Strings of Fate (Mistresses of Fate) (9 page)

“Oh, it helped us enormously,” Helmer chimed in. “You’ve been hacked, Ms. Pascal.”

“Hacked?”

“Yes, hacked.”

Chris focused on Sandeep. “You found evidence that I’ve been hacked?”

“Yes, miss.” He bent slightly to pat her shoulder. “I’m afraid so.”

“I don’t see how that’s possible. I have firewalls, antivirus, sixteen-digit passphrases that I change weekly.”

“I know. Your security is very good, but you were hacked, Ms. Pascal. The unsub, he is watching everything you do, even helping you sometimes. He is very clever.”

“Helping me.” Chris put a hand to her chest, as Tavey’s grandmother used to, but Chris didn’t have any pearls to clutch.

“He sends you tips sometimes, like the one that led you to the little boy being held by his cousin in Shreveport.”

“He sent me that?” Chris whispered.

“He seems to like you,” Agent Helmer muttered darkly. “Actually, strike that. He seems to worship you.”

Chris flexed her fingers a little. “Why do you say that?”

Agent Midaugh made a calm-down gesture. “We’re going to take all this information back to the analysts in Rome, put together a display board with all the identities you’ve created for the past year, and match them with the cases we’ve got on this unsub. We’d really like it if you came in tomorrow and talked to our analysts about the background to each identity, how these identities are requested, things like that. Maybe bring a list of identities you’ve created. Would you be able to do that for us, Ms. Pascal?”

Chris nodded, standing. “Yeah. I have a class at ten, but I can be there by twelve.”

“Don’t you think your class can wait?” Helmer sounded impatient with her, like she was being obtuse.

She wanted to explain to Captain Jackass that, in light of this information that she’d been hacked, the yoga studio could possibly end up being her only source of income, but a thought occurred to Christina, an unwelcome one, but she’d learned to trust her intuition. “Just women?”

“What?” Helmer shoved his hands in his suit pockets.

Chris waved her hands in the air like someone calling for silence, and then she began to pace in a small circle. “You said I’ve been hacked, but I don’t just create online profiles of men for women; I also create women for men. Have any men been killed the same way as your other victims?”

Helmer looked intrigued in spite of himself; his hands had come out of his pockets, and his fingers twitched as if he were clicking a mouse.

“Check it,” Christina ordered. “And I’ll be there as soon as I can tomorrow.”

Agent Helmer looked taken aback, but Midaugh nodded. “I think you might be on to something. We’ll call it in to the rest of the team; see what they can dig up.” He nodded to Helmer, who pulled out his cell phone, looking disgruntled, and walked away to make the call.

Midaugh turned back to her. “Thank you, Ms. Pascal. We appreciate all your cooperation.”

Chris squirmed uncomfortably; she wasn’t a big fan of thanks.

“All right; they’re on it.” Helmer shoved his phone back into the holder on his belt.

“Good.” Agent Midaugh held out his hand for her to shake. His massive palms engulfed hers; he even patted her hand in a fatherly fashion before going to gather up his things from her bedroom.

Mr. Patel was next, shaking her hand. “I think what you do is very noble, Ms. Pascal. I’m sorry this has happened to you.”

Chris felt tears sting her eyes, taken aback by the rare praise of her work, but she ignored them and smiled at the man. He had very gentle brown eyes.

“Thank you.”

“All your computers are still running. We’re going to be monitoring them. I created a remote connection to one of our secure servers.”

“Okay, I won’t mess with anything.” Great. So Agent Helmer would know everything she did and said. Perfect.

Mr. Patel left first, since he’d brought a different car. Apparently they were all heading back to the resident FBI station in Rome.

Agent Midaugh brought her the coffee cups from the bedroom.

“Just set them down in the kitchen. Thanks.”

Agent Helmer came over to her; his face said he meant business. “I know it will be uncomfortable for you, Ms. Pascal, but we’d like you to continue with business as usual.”

“Business as usual?” Christina frowned. “You mean you want me to continue working on online profiles? How can I do that? He’s using them to kill people.”

“Odds are he knows we’re on to him, but if he doesn’t he’ll be easier to track. We’ll know the name he’s using, who he’s targeting, and we’ll be able to keep them safe.”

Chris shook her head. “You think you’ll be able to keep them safe, but you can’t make any promises.”

“We’ll do everything we can. We’ve also asked the sheriff’s department to send someone to watch over you.”

Fate was small enough that it didn’t have a police department; instead the county sheriff had deputies assigned to patrol the town. They even had a small office in the circle, but it was only open on weekdays.

“Great,” Chris muttered sarcastically. “The whole town will know I’m besties with a serial killer. Awesome.”

Agent Helmer ignored her and picked up his jacket, shoving first one arm through and then the other. Chris had a brief flash of déjà vu, like she’d seen him dressing in extreme annoyance before.

When he was finished, he addressed her formally, as if he hadn’t just spent the last several hours in her home, probing into her life and work. “Ms. Pascal, thank you for your assistance.”

Chris folded her arms over her chest, but managed a polite nod.

They were standing there silently, not shaking hands, when Agent Midaugh came back in the room.

“We’ll see you in the morning.” He turned to Agent Helmer. “Ready?”

“Yeah.”

The two men headed to her door while she stayed in the doorway to her kitchen with her arms folded over her chest.

Agent Helmer looked back, a frown gathering between his eyes. “Will you be all right here alone, Ms. Pascal?”

Chris was a little surprised that he had asked; he certainly didn’t seem to want to. After all, what was he going to do if she said no?

She looked at his face, again seeing the handsome features beneath his unwarranted aggression, suddenly wishing he would stay. Overwhelmed once again by the pressing need to have someone with her tonight.

“I’ll be fine,” she prevaricated. After all, it wasn’t a lie, exactly;
fine
was a relative term. What she intended to be was drunk . . . very drunk, if she could help it . . . and her good friend Jack Daniel’s and her other good friend Coke would undoubtedly be happy to help her with that.

12

RYAN MADE SURE
that the door to the lobby of the building shut and locked behind him on the way out. They’d parked behind the building, next to what they knew was Ms. Pascal’s Subaru. Ryan took the passenger seat; Midaugh tended to get carsick if he didn’t drive.

“What’s on your mind?” Midaugh asked about twenty minutes into the drive back to Rome. Ryan realized he’d been silent, turning over the case, the girl, the strangeness of the unsub’s messages in his mind.

“I can’t get the way the unsub described her out of my head.”

“As his Creator?”

“Yes. BAU believes that he’s one of the rare ones that is actually suffering from some kind of psychosis. It’s likely he can’t interact normally with others without people noticing or assuming that he’s different. So instead of meeting people on his own and charming them, he relies on her to create connections for him.”

“Why does that worry you so much?”

Ryan wasn’t sure he could explain. The last serial murder case he’d worked had involved someone suffering from a psychosis as well. Joy Cantrip had believed that the girls she’d kidnapped were her daughters, believed it and made the girls believe it, too, after being held in captivity for over a year. But once they’d been made to believe, Joy had started finding reasons why the girls should be punished—they hadn’t behaved a certain way or hadn’t defended her properly in front of others. She’d locked them in a closet and starved them to death when they’d pushed her to her breaking point.

The thought of this unsub, with his insane talk of strings, had brought it back, the feeling that he was dealing with something so beyond the scope of reason that the killer would be impossible to predict, impossible to defend against. Kind of the way he felt about Ms. Pascal. One evening, and he couldn’t get her out of his head. She unnerved him with her constant motion, her gold eyes, her obsessiveness, her brazen disregard for rules, her lies. His ex had been a liar as well, just the more traditional kind—the kind that slept with other men. He didn’t want to be attracted to Ms. Pascal, but there was something about her. Something compelling.

And he certainly didn’t want anything to happen to her, especially given her connection to the case. Putting a deputy outside her building just didn’t seem like enough to ensure her safety, not when the killer had shown himself adept at weaseling his way into peoples’ lives with technology.

“I just don’t like this, leaving her without any kind of protection—or leaving her alone to cause trouble, for that matter.”

“What kind of trouble do you think she can cause?”

“A woman like that,” Ryan snorted, “a woman that makes a habit of spying on everyone she can, all the time, to find the missing. She seems like the type to take things personally. And someone taking what she created and using it to hurt people seems to have hit her pretty hard.”

“Wouldn’t it bother you?”

Ryan had never created anything that he could think of, other than helping his grandmother with her quilts now and then, which he’d never admitted to anyone, but what Ms. Pascal did wasn’t just creative, it was deceptive. She was helping people lie. He hated it, but he could see how the idea of the killer taking advantage of her skills would bother her. What she would do about it, though, that was the question.

“I guess.”

“You going to get any sleep tonight?”

“Are you?”

Midaugh shrugged his thick shoulders. “I’m sure the wife will appreciate it if I try.”

“I’m sure she would,” Ryan agreed, not sure if he was glad or sad that no one was waiting at home for him. Usually he didn’t think about it either way. When he’d been engaged to Cara, every day was a battle over something: money, time, other women, even though she’d been the one cheating. He’d felt like home was a minefield that he had to navigate and work through; even hunting down violent criminals was a welcome distraction from the ever-intensifying drama.

He hadn’t been lonely since she’d left; he’d missed her, but he hadn’t been lonely. He’d been suffering from relationship PTSD and the silence had been comforting, but suddenly the thought of coming home to someone sounded nice, even if she worried, even if she didn’t understand the stress and long hours.

“I think I’ll go home and work out. Come in early, see what I can put together from the results of the subpoena we had on Ms. Pascal’s Internet records.”

Midaugh nodded. “I’ll be in tomorrow morning. We have a meeting with the team at nine a.m.”

“I’ll be there,” Ryan confirmed, already thinking about what needed to be done on the case. If he thought it would help, he’d head directly back to the office, but he knew better. Sometimes it helped to sleep, or work out, or just do something else for a while. It gave the brain a chance to relax and make connections, sort through problems. He had the feeling that Ms. Pascal had yet to learn that valuable lesson.

“Maybe you should take Ms. Pascal to talk to Ms. Arrowdale tomorrow.”

“Why?”

“So you can keep an eye on her. You said it yourself: she’s not someone who willingly sits by.”

“There’s work to be done—”

“And you’ll be doing it. You’ve been working two weeks straight. Go with her to talk to that lead, find out where they got their information, and in the meantime, keep an eye on Ms. Pascal.”

It didn’t sound like a bad idea. Somewhere in the back of Ryan’s mind, there was the thought that if the unsub was obsessed with her, he was likely to be drawn to her, and if Ryan was close by, the psycho would be easier to catch before he could kill anyone else.

“All right,” he agreed, doing his best to hide his unwilling excitement at the idea.

Midaugh chuckled anyway, and Ryan knew he hadn’t done that good a job hiding anything.

13