzzle piece confirmed. “We found some fragments of plastic and a key from a keyboard. Probably belonged to a laptop. We didn’t find the rest of the laptop yet; maybe he dumped it. We also found two jars full of urine.”
“Urine? Not blood?”
“That’s right. Maybe he started drinking urine as well.”