“All right. I’ve been profiling the Pretender for a year now, and the profile is still in progress. It keeps changing. He’s a chameleon. He adapts, copies, mimics, then disappears. Despite your thoughts about Sergeant Fitzgerald, I’m fully convinced this is the Pretender’s work. Killing Susie McDonald, stabbing her and leaving her on the boat, taking Fitz, then removing his eye and letting him go, are only his second original series of crimes we’re aware of, which obviously changes things yet again. There are a few items I can tell you up front—I don’t think he’s had a formal education, but he’s above average in intelligence. He was raised in multiple homes, was probably a foster child.”

“A foster child,” Sansom said. “Hmm.”

“He’s also transient, just sets up base wherever he is, which makes him harder to track. He’s in his early thirties, lacks confidence in himself, takes jobs as necessary to pay for his basic needs. He’s computer savvy, knows his way around the message boards. He believes he’s a scholar, a student of serial murder. He’ll have books with him, anything and everything to do with serial killers. He considers himself as much of an expert as I am. And he has a fascination with blood that would have started at an early age. I wouldn’t be surprised to find out that he killed very young, a sibling, perhaps. He’s good with his hands, affable, charming, sexual. He can go unnoticed, or he can draw attention, whatever suits his purpose.”

He leaned into Sansom, making sure she was paying attention. “Don’t ever let your guard down if you do happen upon him. I’m dead serious here. He has no feelings, can’t be reasoned with. He’ll kill you without hesitating and never give it a second thought. If he’s cornered, he’ll do whatever it takes to get away. We’re going to have a hard time bringing him in alive. He has nothing to lose. He isn’t a glory seeker, trying to see himself in the news. He’s a pure sociopath who enjoys killing by any available method.”

Sansom didn’t flinch at that, and Taylor thought she should. Of course, Taylor had seen him in person, or thought she had, back in Nashville last year, in a bar called Control, at what was supposed to be her bachelorette party. She’d felt the evil emanating from his skin like sweat on a hot summer day, visible and malodorous.

“Okay then. Where do we start?” Sansom asked.

Baldwin sat back in his chair and crossed his legs. “With the note you found in the trailer in Asheville. It’s handwritten. I have one of the world’s preeminent experts on sociopathic graphology ready to study that note. With any luck, she’ll be able to tell us something about him that we don’t already know.”

Sansom turned to Taylor. “That’s a start for you, then. I still have a kidnapping and murder on my books to clear. So let’s get down to it. I’ll show you mine if you show me yours. What else do you know about the Pretender? How are we going to catch him? Lieutenant, I’d like to hear from you. What do you think his next move is?”

“His next move?” Taylor laughed lightly. “Me. I’m his next move.”

Five

Taylor had a flash drive with a PowerPoint presentation on it, one that had originally been given to her team when they were dealing with the Snow White Killer’s apprentice brutalizing Nashville. The Snow White had killed ten Nashville girls in the 1980s, then sent a letter to the police telling them his reign of terror was finished. He was true to his word for over twenty years. But then, the previous Christmas, the long-dormant killer resurfaced. Out of the blue four girls were viciously murdered in the Snow White style. Taylor’s team suspected a copycat, and they’d been partially correct. That was the first time the Pretender had come across their radar screens. But he’d existed long before he touched Taylor’s world.

She popped the flash drive into Sansom’s laptop computer; Yeager and Polakis got behind to watch.

Taylor narrated, trying to ignore the chill creeping up her spine. The last time she’d heard this information, FBI special agent and profiler Charlotte Douglas had been speaking. Charlotte had used the information as a weapon to make Taylor look bad. Her actions had backfired.

Taylor didn’t think she’d ever forget arriving at that crime scene, the shock of seeing Charlotte’s fire-red hair commingled with her life’s blood, the setting sun echoing the bloody sheets.

Taylor forwarded the slides, covering the original killings of the Pretender, sharing the details as they knew them. By the time he’d hit Nashville, he had eighteen confirmed kills under his belt already. He’d committed another four under the tutelage of the Snow White Killer, then he’d gone off the rails. He killed three more girls before he was shot and ran. Adding Charlotte to the mix took his total up to twenty-six homicides.

Taylor heard an echo from the past, Charlotte’s voice ringing through her head in triumph. These four murders in Nashville have been directly connected to the other eighteen. You don’t just have a copycat on your hands, you have an obscenely prolific serial killer with victims in five states. The CODIS results are definitive. His pattern is undeniable. It is quite likely that he will move on to another state, kill more young women, if you don’t stop him here in Nashville.

Despite her proselytizing, Charlotte Douglas had been right on the money. They hadn’t stopped him. And now look where they were.

Taylor played with the remote in her hand. “As you can see, Susie McDonald makes twenty-seven confirmed kills. If the evidence matches the forensics we already have, of course.”

“I thought you were certain this was tied to the Pretender. You have an eyewitness, after all, even if he says he can’t remember anything,” Sansom said.

Taylor ignored that last comment. “You know as well as I do that we have nothing yet to definitively prove it was the Pretender. We need the DNA results, the forensics, to confirm it for sure.”

Sansom opened a folder, laid out an Identi-Kit sketch. “I was under the impression that you’d seen him before. We have this picture we’re working from, and your sergeant thinks it was the same man.”

Taylor glanced at the picture, at the electronic depiction of the man he’d seen. Remembered giving the description. Cruel eyes. Square jaw. Dark blond with a military buzz cut. Generic.

“Fitz told me he thought it could be the same man but he never got a solid look at his face. Yes, he gave a description, from a moment’s glance at over four hundred yards through binoculars, of someone who might have been the same man we saw in Nashville, but we have no real proof he’s the Pretender. We need to tie the crimes together with actual evidence, and with DNA, and the only way we’re going to do that is by capturing him.”

“Okay. I see your point. Tell me more about his earlier kills. I want all the gory little details.”

Taylor clicked to the next slide. “In Los Angeles, he copied the Santa Ana Killer from the mid-fifties, the one who dismembered the bodies of the women he killed and left them in the desert. In Denver, it was the LoDo, the Lower Denver Killer, who preyed on prostitutes. He strangled them and left them posed on street corners. In Minneapolis, Minnesota, he copied the Classifieds Killer of the 1970s. Do you remember him? Old guy, placed ads in the Star Tribune for temporary secretarial work. They’d answer the ads and he’d gut them.”

Sansom’s eyes shone. “Yes, I’m aware of that case.”

“Good. In New York, he became the Prospect Lake Killer, strangling his victims and dumping their bodies into Prospect Lake Park on Long Island.”