Page 67 of Royal
Chapter 16
Gray
Phoenix was on the phone with the lieutenant of the Bellingham police department. He’d talked to him previously, when the feds had gotten involved with the investigation the year before. Now that the profile was more fleshed-out, Phoenix asked if the lieutenant would email the file from the first victim so we could look it over again.
The first was usually the most significant. Since we knew Ameinias believed he loved his victims, there was bound to be something of importance from the first person he’d killed—a woman named Lauren Parks. She’d been a well-known motivational speaker who’d been visiting local colleges on a tour throughout the US. A few days after arriving in Washington, she’d been found dead.
Phoenix also called his information guru from the Criminal Justice Information Services to run the names the lieutenant had given him of men who had been arrested for various smaller crimes and who fit the profile. We would cross-reference those names with people in Lauren’s life.
“You should head home,” Phoenix said after I’d gotten off the phone with Royal.
He’d sent his team to check out a few places of interest, and Ruby had left about an hour before to be with Yuna, at my insistence, because she’d worked about as much as I had. It was just me and the chief of the BAU in the back room.
“No way. I’m not leaving you here to do all the work yourself.” I walked over to the table and looked at the email he’d printed about Lauren Parks’ case. I’d learned a bit about the past crime scenes, but some details had been left out. “She was found in the bay area? Wow. Kind of public with all the boat traffic and visitors from the nearby shopping district.”
“That’s what I thought, too,” he said, studying the victim board. “Which tells me he clearly knew the area and knew the best times he could go and not be seen.”
I noticed Phoenix did that a lot. If we were theorizing, or if he was deep in thought, he’d look at the victims, memorizing each of their faces. Maybe trying to gain answers from them, as well.
“You’ve been a profiler for a while, haven’t you?”
Phoenix’s eyes moved to me. “I became an agent at twenty-three and joined the BAU when I was thirty.”
“How old are you now?” Maybe it was rude to ask, but he didn’t look much older than me.
He arched a brow, seemingly amused. “Thirty-seven.”
“Kind of young to be the big, bad chief, eh?”
“Not really. Experience and skill were what got me here. Age had nothing to do with it.”
Fair enough.
Thunder rumbled in the distance, and I looked out the window at the dark clouds rolling in. Goddamn spring. If it wasn’t allergies killing me and making my life miserable, it was thunderstorms.
Was it too much to ask for a nice, warm-but-not-too-hot day with clear skies, while still being able to breathe out of my nose?
Ameinias was out there right now. Hiding in wait. His letter said he’d “been a good boy” by not hurting anyone. And I’d provoked him. The festival was this weekend. It’d be crowded with bands, guest celebrities, solo musicians, graphic artists, and chefs. Basically, one huge melting pot of talent, all together in one place.
Phoenix had spoken to the event coordinator, as well as the head of the festival, and suggested they move to a different location just in case, but his request was declined. Too much money had been put into the promotion, and it was too short notice to move it elsewhere. They’d told him, “We’re not going to lose all of this money on a whim. We’ll pay to have more security, but we’re not canceling.”
Damn money-hungry mongrels. If someone turned up dead, it’d be their fault.
But there wasn’t any proof that the killer intended to target the festival. He’d made no mention of it in his letter. If he had, we would’ve been able to shut it down for public safety.
The clouds opened up. Rain hit the roof in a massive downpour. Lightning flashed, and four seconds later, thunder struck, like a whip cracking through the sky. I cringed at the sound.
I hated storms, especially thunder. An irrational fear that’d followed me since childhood. Thunder couldn’t hurt me, but the loud noise had sent me into outright panics when I was little.
One time when Royal had slept over, it had stormed badly. Thunder cracked, and I sat up in bed with a gasp, scaring the shit out of him. I’d tried to play it off and be cool afterward, but he’d seen right through me.
He still did.
The lights in the station flickered, and the rain got heavier. More thunder boomed. The wind picked up, and it sounded like a damn hurricane outside. There was another loudcrackas the rain hit the window, coming in at a slant.
“Grayson?”
I was gripping the back of the chair so hard my knuckles had turned white. I released it and took a breath. “I’m okay. Didn’t know it was supposed to storm today.”
