She already knew she wouldn’t. She’d take some iron supplements and hope the problem would go away.
The doctor stressed that this problem couldn’t be ignored, as if she could read Rhea’s mind through the phone. Then they ended the call.
Rhea got a dog snack and lured Syrup from under the desk. As he munched on the snack happily, she yawned again and scratched his back.
“I’d settle for two cat ladies, with twenty cats each,” she told the pug. “Get the word out.”
CHAPTER 41
As time went by, the task force’s status room underwent changes Tatum had seen happen in similar situations. The whiteboards filled up and then were erased and redrawn to accommodate new information, leaving leftovers of previous notes in the corners. The long table filled up with crumpled pieces of paper, empty cups, the occasional sandwich wrapper. The smell of the room changed as well, becoming a mixture of body odor, coffee, and the scent of whiteboard markers.
“What’s your poison?” Sykes asked Tatum. “Chinese or pizza?”
Tatum raised his eyes from his laptop screen, the question making no sense whatsoever. “What?”
“Food,” Sykes clarified. “I’m ordering us some food. What do you prefer?”
“Uh, Chinese, I guess.”
“Noodles? Rice? Vegetarian? Are you allergic to peanuts?”
“Sykes, just order whatever you feel like. I don’t care,” Tatum said impatiently, then turned to Zoe, who was writing furiously in her notebook. “Zoe, Valentine just sent us the DNA report.”
She glanced at him. “And?”
“There’s a match between the DNA found underneath Fishburne’s fingernails and Glover’s DNA.” They had Glover’s DNA for comparison from his attack the previous month on Andrea, but Tatum didn’t point that out.
Zoe exhaled slowly. “So that’s it. Direct evidence.”
“Yup.”
“What about the sample from the bite?”
“No match to anything in the database, but it matches the DNA sample taken from Catherine’s body.”
“Zoe, do you want Chinese or pizza?” Sykes asked.
Zoe didn’t miss a beat. “I want spring rolls, if they have any with meat, and chop suey, but I want that fried with noodles, not rice, and tell them to go easy on the coriander—that’s important.”
Sykes gave Tatum a look and ambled away.
“Does anyone have Valentine’s personal phone?” O’Donnell called from the other side of the room. “I can’t reach him on the office.”
Tatum found the number and handed her his phone. On his way back, he noticed Koch was sifting between multiple images of pentagrams.
“What are you looking at there?” Tatum asked Koch.
“Well . . . I’m trying to figure out the reason for the pentagram. Originally we thought it might be a satanic ritual, right?” He shifted a few images and picked one up. It was an illustration of a man in some sort of clerical garb standing over a naked woman. The man was holding a carving knife. “This is an illustration from, uh . . . Le Satanisme et la magie. It’s the Black Mass.”
“No pentagram there,” Tatum pointed out.
“No, but the pentagram crops up in different references. But there’s another explanation.” Koch spread some of the images on the table. They were photos of graffiti depicting various symbols. Each had a pentagram. “Those are gang tags. The five-pointed star is used by the People Nation alliance and particularly by the Latin Kings.”
“So . . . you’re thinking the murders are gang related?” Tatum asked, his voice strained.
“Not directly, but one of the killers could be a gang member, right?”
“Glover isn’t in any gangs, and the unsub’s DNA doesn’t have any matches, meaning he wasn’t incarcerated.”
Koch shrugged. “It’s worth checking.”
Tatum nodded and walked over to Zoe. “How’s it going?”
“I’m working on the initial profile of the unsub. I think I can give them something to work with.”
Tatum sat down and leaned backward. “How do you figure it all happened?”
“What happened?”
“Glover and the unsub? How did they start working together?”
“Well . . . I assume the unsub was in the Riverside Baptist Church, like Glover was. Then, when Glover gave them his speech about wanting to help people with a violent life, the unsub approached him.”
“Yeah, that’s what I figured. This guy has some violent thoughts about blood drinking—”
“We don’t know that was the nature of his delusion back then.”
“But we can guess.” Tatum waggled his eyebrows and grinned when Zoe gave him a frustrated look. Zoe hated the word guess.
“Glover can read people well,” Zoe said. “He saw a man on the verge of violence, easily manipulated. And his fantasies aligned with Glover’s. I doubt Glover thought about him as a partner back then. But he must have figured that