Color Blind (13 page)

This time, Woody faced him, looked in his eyes. “I . . . yes. I’m sure I did. This is a fireworks shop, and he came in to buy. What is this about?” The man blinked some more, then said, “How can I help?”

Thadius’s imagination had gone wild in the aftermath of Emily’s murder, and he had a clear picture of what her body might’ve looked like. It flashed in, charred beyond recognition, all except her face. Her striped hair.

“You can’t . . . Jesus. Did he say what he planned to do with them?”

Now sweat stuck Thadius’s shirt to his chest. It had seemed so obvious. All of it. But right now Woody wanted to help him, even with a gun to his face.

Woody smoothed his palm over his mouth as he thought. “No. I don’t think he did. If he did, I don’t remember it at all. Sir, is there someone I can call for you?”

Thadius kept the gun on Woody and backed away from him. “Don’t move.”

This couldn’t be happening. It wasn’t right.
Emily.

“I’m sorry for this,” Thadius whispered.

J
enna sat at the kitchen table typing on her laptop, Hank beside her. Try as she might to ignore her father’s disapproving eye from where he sat on the floor with Ayana and her farm puzzle, Jenna kept getting distracted.

“Shouldn’t she be off that thing by now?” Hank asked.

Jenna swiveled her chair so she couldn’t see Vern anymore, who was muttering something angry under his breath. “She’s still a baby, Hank.”

“Pacifiers can cause tooth problems, can’t they? I tend to think the longer you wait to take it away, the more attached she’ll become.”

“And I tend to think she’ll stop using it when she’s ready,” Jenna replied. Jenna modified the search criteria, hit the return key on the keyboard. “Bingo.”

Hank leaned in to look at her screen, which now bore Thadius Grogan’s self-made website about his daughter’s murder. “Look no further for how Isaac Keaton knew what he did about Grogan.”

“It certainly tells a thing or two about Thadius’s mental state anyway.”

Jenna’s cursor naturally fell onto the tab marked “To Emily’s Killer.”

Unlike the rest of the site’s soft pastels, this page’s stark white background contrasted with plain black lettering. The note described all of Emily’s activities, friends, charitable causes. It went on to tell the murderer he would be punished, labeled him everything from impotent to unintelligent.

“Assumes a lot,” Hank said. “Takes for granted the killer didn’t have anyone who loved him, berates him for not knowing what it is to have family. Presumes he’s pathetic even.”

Jenna shook away the orchid color that flashed in at Hank’s words. The shade corresponded in her color vocabulary to elitism and a mind-set of superiority, but she couldn’t let Hank’s ideas influence her. The color had popped up at his words and didn’t relate to her own gut feelings. It was something she’d learned to distinguish the hard way over the years.

“Says much more about Thadius’s own healing process than anything else,” Jenna agreed.
Or lack thereof.

Stop profiling Grogan so much. It’s what Keaton wants you to do.

Jenna clicked away from the letter—the obvious draw—and hit a tab of friends’ and family’s tributes to Emily Grogan. “Emily was bubbly” and “Emily was loved” graced the page, but nothing that might help figure out where Isaac Keaton originally found Thadius Grogan.

She out-clicked on the “Articles” tab. “If I were scouting for a volatile male with buttons to push, where would I go?”

“Would you like me to Google that for you?” Hank answered.

Jenna skimmed a piece about Thadius and Narelle visiting Emily’s grave on the anniversary of her death not too long before Narelle killed herself. The website lined up a virtual tour of
where
to meet Grogan, but someone would’ve had to have his name—or Emily’s—to search him out on the Web.

“I guess you
can
Google ‘vigilante justice,’” she said.

Her fingers pecked the words into her search bar. Lots of definitions popped up, several articles about various episodes of vigilantism over the years. A parent killing a perp who molested his child, a woman opening fire on her rapist. The article about the rapist’s death had a few quotes from other crime victims.

“Have Irv get me every article he can find where Grogan’s name is mentioned
not
in conjunction with the details of
Emily’s
murder case,” Jenna said. “Not specifically anyway. Anything commenting on other victims’ rights issues, stuff like that.”

“Got it.” Hank opened his texts. “He says he just sent you a listing of all of the violent crime support groups Grogan has known involvement with. The main one is the Florida Families of Victims of Violent Crimes.”

Jenna logged in to her e-mail. Some of the victims would sympathize with Thadius’s mission, maybe even have struck out on their own to find the person who hurt their loved one.

Like a brick to the face, it hit her: any one of them might’ve helped Thadius get revenge
.

She’d been around Charley, whose support group was all about forgiving the perpetrators who’d hurt their families. For a time, it hadn’t occurred to Jenna that not all survivors tried to heal. Now she knew she’d been too close to be objective. Just because Charley didn’t believe in the death penalty didn’t mean everyone who went to a group like his felt that way.

“Hank, let’s say you’re Grogan. You try to bribe Detective Hardeman for information and fail, so you’re seeking out someone who understands your plight. Someone in your support group maybe. What do they tell you?”

Hank shrugged. “Where to buy a gun?”

“Or what PI to hire.” Jenna laughed out loud even though it wasn’t funny at all. It was the sort of thing her mother would do.

“Howie Dumas.” Jenna and Hank spoke the words simultaneously.

“How did Grogan not pick up on dumb ass?” Hank asked.

“Eh, people miss a lot of things when they lose someone. It’s not exactly the clearest your head’s ever been,” Jenna answered. “Thadius wasn’t looking for Keaton. He was looking for whoever killed Emily. Keaton snuck in, playing with him.”
Playing with us.

Jenna clapped the laptop shut. “Did you ever get that list of visitors from the Sumpter Building?”

She hadn’t realized she was clutching the computer so tight until Hank’s hand entered her vision, where it folded over hers. His thumb stroked the hook-shaped birthmark on her wrist. The same place his hand had fallen the first time they’d kissed.

Behind the inferno that had been, ironically, a firehouse years and years ago, Jenna sat wincing in the back of the ambulance while the paramedic stitched her chin.

“Could be worse,” Hank said as he approached from a few feet away, still wearing his FBI-issued Kevlar vest over his white dress shirt. The raid on the hideout of the dangerous serial arsonist they’d been tracking had almost gone to plan. Except, of course, for that little moment when that bastard Toby Van Shore, who’d been hiding under the basement steps, had clotheslined Jenna on her way down to secure the room. She’d hit the concrete hard, heard her chin crack against the cold floor. Rookie mistake.

Luckily, Hank had been her backup, and he’d put a bullet straight into Toby’s skull. And just like that, her first case with the BAU had ended. Her first encounter with a madman who wasn’t a relation, done.

And she’d lived to tell the tale.

Hank had glanced around, checking that none of the others were nearby. Then his hand had folded across hers, his thumb caressing her birthmark.

“Don’t be too hard on yourself,” he’d said. “Happens to the best of us.”

She shook her head. “No, it doesn’t. That’s why the best of you are still breathing.”

He’d squeezed her hand as the medic finished up, told them he’d want to watch her another five minutes to make sure she didn’t have a reaction to the pain medication he’d given her. Hank promised to notify him of any change, and the medic had seen what every other profiler in their unit hadn’t—either by chance or by choice—and left them alone together.

“You think they know?” Jenna asked softly as Hank boosted himself into the back of the ambulance to sit beside her.

“If they don’t, they’re not the team I thought they were,” he said.

But it was a moot point. No one else had followed Hank to check on Jenna. They all knew.

“I think they’re exactly the team you thought they were. After all, the number one rule on this team is not to profile another team member,” she said, staring down at their hands clasped together, the light and the dark perfectly contrasting.

She looked up, expecting to see him looking at their hands, too, but instead, she’d met his eyes. Dark brown with a ring of hazel splayed around each pupil. If a teammate had been shrinking her right now, they’d probably note her shallower breaths, the way her own pupils dilated as she took his in.

“I didn’t say anything about kissing a team member, right?” he asked.

Before she could say anything, his mouth had met hers, and she’d leaned into his kiss. First case over, something else insane begun. Check.

Now Hank waved his hand in front of her face. “Earth to Jenna? Come in Jenna.”

She shook away the memory. “Sorry. Must just be tired. What were we saying?”

“I was telling you nobody out of the ordinary was on the visitors’ list at the Sumpter Building, Jenna. Lawyer, consulting state psychiatrist. That’s it.”

Figured.

“All right. Let’s pay the Florida Families of Victims of Violent Crimes an office visit, take Richards’s lineup with us. We’d cut out a lot of guesswork if we just ask if they’ve seen this guy.”

Jenna crossed into the living room, kissed Ayana atop her head.

“Off again so soon?” Vern sulked.

“Duty calls.”

“Bye-bye, Ay!” Hank said, waving goofily to his daughter from the door.

Jenna’s chest clenched painfully as an image emerged from somewhere deep in her memory of that same goofy face hovering above Ayana’s crib when they’d all lived in the apartment together, before they’d decided to admit it was time for both of them to walk away while they still could, mostly unscathed. The first time she’d ever heard her own daughter’s laugh had been as that same face peek-a-booed from behind a soft, knit afghan Hank had held.

Some things never change.

Now Ayana giggled and grinned from behind her pacifier. She pointed a chubby finger at Hank.

“Geen!” the baby squeaked.

Hank shot a look at Jenna. “Gein? Like Ed?”

Jenna rolled her eyes. He
really
wasn’t around her enough, was he? “You work with too many serial killers. Green, Hank. She’s pointing at your tie.”

He glanced down. “Oh. Right.”

Jenna walked out the door and closed it behind her, started toward the stairwell. “You should know I’m not teaching Ayana about Gein until she’s at
least
four.”

“Five and a half,” Hank countered. “And incidentally,
you
might be
reading
too many serial killers. The real Gein doesn’t meet the traditional definition of a serial. Less than three murders attributed to him. Hannibal the Cannibal, he ain’t.”

“
Proven.
Less than three
proven.
Claudia didn’t fit the traditional definition of a black widow. She was only
charged
with one murder and two attempted. That doesn’t make her less of a serial. What do you make of that, by the way?”

“Make of what?”

“No visitors to the Sumpter Building other than the lawyer and the state psych.”

Jenna felt more than heard Hank’s steps slow behind her.
Here we go again
.

“He’s bluffing, Jenna. That’s what I make of it.”

She descended the stairs at a steady clip. This wasn’t the time.

“Don’t underestimate her, Hank.”

Hank sped up again behind her. “Don’t you mean
him
, Jenna? Don’t underestimate
him?
”

Her feet whirled on their own, her body controlling her. “What is that supposed to mean, Ellis?”

“Jenna, this is about Isaac Keaton, not Claudia. Even if it was about Claudia, she’s
still
considered legally insane. Black widows are psychopaths. Claudia is manipulative, but she’s very likely schizophrenic. They’ve said it over and ov—”

“And
I’ve
said over and over that Claudia has everyone snowed.”

“The best psychiatrists the state—the
FBI
—can conjure up? She’s spinning every single assessment at her competency hearings?”

Jenna glared at him but didn’t answer. He wouldn’t hear her if she did, because Claudia didn’t fit the textbook. She didn’t kill for financial gain or have a history of sexual abuse, never made a violent move toward an animal. After all this time, Hank still didn’t understand how Jenna could know everything she did about psychopathy and still reject the repetitive findings of the court systems. Jenna ignoring the conventions baffled him.