side of the victim’s neck. The skin was ravaged and torn, and a thick trickle of dried blood ran down it. “Any idea what that wound is?” she asked, pointing.
“From what I could see, it’s a bite mark,” Terrel said. “I’ll get saliva samples from it, compare it to the ones from the previous murder.”
“Sounds like a form of escalation,” Tatum said. “At first he only used syringes. Now he bites the victim.”
Zoe frowned. She wasn’t sure about that. “But he still used syringes.”
“Maybe he stores some of the blood, and that’s what he uses the syringe for,” Tatum suggested. “But the fantasy evolved. He wanted to bite her. Like a predator.”
Zoe thought about the spattered blood next to the victim’s car, which O’Donnell had mentioned. The body had only two visible deep wounds—the knife and the bite. And the knife was postmortem. “He probably bit her by the car,” she said slowly. “That’s where he attacked her. But that wasn’t the plan.”
“Who said there was a plan?” O’Donnell asked.
Zoe gestured at the image on the ground. “This wasn’t easy to draw, and there’s a lot of paint here. They brought it with them. Took the time to do it for some reason. There was a plan here, an agenda. But something went wrong.” She straightened. “One of them lost control. Bit her.”
“I can see another loss of control here,” Tatum said darkly, gesturing at the victim’s bruised ribs. “I’ve seen marks like these before. Someone kicked her when she was down.”
Zoe nodded. “That’s a clear sign of anger.”
“Or domination,” O’Donnell suggested. “A show of force.”
“No,” Tatum and Zoe said at once. Zoe glanced at Tatum and nodded at him. You go.
Tatum cleared his throat. “Offenders who rape and murder for power or domination are called power-assertive offenders. They typically plan to rape the victim, and the actual murder is an accident. This murder was definitely planned. They brought the paint and the syringe. And then they . . .” He frowned. “Hang on. We assume they attacked her in the train station’s parking lot Monday night, right?”
“That sounds like a logical assumption,” O’Donnell said.
“They probably killed her and drove here to dump the body.”
“Most likely so they could pose her like this, without the train station’s security seeing them,” Zoe said.
“Then who are the suspicious individuals that our caller saw?” Tatum asked. “The person who called dispatch to tell them about suspicious individuals called this morning, not last night.”
“Maybe it’s just a coincidence,” O’Donnell suggested. “He saw a bunch of teenagers going into the park to party and decided to do his civic duty and ruin their fun.”
“Uh-huh.” Tatum peered at her dubiously. “Let’s check.” He stepped away, pulling out his phone.
“Having paint in their car doesn’t mean they planned all this. It doesn’t mean they had an agenda,” O’Donnell told Zoe. “I once had a can of paint in my trunk for two months. But I had no nefarious agenda except painting my living room.”
Zoe felt frustrated. The smell of the body, strong even in the open air, made her sick, and the constant pounding in her skull was impossible to ignore. She bit down a sharp response and turned to look at the river’s murky water until she was calm enough to answer. “Anything is possible,” she said. “Our job, as profilers, is to point out what’s likely. Like Dr. Terrel astutely noticed, there is a lot of similarity between this murder and Catherine Lamb’s murder. I think this murder was planned, but they deviated from the original plan. And I think Glover and his partner from the previous murder killed this woman as well.”
“Fine,” O’Donnell said. “Then what’s with the pentagram and the knife? From what you told me, it doesn’t fit in anywhere.”
It was true. She’d called it a plan, but a plan for what? This fit with neither of the men’s profiles. She shook her head. “I don’t know. There’s something we’re still missing.”
“Zoe.” Tatum walked over and handed her his phone. “I just got dispatch to send me the recording of the phone call. Listen to it.”
Zoe hit play on the screen. The voice of the dispatcher emanated from the phone’s speaker. “Nine-one-one, what’s your emergency?”
And then another voice—gritty, low, and chillingly familiar—said, “I want to report a suspicious activity at Kickapoo Woods. I just saw two guys going in there, carrying something heavy. I think they had guns. They looked like terrorists.”
The dispatcher asked for an exact location, and the caller began