Winter Black Box Set 3 Read online

  Clenching her jaw, Winter pushed aside the ridiculous questions.

  He was nineteen now, not six. She was searching for a young adult, not a little boy. He may have even attended college. Either way, he was a much more complex person than he’d been in the first grade.

  As the cheery ding sounded out and the silver doors slid open, she took in a steadying breath and stepped into the hall. Stella had a busy day, but she’d told Winter she was welcome to stop by the office during her lunch hour.

  Stella Norcott’s door was the last in a row of three, and light from the sunny office spilled out into the dim hall. As Winter stepped into the doorway, Stella’s jade green eyes snapped up from the container of food on her desk.

  With a smile, she rested her fork on the edge of the Tupperware. “Hey, Winter. How’s it going?”

  Winter returned the expression to the best of her ability, but she was sure she’d failed miserably.

  “I’m all right. How are you?” The question felt perfunctory and robotic.

  Shrugging, Stella set her food aside. “I’m all right too. Yeah, that about sums it up. Tired. Busy. Stressed. You know, the usual.”

  As she dropped down to sit in front of the polished desk, Winter maintained her wooden smile.

  Fortunately, Stella’s attention wasn’t fixed on Winter’s strained expression. With one hand, she turned the widescreen monitor to face Winter as she tapped a couple keys with the other. “The lab is chaos right now, so that’s why we aren’t in there. You know those performers who spin plates on sticks, right?”

  Brushing a stray strand of hair away from her eyes, Winter nodded.

  “That’s what I feel like every time I go back there. We had a couple people quit out of the blue, and then my ballistics guy, Ted, is on paternity leave.” As she dropped a hand to the top of the desk, she sighed. “I’m sorry. You aren’t here to listen to me complain about personnel issues. You’re here to talk about a case.”

  For a moment, Winter’s smile didn’t feel so strained.

  Sometimes, knowing there were others nearby who ran around their day to day lives with the same frenetic pace as a person on fire was enough to keep Winter from spiraling down into the realm of anxiety. Stella Norcott had always struck Winter as a woman who had her life together, but even the best and most organized men and women fell victim to the chaos every now and then.

  “Here we go.”

  When Winter glanced back to the forensics specialist, her eyes were on the monitor. As Winter followed her gaze, she had to fight to keep from wrinkling her nose at the gory sight. Somehow, seeing the dissected rodent displayed in high definition on a screen was more jarring than seeing a dead rat in real life.

  “Oh, sorry. I guess I should have warned you before I pulled this up.” Stella’s eyes flicked over to her lunch and then to Winter before she shrugged. “I’m used to it. Animals and gore like this aren’t usually my specialty, but I see enough of it that I can watch a surgery while I eat spaghetti.”

  Winter hoped her chuckle sounded less like a nervous cackle than it did to her own ears. “It’s okay. Were you able to find anything from the rats?”

  Stella pursed her lips as she tapped the keyboard again. In the next image, the item of the camera’s focus was smudged with coagulated rat blood, but it wasn’t organic.

  Squinting at the monitor, Winter scooted forward. “Is that…what is that? Is that a Black Cat? A firecracker?”

  Stella nodded. “It is. We’ve got no idea why they were there, but we found one in the belly of each rat. Do you know what they might mean? Is it something that might have been significant to Justin somehow?”

  Just as Winter was about to shake her head, she was struck with a sudden memory. “Oh my god.”

  “What?” She could feel Stella’s curious gaze on the side of her face.

  Winter couldn’t pry her attention away from the monitor. “That summer, the summer before my…my mom and dad were killed, that Fourth of July. Mom and Dad let Justin light some fireworks, just the small stuff, sparklers and a couple bottle rockets. I remember, earlier that day, he’d done something to irritate me, so I put his favorite stuffed animal on the top of the bookshelf down in the living room.”

  When she paused to swallow, Stella remained quiet.

  “It was a lion, a stuffed lion named Rory. My parents were busy doing yard work, so it was hours before one of them had a chance to come in and get Rory down for him. We ate dinner, and I just figured everything went back to normal. He’d annoyed me, and I got back at him, so we were square. But then, when we were out lighting off fireworks.” Winter glanced over to Stella and pointed to the screen. “He threw a Black Cat at me.”

  Stella gave her a commiserating look but didn’t appear shocked or even a bit surprised. “My mom’s brother stabbed her in the back with a screwdriver once when they were eight or nine.”

  “Oh my god,” Winter managed.

  Patting the air with both hands, Stella shook her head. “Sorry, I’m not trying to steal your thunder. It just seemed relevant. Siblings can be jerks to one another.”

  With a quiet chuckle, Winter nodded. “Yeah, they can. My mom and dad chewed him out for it and told him how dangerous it was to play with fireworks like that, and he apologized for it later that night. It was just one of those things. He didn’t know any better. He threw it at my feet to try to scare me, and it worked.”

  “No doubt.”

  Winter could feel the creeping horror walking up her spine as she met Stella’s gaze. “Why would he do that?” But she already knew.

  Stella’s cool composure didn’t waver as she casted a thoughtful glance to the monitor. “Maybe he just wanted to make certain that you had no doubt that it was him.”

  “Maybe.” The word was barely above a whisper.

  There was no way she could have mistaken the author of those two messages for someone else.

  “Other than that, we ran through the fingerprints we collected from the house. The prints and these guys.” Stella pointed to the headless rat on the monitor. “Those were the most time-consuming parts of our investigation. The only prints in the house were from the realtor, Dr. Trent, yourself, and a couple other agents.”

  “How did he get in? The lock to the door was still intact when we got there, and it didn’t look like anyone had walked through the living room for quite a while.”

  Stella closed the gory image and straightened her computer screen. “We found a footprint outside one of the windows. We’re still looking at it, trying to see if we can figure out a size, style, that sort of thing. Right now, we think that’s how he got in.”

  “That makes sense,” Winter murmured.

  None of this made sense, but she wasn’t about to put Stella down when she’d clearly gone above and beyond her normal duties to get the analyses to Winter so soon.

  As if she could sense Winter’s underlying nervousness, Stella’s expression sobered. “I’m sorry we don’t have more for you right now. The writings on the walls were definitely done with rat blood, but otherwise, we didn’t find any indication that there were even rats in the house. They had to have been killed somewhere else.”

  Just when Winter thought the situation couldn’t make less sense, Stella threw her a curveball. Was it more or less disconcerting that Justin had mutilated the rats before he arrived at the house where their parents had been killed?

  At the thought, her stomach roiled.

  “When do you think you’ll make it through everything that’s left?” The question had been spoken in Winter’s voice, but she felt like someone else had said the words.

  “Aside from the paperwork, we should have it all wrapped up by tomorrow. The paperwork usually lags behind by a couple days, or lately, by a week.”

  “Tomorrow, okay.” Winter clenched one hand and focused on the sting as her nails dug into her palm.

  Like everything else so far in the search for Justin, the most recent discovery only left her with more questions than answers.

  Chief among them was what had happened to the little boy who’d been taken from her so many years ago.

  Where was he, and who had taken his place?

  8

  Though working out a psychological profile of a serial killer was more specifically within Aiden Parrish’s realm of comfort than interrogating a Russian mafia foot soldier, part of him preferred to deal with the mob. More often than not, the mob made sense. They were motivated by one thing and one thing only—money.

  To be sure, they committed plenty of atrocious acts in their pursuit of money and power, but their motive was always the same.

  When Aiden was faced with a puzzle like the one that had been delivered to the FBI by Ryan O’Connelly, he wondered if he had finally come across a mystery he couldn’t solve.

  He would never admit the uncertainty to anyone else, but after almost a decade and a half in the BAU, he figured the initial pang of doubt was part of the process. This time, his immediate response to the fleeting uncertainty had been to reach out to a certain forensic psychologist.

  With a groan, he leaned back in the office chair and rubbed the bridge of his nose.

  When he’d started at the bureau, he’d always thought he would make it through his career without the mistake of mixing his professional and personal lives. Then he’d met Sun Ming. Of course, that was only after the one-time affair he’d had with Cassidy Ramirez during the start of The Preacher case nearly fourteen years ago. And the feelings that had grown for the girl who had been orphaned by that particular psychopath.

  He mentally cursed himself. Maybe he wasn’t as adept at separating professional and personal business as he liked to think.

  The realization elicited another groan, and he was suddenly glad th
at Winter and Noah were late to the last-minute meeting.

  Somewhere in the back of his mind, he knew Autumn Trent was different.

  They’d only known one another for a few months, but he was sure she already knew more about him than most of his friends and acquaintances. She knew about his secret affinity for Code Red Mountain Dew, about every computer game he’d ever played, every concert he’d ever been to, every college exam he’d ever bombed.

  And yet, he couldn’t bring himself to act on the inexorable pull he felt when he saw her. Especially now that she’d started to dress like a runway model instead of a roadie for Nirvana. Not that she’d looked bad before. If anyone could make ripped jeans and flannel look good, it was Autumn. But now, she wore those heels…

  As much as he wanted to avoid mixing the personal and professional, he couldn’t help but wonder why he was so hesitant to act on the undeniable attraction. Maybe the conundrum itself was the problem. Not only was Autumn a professional colleague, but she was one of Winter Black’s best friends. Unless he was sure the outcome would be positive for everyone involved, it was best to stay far away from such an impulse.

  When the creak of the door cut through the stillness of the little conference room, he jerked his attention back to the present.

  He arched an eyebrow at Winter as she closed the door behind herself. “Where’s Dalton?”

  “He sent me a text a few minutes ago. He was with Miguel Vasquez checking up on one of the victim’s families.” She dropped down to sit across from him.

  “You didn’t go with him?”

  She shook her head. “No. I was stuck on a phone call trying to get ahold of the other victim’s parents. A phone call that went nowhere, so, whatever.” Crossing both arms over her chest, she turned those vivid blue eyes back to him.

  He chuckled quietly. “Whatever, indeed. I suppose we might as well get started then.”

  With a half-smile, she nodded. “Yeah, we might as well. I’m assuming you already know everything we’ve found so far, so I was hoping I’d be able to pick your brain about it.”

  Straightening, Aiden propped his elbows on the table and returned her nod. “Of course. I looked through those videos and all the posts under them in that forum. Most of them seem like run of the mill predators, but our voyeuristic OP, or original poster as they say, is cut from a slightly different cloth.”

  “Different how?” She scooted forward, her eyes fixed on his.

  “Well, for starters, all signs point to the fact that he’s a sociopath. He knows right from wrong, and that’s why he wore the mask, the sunglasses, all of it. It’s why he hid his location with a proxy server and removed any distinguishing marks from the room where he held those girls. But…” He raised a finger.

  Winter gave him a don’t play with me stare. “But?”

  “But, he’s not exactly an unfeeling, methodical murderer either. There’s some repressed rage buried underneath the calculating veneer. When he cut that girl’s throat, he almost decapitated her. His expression wasn’t visible, but the way he held himself wasn’t cool and collected. His movements were uneven and erratic. He turned the camera off, but I don’t doubt that he stabbed her a few more times before he got rid of the body.”

  “Okay,” Winter said. “He’s pissed about something, so he abducts and murders women to try to turn a profit on ‘pervs are us dot com’ all while he tries to satiate his rage?”

  Aiden tapped his knuckles on the table. “Close, but I think there’s more driving his behavior than just plain anger. It could stem from attachment problems with his mother during his development. Then, when one of his advances was rejected during his teen years, he snapped. And just to be clear, it wasn’t the girl’s fault for rejecting him.” He flashed Winter a matter-of-fact look. “He was a psychopath before she turned him down. She didn’t drag it out of him. People like this, they’re wired differently.”

  The corner of Winter’s mouth twitched in the start of a smile. “You’ve been hanging around Autumn, haven’t you?”

  He tried to look confused. “What?”

  With a light laugh, she rolled her eyes. “Yeah, okay. So, we’ve got a guy who’s angry at women due to attachment issues with his mother and then probably rejection when he was older. What are you thinking in terms of demographics?”

  “If the videos he posted are any indication, he’s still evolving, still changing parts of his routine. He went from recording the girls while they were being held captive to murdering one of them up close on camera. Something might have happened in between the last captive video and the homemade snuff film. It could be that he was stressed about something unrelated, or that he got turned down by another girl.”

  Winter scoffed.

  “I agree. But the fact that he’s prone to these outbursts, to changing his MO so drastically out of anger, means he probably hasn’t been doing this for long.”

  Nodding her understanding, she shifted her eyes away from him as they lapsed into silence.

  “What about Justin?”

  The question leapt out and struck him with the force he’d expect from a boxing heavyweight champ.

  The effort to say something other than a dumbfounded “what” felt Herculean. Aiden wasn’t knocked off-balance by a question often, but when it happened, it made him nervous.

  He hated to be nervous. Anxiety was an aspect of his mind he liked to think he’d conquered a long time ago, and a reminder that the unease still lurked beneath his polished, purposeful exterior brought a bitter taste to his mouth.

  “What about Justin?” he echoed when nothing more substantial came to mind.

  The motion slow and measured, Winter nodded. “I know you, Aiden. I know you’ve probably had a profile or a theory put together about him for months. Ever since Kilroy told us he was still alive. Even if you didn’t write it down or make it official, I know you’ve at least got an opinion.”

  He linked his hands behind his head and let the room lapse into silence.

  She was right. He did have an opinion about what had happened to Justin Black, but he knew she wouldn’t want to hear it.

  However, if he refused to answer the question, or if he offered some half-assed explanation, she would know. Winter might not have had the same bizarre knack to see straight through someone like Autumn did, but she’d known him for nearly fourteen years. She knew better than to think he hadn’t formed an opinion about Justin.

  He’d done more than form an opinion.

  He’d pulled in the expertise of Autumn Trent, and he’d done so officially. There were records at both the bureau and with Shadley and Latham—the prestigious firm that specialized in criminal and forensic psychology—that confirmed Autumn’s involvement in Justin Black’s kidnapping investigation.

  For the time being, he would make a point to leave Autumn out of the clash that was on the horizon. Well, it had been on the horizon, but now it was knocking on the front door.

  Even when Winter was a teenager, Aiden had never coddled her. She was a smart, strong young woman, and she didn’t need to be shielded from the harsh realities of the world. After all, she’d been dead set on working for the FBI since she was in junior high. If she wanted to work for the FBI, she needed to know the truth.

  The truth about the world, and now, the truth about her brother.

  When the blinds clattered against the glass door as it swung open, he barely kept himself from heaving a sigh of relief.

  As soon as Noah Dalton stepped into the room, the man froze in place. His green eyes darted from Aiden to Winter and back before he released his hold on the handle to let the door swing closed.

  “Did I interrupt something?” Noah didn’t move from his spot just in front of the doorway, unabashed skepticism written on his face.

  Winter’s intense stare on Aiden didn’t relent. “No. Aiden was just about to tell me his thoughts on Justin’s kidnapping.”

  Noah opened and closed his mouth a couple times before he clenched his jaw and nodded. “Okay. Do I need to be here for this, or…?”

  As he reached for the door handle, Aiden held up a hand. “You’re fine, Dalton.” The first rush of irritability rose up to greet him, and he embraced it like an old friend. “This will just take a second.”