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“His first kill was someone he knew,” she murmured. She wasn’t watching the scene. Her focus was reserved for the huge waves crashing against the oversized rocks.
“You mean his stepfather.” He’d read the articles Reese had written during Thorne’s reign of terror. She was a scrupulous researcher. His only question at the time had been how she’d been tipped to Thorne as the killer when no one on the TK task force had considered him a serious suspect.
Raiker had discovered that answer. He was unparalleled when it came to teasing out the secrets that people most wanted to keep to themselves. Hayes had been dubious when his boss had told him in matter-of-fact terms about Reese’s gift. He wasn’t as close to accepting it as Adam had been. Hunches and instincts were one thing. Believing in the ability to crawl around in someone’s mind to pick up the thoughts they kept buriedrequired a level of open-mindedness Hayes wasn’t certain he possessed.
Mendes was heading their way, swerving around the clutch of law enforcement to where they waited. “Thorne never wanted to talk about his stepfather, or what happened back then. I assume the experience is what led to his sealed juvie record, though.”
She finally looked away from the water long enough to send him a questioning glance. “You spoke to him?”
“Five or six times. Initially with Raiker. But mostly one-on-one.” When she didn’t respond, he added, “I did that a lot for the Bureau, too. We like to build a file on serial offenders to get a better understanding of them.” Combing those hours of video honed the profiling skills that helped catch others.
“He seemed like a disorganized thinker. Driven by his compulsions, yes, but also by emotion.”
“I found that to be true, although consistency with medication probably lent him more focus when I spoke with him.” He’d wondered at the time if the man was being over-medicated in custody to make him easier to handle. In the later interviews, Thorne had been monotone, almost robotic. He’d taken Hayes through the murders attributed to him, as well as three that had been unsolved. The man was devoid of empathy, either for his victims or their families, and seemed particularly incapable of self-reflection.
“So. Her gaze was direct now. “What were your findings?”
“I agree with his original diagnosis—antisocial personality disorder. In my opinion, he also suffers from PTSD and unresolved trauma from his childhood, coupled with a low average IQ, poor impulse control and executive function. Without the proper medication to mitigate his negative thoughts and obsessions, those urges become overwhelming.”
Mendes reached them in time to hear the last part of his words. “We’re a long way from placing Thorne at this scene. But if he’s to blame for this death, are you saying we need to expect two more victims?”
Hayes didn’t like dealing with hypotheticals. Even if the victim did turn out to be Pollack, Thorne hadn’t left physical evidence behind at any of his crime scenes. Fire was usually quite efficient at wiping it out. Fingerprints survived in only about twenty-five percent of arson cases, and that was highly dependent on the heat generated by the flames and the burn patterns.
Water was equally destructive, as they’d discovered with one of the victims in Alabama.
He chose his words carefully. “As the Trifecta Killer, Thorne struck three times in quick succession. But he usually chose victims he didn’t know. If we’re correct, and Pollack is an acquaintance of his, murdering him would make this crime something of an aberration.”
Mendes looked from one of them to the other. “So how does killing his stepfather evolve to committing homicides in threes?”
“It’s obviously part of his signature, but we can’t be sure where it stems from,” Hayes admitted. “Or how it fits into his diagnosis.”
“Maybe it originated from his early trauma, and isn’t part of his psychosis.” He and the deputy looked at Reese. “I spoke to a friend of his mother’s when I was writing about Thorne. She mentioned that Patti Wallace was a nurse, and worked three back-to-back twelve-hour shifts a week at the local hospital. The stepfather—a trucker—arranged his schedule to be free on those days to babysit. According to the friend, that’s when the abuse would occur. It’d halt when Thorne’s mother was home and her husband was on the road.”
He recalled that information from her statements in the weeks following her rescue. Wallace and her friend were dead, so there’d been no way to follow up on it. But Severin was a semi driver. If Reese’s supposition was correct, and Thorne’s repeated cycles of abuse occurred in threes, that number might figure prominently into his violent tendencies. “Most of the TK’s victims were tortured. Sisson—the woman who drowned trying to escape from him—was an exception. With others, the ME couldn’t be sure because of the extent of the burns. And Thorne found places beforehand where he could enact his ritual in private.” The beach was isolated enough, but he wouldn’t be assured of privacy here.
“Detective Jacobs caught the case. Until more evidence is unearthed linking it definitively to Thorne, we won’t take it over. She’ll keep us in the loop. I’ll let you and Raiker know if something pops.” Mendes walked back toward the detective, and Hayes didn’t state the obvious.
Evidence took time to recover and even longer to process. He gestured to Reese, and they headed for the rocky incline, one thought weighing heavily on him.
If the TK was active again, the woman beside him would be the killer’s prime target.
11
One of the uniforms stationed at the perimeter held back traffic, allowing Hayes to make a three-point turn and slowly pull away from the area. Reese stared out the window silently. She could feel his gaze on her a couple of times, but he drove for several minutes before speaking.
“How are you doing?”
An innocuous question, albeit loaded with meaning. She shrugged. “I’m o—” she said before stopping herself. In a rare instant of candor she admitted, “I really don’t know.”
“It’s a lot to process.”
It was, but her mind was a jumble. She’d never visited a crime scene, except for the one she’d been part of. For her articles, she’d pored over the public reports for the TK’s victims, but that was vastly different from seeing the spots firsthand.
Reese shivered. She hadn’t let her gaze linger on the blackened remains, but one look had been enough to sear them on her memory. It was a challenge to separate Pollack’s fate from Autry’s or Amelia Trainer’s, the third victim in Thorne’s basement. Her mind insisted on swinging from past to present, melding the two horrors, making objectivity difficult.
Writing about the tragedies that befell people required impartiality. But there was nothing objective about being a part of a murderous hellscape, close enough to feel the blood spatter, for the screams of the victim to spike her eardrums like ice picks. Or near enough to smell a scorched corpse. Right now, the quality felt like a distant nebulous ideal, one she wasn’t sure how to retrieve.
“There’s no use wondering if it was Thorne until there’s evidence that points to him.”