Page 55 of The Killer She Knew

“No. Not yet.” Leigh shook her head, more than happy to melt into a puddle on the cold floor as soon as possible. “The ME’s office is still limited in what tests they can run working off nothing but a generator. But I’m thinking our theory about Teshia Elborne’s high school sweetheart might be right. Turns out injecting arsenic and cyanide into someone’s eye kills them within minutes. She wouldn’t have suffered any of the poisons’ effects after he knocked her unconscious with chloroform.”

“He didn’t want her to suffer.” Small wrinkles set up in Ford’s suit jacket. For the first time in the past forty-eight hours, he wasfinally starting to look how she felt. “Could her death have been an accident? Maybe a crime of passion?”

“It’s possible. Regardless, the way he handled her remains makes me think he cared about her.” She shrugged, circling around to her own chair. Her knee knocked into his as she sat. A small motion but big on her part. She didn’t like to get personal. With anyone. Least of all fellow law enforcement officials. There was too much bad blood between her and the rest of the system, but here she’d gone and handed over her darkest secrets. To this man. “In my experience, a serial offender’s first kill tells more about the killer than the victim. Modes of operation can change over time, but the signatures—the markers that killers use to make themselves known—never evolve. The arsenic and cyanide are considered part of his MO. Sooner or later, he may try to alter the compounds or try another murder weapon, but the care he puts into washing and cleaning the victims’ remains is his signature. He makes an effort to ensure we know it’s him, and it all started with Teshia Elborne. He took care of her after he killed her, and that simple act probably gave him a sense of closure. So he keeps doing it. It’s a cycle. In reality, she changed everything for him.”

“But the unsub didn’t get the chance to wash Tamra Hopkins and Pierce Morrow’s bodies.” Ford knocked his knee against hers this time. “He must not have had the resources or the time.”

They’d done what they could for Tamra Hopkins’s remains, but Leigh had collapsed from Dean’s drug before she’d gotten the chance to examine her former mentor’s. She stood to leave. “We should take a look at Morrow’s body again.”

“You talk about this guy as if you understand him. Almost like you can see the world through his eyes.” Ford studied her from his seat, and she couldn’t help but feel completely exposed under that gaze. Like he wanted to break her open and see howshe ticked. “Makes me think the sword could’ve gone the other way. You would’ve made a formidable serial killer.”

She didn’t know what to say to that. What to think. There were law enforcement officials who’d refused to work with her over the years. The ones who’d made that very same observation. Not knowing what to do with someone who lived inside the minds of the very people who brutally ended lives. She couldn’t lie. Her chest tightened at hearing those words come from Ford when all she wanted was to be the woman he believed her to be from the investigation files and media coverage he’d studied over the past few months. “I wouldn’t be very good at my job if I didn’t try to see the world from their perspective. Does that bother you?”

Standing, he closed the distance between them. Larger, more formidable than ever before, and her blood pressure spiked. Threading his hands into the hair on the back of her neck, Ford pressed his mouth to hers. This kiss wasn’t the punishing, desperate desire for connection they’d shared in the corridor or the one before that. It was something sweeter. Patient and slow. Accepting. He skimmed his thumb across her cheek. “No, it doesn’t.”

His smile cut through the heaviness still lingering from the past two days, and the relief Leigh felt nearly knocked her on her ass. Ford let his touch drop away but kept his proximity. “We got a name for Teshia Elborne’s high school boyfriend yet?”

“No.” The word left her mouth as nothing more than a whisper as she tried to regain control over her body. Leigh worked to clear her throat. Didn’t help. That was one thing they couldn’t solve in their current situation. Even with a repeated phone number in Elborne’s phone records, they had no way of tracing it back to a registered name.

“Even if the on again–off again boyfriend is a suspect, we can’t overlook the fact Dean Groves is here. Not only is hesneaking into conference rooms and knocking federal agents unconscious, he pulled your weapon on you,” Ford said. “That doesn’t scream innocent to me.”

Another good point. Except Dean had handed her weapon back. She scrubbed a hand down her face to chase back the exhaustion closing in. Well, if she was being honest, it’d never left. The second she’d set foot on this campus, eighteen years of pure heaviness had descended. Emotional trauma for the win. As much as she wanted to believe Dean had spent the last eighteen years trying to clear his name of Teshia Elborne’s murder, she couldn’t altogether dismiss him as a suspect. The evidence said otherwise.

Leigh grabbed for the door handle and escaped the too-hot room into the corridor. Activity buzzed from the lobby. “He’s still in the building. He won’t leave until he’s finished what he started. Not when he’s this close.”

“I’ve done multiple rounds through the building in the past two days. There’s no sign of him, and believe me, I’ve been looking. But he can’t hide forever.” Ford closed the conference room door behind him. He’d cleaned the blood from the back of his hair, but dried flecks still clung to the fabric of his shirt and suit jacket.

Leigh couldn’t help herself, reaching up to swipe away the remnants from the fabric. The action brought them nearly chest to chest, and her heart rate kicked up. The last time she and Ford had found themselves in this position, someone had thrown a rock at a fluorescent tube to cause a distraction. Dean? His name was more growl than thought in her mind. Though she supposed he’d had a point. Distractions would get them killed if she wasn’t careful. “You’ve got blood on you.”

“It’s not the first time.” Ford stared down at her with that look again, consuming and intense and a little bit intimidating. The one that said he wanted this to happen as much as shedid. “Once this shelter in place order is lifted, this place will be swarming with cops and forensic teams.”

Her skin tightened, drawing a slow exhale from her chest. Right. The case. “Dean is in the tunnels. Most likely somewhere with the least amount of flooding. It would be the last place we’d want to search, and for that reason alone, the perfect hide-out. I wouldn’t be surprised if he worked out a way to gain access from another building.”

“You almost died the last time you went down there,” Ford said. “Don’t even think about it.”

His concern was… cute. But flawed. This was her job. Attraction didn’t change that. And as much as she wanted to argue that she could take care of her damn self, she had to agree. There wasn’t anything that could make her want to go back into that hellhole.

Commotion bled from the lobby. As though someone had taken a swipe at a hornets’ nest. Shouts reached her ears. She threw Ford a glance before jogging back to the front of Thompson Hall. Students were up off the floor, crowding around the glass doors. Pushing through.

The president of the university held both hands up. “Please, the police have not lifted the shelter in place order! We cannot leave until the storm passes! It’s not safe.” His voice failed to reach over the cacophony of rising voices.

“There’s a killer on the loose! It’s not safe here!”

“They want to keep us here to die!”

“You have to let us out! Please, I have to go home!”

Leigh couldn’t reach the front of the crowd without going through the mass itself. A shoulder knocked into hers, shoving her to one side. Another student jostled her holster, and she clamped a hand on the butt of her weapon. Just in case.

Strong hands held her upright. Ford. He had her back as she pushed through, but there were too many of them. Every stepcloser antagonized the frenzy. The lack of sleep and food had triggered a primal chain reaction that there was no coming back from this time. She could feel it the air same way she could anticipate violence in crime statistics and patterns.

“I’m getting the hell out of here!”

“I was here first!”

“Back off!”

A student fell into her and hit the floor. Pain flared across her shoulder. She lost her balance trying to catch them and was taken down in a tackle. The floor rushed up to meet her. Feet caught in her ribs and sucker-punched the air from her chest. Forced to protect her face, she turned onto her belly and tried to claw through the maze of limbs toward the glass doors.

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