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CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT

A ddie slipped off her coat and hung it on the tree by the glass entry doors.

“Morning.”

She smiled at Stella, one of the two agents sent over from Seattle. “Hey, how’s it going so far?”

“I’ve been here about ten minutes more than you.” Stella had a pixie cut, high cheekbones, and the figure of a woman who did spin class six times a week but ate enough to fuel her life. She was muscled and glowed.

“How was class this morning?”

Stella made a sound akin to “phew,” and sipped from a smoothie. Yet another normal thing that made Addie glad for the time she’d spent with Jake last night. A sweet moment, even in the middle of all this.

“You know,” Stella said, “I wasn’t all fired up to come to Benson, but it’s not bad here.”

“Yeah?”

Stella nodded. “Maybe it’s just not as bad as I thought it would be.”

Addie chuckled.

Kyle strode in. He waved, so she waved back. “Stella tell a knock-knock joke again? They’re usually terrible.”

Addie shook her head. “She admitted Benson might not be so bad.”

Kyle made a face.

“It might grow on you as well.”

“I guess anything is possible.” He headed for his desk.

They’d established a certain working rhythm, but it was still new. She had no idea if they would stick around after the case was done. She wouldn’t mind if they did. She was used to working with other agents, and she’d discovered an empty echoey office wasn’t her favorite thing.

She checked her email, dealt with the immediate stuff, and headed for coffee.

Kyle met her at the coffee bar she’d set up. “How’s your sister? And your friend?”

Since Stella didn’t drink coffee, Addie filled two mugs and handed him one. “It’ll be a long process for both of them.”

Kyle was older, maybe nearly forty, but a newer agent. He’d joined the FBI from a career as a police detective and had an excellent eye for inconsistencies. “I can’t imagine.”

“Mona is still pretty upset, but so is Russ. It’s hard to put the hammer down on the teen antics when she’s grieving. She can’t blow off steam in unhealthy ways because she’s grounded.” Addie winced. “I’m just glad she’s not the one who found him, and she was nowhere near when it happened.”

Stella nodded. “Me, too. Poor kid.”

“Jacob looks better, and he’s moving around.” She realized she hadn’t referred to him as “Jake” that time but wasn’t sure what it meant. “When he’s up to it, we’ll get him back to his apartment and clean up there.”

The cops didn’t have any leads on who’d broken in or why. Nothing was taken. There were no signs of forced entry, and the security system hadn’t noted any anomalies.

Neither she nor Russ was all fired up to kick him out, though. Even if Russ’s couch was uncomfortable and her sleeping on it meant he couldn’t spend all hours at his desk working on that thing he said he didn’t want to bother her with. Because apparently, Jacob was helping him with it.

Addie shoved away that irritation. She probably didn’t have the bandwidth to worry about peripheral stuff right now. Russ likely made the right call there.

“Where are we at with all this?” Addie motioned to the whiteboards.

Kyle waved a hand out. “The way you organized it cut out hours of work trying to correlate all the details. We were able to find two additional cases in PD files. Except we believe they’re the same case.”

“Tell me.” She tried to phrase it not like an order because she wasn’t their boss technically. And they were here doing her a favor.

Stella brought over a tablet. “Two victims. One male, one female. Both show the same injuries, though one was strangled and the other has slit wrists.”

“Murder-suicide?”

“They were found two weeks apart on different sides of town,” Kyle said. “But we believe they’re connected.”

“Decomp was different, but I think that’s down to weather conditions and the environment they were left in.” Stella swiped the screen of the tablet. “The strangled female was dumped up river, we think, and washed up on the shore of the lake that’s east of town.”

Addie nodded. “I know it. We used to go out there every Friday in summer, and everyone would sleep on the beach after.”

Stella scanned the screen. “The male is the apparent suicide. Aside from cause of death, his injuries are almost identical. He was left in a storage unit, inside a freezer. Discovered when the unit was auctioned off. But the investigating detective didn’t find anything on the previous renter.”

“What were the injuries?”

Kyle took the tablet and ran his thumbs over the screen. “Bug bites over sections of their bodies but concentrated on the legs. Cuts and scratches on the hands and arms, possibly defensive wounds.”

“Ruptured eardrums?” Addie’s stomach flipped over just saying it.

Stella nodded. “Yeah, that was listed on both.”

Addie stumbled to a chair and sat. She took a long breath and blew it out slowly. “Anything else?”

Stella and Kyle glanced at each other, then looked at her. Stella lifted her chin. “How about you tell us what you’re thinking?”

Addie didn’t want to say it.

“This is about what happened to you, isn’t it?” Kyle spoke with a measured tone.

She could only nod.

“These deaths occurred two months ago.”

“He’s doing it again.” Addie swallowed. “But it makes no sense. Why kill Celia?”

“You think it’s the same guy, some kind of copycat?” Stella shifted to sit on the edge of a table.

“An apprentice.” Addie winced. “There were indications, but no one ever figured out if it was true that he worked with someone.”

“None of you ever saw a second person?” Kyle sighed. “I wish we could ask Detective Maxwell.”

Addie hadn’t heard from McCauley whether or not Hank had been found. “He’s still AWOL?”

Stella nodded. “It isn’t looking good for him.”

Addie wanted to jump to his defense. The way she did with Jake.

Hank wasn’t the friend she’d known.

Not even the Jacob she knew now was the same boy she’d been so in love with. They’d all lived a lifetime since the last time they were together.

Things with him might be familiar, and what seemed to be there between them had a hint of the easy thing it had been. Yet there was a whole lot about it that was new.

Addie felt the same about being back in Benson. Who she had been in the FBI was a person she’d decided on. Maybe she needed to be to move on from everything that happened. Someone who analyzed and took a step back to look at things from the outside rather than getting involved, and it ended up messy.

Who she was in Benson didn’t quite match up. Someone wanted her back here, and just in time for Ivan Damen’s apprentice to begin his work again?

Addie fought a shiver. She got up and grabbed the phone from the desk, punching in the numbers to call SAC Zimmerman.

He picked up. “Calling to ask for your job back? Or some other reason?”

Addie pressed her lips together. Did he think she was going to cry and plead for another chance at their relationship? They lived on opposite sides of the country, and he was back with his wife, wasn’t he? She figured whatever the question, Kyle and Stella didn’t need any more reason to believe her emotions were clouded right now.

“Well?” Zimmerman sighed.

“Who pushed for me to come here and take this assignment?” Addie asked.

“That’s what you want to know?”

“I’m sorry, did you think this was going to be a personal call?” She tried to keep the sarcasm out of her tone. “I’m busy with a dozen open cases. Do you know the answer or not?”

Zimmerman went quiet for a second. “I can try and find out.”

“Great. That would be…” She’d already said great again . “Thanks. I appreciate it.”

“Hmm.” Zimmerman hung up.

Addie turned to her new colleagues.

“Talk it out.” Kyle took a sip of his coffee. “You’re the profiler. What are your instincts telling you?”

Addie had hardly put the thoughts together but figured that was a good idea. Sometimes it helped to speak aloud ideas. Even doing that could help pieces to fall into place.

“He’s starting again.” Addie frowned. “Or he never stopped. He’s been developing it all these years, working out how he operates. Now he’s ready. He did it with these two victims you found.”

Stella said, “And now?”

“There’s a reason I was brought back here.” There had to be. “How, I have no idea. But why now? It’s not like I was expected, so he couldn’t guarantee I’d be here. And it’s not like he’s taking advantage of me being here now. It doesn’t feel like that.”

“So it could be that he orchestrated your assignment?”

“It brings things full circle with me back in Benson. He finishes what Damen started, and he can make it his own from there.” She thought about all those silent phone calls. “Or he hates himself, and he wants to end it.”

Stella nodded. “He could want you to catch him.”

Kyle said, “Not the first criminal I’ve met who wants it to end. Wants to get caught because they don’t like what they do.”

“But knowing he hates himself doesn’t narrow it down,” Stella pointed out. “At least not in a way we can track.”

Somehow, Addie had to figure out how to marry up the two sides of her. The woman she was in Benson, a survivor with history here, and the FBI profiler she’d become. Both parts of her were going to have to work together to solve this.

“Question is, who in Benson had a hand in getting you back here?” Stella said. “The mayor? The police chief? Isn’t the mayor’s brother a senator in Washington, DC?”

Kyle said, “That guy might have juice enough he got you assigned here.”

“There would be an official request,” Addie said. “But who could’ve pulled strings behind it?”

Someone might have whispered in his ear, and the mayor made the request. She didn’t think the police chief was a likely candidate. Maybe someone within the police department.

“We could all go talk to the mayor. Pin him down.” Kyle had a gleam in his eye. Like a detective determined to put the screws to someone.

Addie would like to see that. But these two were outsiders. “I’ll go.”

“Sure?” Stella asked.

Addie nodded. “I’ll keep it casual. See if I can get him to open up about how it went down.”

“Good,” Stella said. “Something is definitely up in Benson.”

“At least you didn’t use the word afoot .” Kyle grinned. “While you’re out, we’ll work on these two new cases.”

“Celia’s death still doesn’t make sense. It fits, and it doesn’t, at the same time.” Addie wandered to the board that held those case details and studied it again, hoping to see something she hadn’t gone over a hundred times already. “If he killed two in the same manner as Damen, then why kill a single girl differently?”

“Could be there’s a missing male out there somewhere,” Stella said. “Someone we didn’t find yet. Or another case labeled differently.”

Addie thought about Austin. “Who worked the two cases you just discovered?”

“The suicide was signed off. Not much of an investigation to speak of, and the state police took it because he was found out in the woods.” Kyle tapped the tablet screen. “The girl’s case was assigned to…”

The door opened. A pale man with dark hair and dark circles under his eyes came in, moving slowly.

Celia Jessop’s father.

Addie set a hand on her holstered weapon, ready for whatever might happen next.

The man raised both hands, despair in his eyes.

“I’m turning myself in. I stabbed Jacob Wilson.”