Double Cross

Chapter 89

THERE IS A SAD LITTLE DEATH of hope and optimism that happens every time something tragic and unforeseen like this goes down. It was as if Kitz’s murder opened up a little more room for hatred in my heart. Was that true? All I could hope for now was that we would get the killer-or killers-and stop all this somehow.

So I did the one positive thing I could do: I kept working the case, harder than ever before. For starters, Bree, Sampson, and I stayed at the house on Nineteenth Street late into the night. We sucked every last drop of evidence out of the crime scene, but truthfully there wasn’t much to go on. The place was clean. It turned out that the homeowners were away for the month. None of the neighbors had seen anything unusual. No one had spotted DCAK before or after he murdered Brian Kitzmiller.

I got home around three thirty the next morning and grabbed a few hours of sleep, then pushed myself to get up and start all over again. There were patients to see first thing, but I used my early-morning run to the office to go over everything in my head one more time. Then again. And again.

What was I missing? He was evolving-that much was clear. Just about every successful serial killer does; it’s only a matter of how. Certainly his methods were improving, and growing more complex. Everything about yesterday was a little bigger-the news coverage, the derring-do, and the amount of live-television time he’d gotten.

It was about control, wasn’t it? That’s what was changing most dramatically here. It crystallized for me as I sprinted across the National Mall, my lungs starting to burn. With each murder, DCAK got a little more control, a little more of an edge on us. Which meant-ironically-that time wasn’t on our side.

I was still thinking of the killer as he, but that might not be true. A man and a woman were probably working together, leaving a trail of clues for us to follow.