Page 44 of The Naturals

Most killers have a type, I thought, falling back on my own lessons. “Do any of the other victims have ties to the psychic community, astrology, or the occult?”

Michael turned back to the two reports in his hand. “Lady of the Evening,” he said, “another Lady of the Evening, and a telemarketer…who worked at a psychic hotline.”

I glanced down at the two files in my hand. “I’ve got a nineteen-year-old runaway and a medium working out of Los Angeles.”

“Two different kinds of victims,” Michael observed. “Prostitutes, drifters, and runaways in column A. People with a tie to the occult in column B.”

I fished Before photos of the victims out of my files and gestured for the others to do the same.

You pick them for a reason, I thought, looking at the women one by one. You cut their faces, slice your knife down through skin and tissue, until you hit the bone. This is personal.

“They’re all young,” I said, studying them and searching for commonalities. “Between eighteen and thirty-five.”

“Those three have red hair.” Michael separated out the victims with no ties to the psychic community.

“The palm reader had red hair, too,” Sloane interjected.

I was staring directly at the palm reader’s Before picture. “The palm reader was a blonde.”

“No,” Sloane said slowly. “She was a natural blonde. But when they found her, she looked like this.”

Sloane slid a second, gruesome picture toward us. True to Sloane’s words, the corpse’s hair was a deep, unmistakable red.

A recent dye job, I thought. So did she dye her hair . . . or did you?

“Two classes of victims,” Michael said again, lining the redheads up in one column and the psychics in another, with the palm reader from Dupont Circle between the two. “You think we’re looking for two different killers?”

“No,” I said. “We’re only looking for one killer.”

My companions could make observations. Sloane could generate relevant statistics. If there’d been witness testimony, Michael could have told us who was exhibiting signs of guilt. But here, now, looking at the pictures, this was my domain. I would have had to backtrack to explain how I knew, to figure out how I knew—but I was certain. The pictures, what had been done to these women, it was the same. Not just the details, but the anger, the urges…

All of these women had been killed by the same person.

You’re escalating, I thought. Something happened, and now you need more, faster.

I stared at the photos, my mind whirring, picking up each detail of the pictures, the files, until only three things stood out.

Knife.

Redhead.

Psychic.

That was the moment that the ground disappeared from underneath me. I lost the ability to blink. My eyes got very dry. My throat was worse. My vision blurred, and all of the photographs got very fuzzy except for one.

The nineteen-year-old runaway.

The hair, the facial structure, the freckles. Through blurred vision, she looked like…

Knife.

Redhead.

Psychic.

“Cassie?” Michael took my hands in his. “You’re freezing.”

“The UNSUB is killing redheads,” I said, “and he’s killing psychics.”