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"Messy," Beth said dryly as the ME pulled the sheet down revealing a young woman's body. Her torso and limbs were covered with a myriad of cuts far too precisely placed to be accidental, and there was deep bruising on her wrists and ankles.

Sam nodded, fighting down the whisper in the back of his mind telling him that this was their fault. His fault. That he should have worked harder, worked smarter, caught the killer after the last victim before the monster had stumbled upon this poor girl. Intellectually he knew that there was nothing else that they could have done, that he and his team had exhausted every avenue of pursuit available to them, but knowing that fact and accepting it were two very different things. Especially when you were looking at a victim who couldn't be more then eighteen. "All pre-mortem?" he asked the medical examiner, forcing those thoughts to the back of his mind. Given the previous kills he knew what the answer would be, but habit had him confirming the results.

"The injuries to the extremities, yes, but with the exception of the killing blow the rest of cuts were made after she was already dead. Between two and six hours afterwards, by my estimate."

Sam twisted back towards her at the same time that Beth's head jerked up. That was not the answer that he'd been expecting.

"You're sure?" Beth asked.

It was the same question that was on the tip of Sam's tongue, and he waited for the ME's response. With the previous three victims, the unsub had been careful—sickeningly careful—to keep the victims alive during the torture. The killing blow to each had only been delivered when there had been so much blood loss that the victims wouldn't have survived anyway.

"Very," she said with a nod, holding out a closed folder. "This is my full report. The later incisions to the torso are almost completely bloodless."

Sam waved it over to Beth, as he leaned over to check what the ME was saying for himself. Not that he disbelieved her, but that was such a radical shift in behavior on the part of their unsub…. "An accident?" he suggested after a moment. "The unsub was just getting started on part two and the knife went too deep?"

"He accidentally drove six inches of steel directly through a woman's heart?" Beth asked, looking up. "That's a hell of a slip. Especially since the nonfatal wounds on all of the other victims were concentrated on the abdomen and extremities, not the chest."

"A quick kill isn't his pattern, though." He tapped a hand against the table lightly. "She got free of the restraints, somehow, after the first session? Tried to fight?"

"I doubt she'd have been able to put up much of a fight, but it might have been enough to push him over the edge," Beth said after a minute, returning her attention the victim. "And the previous kills could easily have set the compulsion deep enough that he had to finish the pattern even after she was already gone."

She didn't sound like she entirely believed it, but then, neither did he. The ugly bruising on her wrists and ankles screamed 'restraint' to anyone who knew anything about injuries, and there was no indication that she'd managed to slip them. That didn't mean that he had a better explanation, though. At least not yet.

"That's your copy," the ME said as Beth started to hand the report back. "And I've sent a copy to the local precinct as—" A ringing from the other room cut her off, and she turned. "—as well. I should get that. Do you mind?"

"That's fine, I think we're good for now," Sam said. "But would it be all right if we spent a few more minutes here?"

"Of course. Let me know if there's anything else that I can do for you."

Sam nodded and then circled the body again, looking for anything he'd missed on his first examination. There was something about those cuts on the abdomen…. "Beth, you read the other reports, right?"

"Yes."

She did him the courtesy of leaving the 'obviously' unspoken, even if it was pretty clear in her tone. "How do the cuts that were pre-mortem compare?"

She flipped forward a few pages in the report. "Shallow." Her eyes narrowed. "Too shallow. I take it back, if this is all he did, she'd absolutely have been able to put up a fight. She'd have been in an incredible amount of pain, but even in combination these cuts aren't deep enough to cause enough blood loss to disable her, and there's no way dehydration or starvation would have set in that fast." A pause. "That assumes she managed to get out of the restraints, though, and there's no evidence of that."

"More indication to the contrary given the lack of defensive wounds," Sam agreed. If nothing else, fingernails that long should never have survived a fight intact. "So, again, why the change? Maybe it was personal?"

"You mean something specific that made him pick her?" Beth stared at the woman on the table for a minute. "But height, weight, race, age, even hair color, they're all consistent with the other victims."

"The other victims and a good portion of the rest of the population, but maybe there was some kind of interaction between them."

"As in they ran into each other at the grocery store or something like that?"

He nodded. "Maybe literally. In a confrontation, her similarity to the other victims would work against her."

"Still, ritual is ritual, especially at this level," Beth said with a shake of her head. "Even if there was an interaction that made him focus on her way ahead of schedule, the cuts on the last three victims were way too precise for him to discard the whole torture sequence for the sake of a temper tantrum."

"He didn't discard it. You said it yourself; the compulsion could have been what drove him to finish the job even after she was dead."

"But even the depth of the cuts that were pre-mortem don't mesh with his previous kills," she argued. "The locations might have been identical, but he pretty solidly broke pattern here."

It was a fair point, and Sam frowned. There had to be something different about this girl—something that went deeper than just having made their unsub angry—but he wasn't seeing it yet. He stared at the body for a minute longer and then reached out to pull the sheet back up. "Let's get back to base. We need her timeline and whatever background we can get, and then we can start running some comparisons."


"Lot of suspicious looks, not a lot of talking," Prophet said with a shake of his head. "About the same as our last visit. Got a first name, at least—Nina, and from a couple people so I'd say it's as legit as we're going to get without a fingerprint match—but no last, and as far as when she was grabbed all we could find was a shopkeeper who might have chased her and another woman off three days ago." Prophet seemed to share Beth's habit of working while perched, shifting a little further onto the table as he scanned through his notes. "Mike Thomas from Dave's Mini-Mart on the corner of Fifth and Green. A 'yeah, that looks like the one' on her when I showed him the photo but the best he could do on the friend was 'tallish and kind of red haired.'"

"Tallish and kind of red haired?" Mick was in a chair, but it was currently balanced precariously on its back legs and Beth really hoped he wasn't about to crack his skull open on the cement floor of the building as he leaned back further to look at Prophet.

"That's what the man said. The only security camera in the store hasn't worked in ten years, of course, so no help there, but if all else fails we can set him up with a sketch artist and cross our fingers."

"Well, if he's right and it was her, three days means barely two days between the time she was grabbed and when her body was found," Gina said. Unlike the two men—or Beth, for that matter—she was seated properly at the center table, but she didn't show any hesitation in speaking up which raised Beth's estimation of her a few notches. "For some reason he cut his timetable by more than half, and that's on top of the shortening of time between attacks. I mean, we all knew it was coming, but it shouldn't have been now."

"Maybe something set him off," Mick said, letting his chair fall forward again with a thump. "Her appearance is the same as the other victims; maybe they had some kind of confrontation that triggered his compulsion."

"That's what I was thinking, but the timeline isn't all that's changed," Sam said, finally turning his attention away from the chalkboard on the other side of the room.

His focus might have been more understandable if there had been anything written on the chalkboard, but as it stood Beth just hoped he wasn't beating himself up too bad over this latest victim. At least he'd clearly been following along with the conversation.

"It wasn't in the initial report," Sam continued, "but from what the ME gave us about half of the cuts on the latest victim were post-mortem."

Prophet's eyes narrowed slightly. "I could go with the confrontation escalating his timeline, but what the hell would cause that kind of change in MO?"

"Maybe he was interrupted." Gina suggested. "The timeline is wrong enough that if he did grab her spur-of-the-moment he wouldn't have been prepared to keep her for days like he did the others."

"And even if he was interrupted, the whole ritual he's developed could have driven him to stash her and then go back and finish the rest of the pattern later," Mick said with a nod.

An interruption was a possibility that Beth hadn't considered, and it was a more than fair explanation for the abrupt change in the kill portion of the timeline, but she shook her head anyway. "That still doesn't account for him altering the depth of the initial cuts. Even the ones that were pre-mortem were less than half as deep as any of the cuts on the other victims." She didn't like suggesting the idea of a copycat, especially in a case like this where the injuries were so damn precise that someone would practically have had to be working off an autopsy report to get it right, but that was where her suspicions were starting to turn.

For a moment Mick, Gina, and Prophet looked startled, and she couldn't really blame them—aside from the fact that they were clearly accustomed to working as a foursome, she'd been sitting on the table across from Prophet's and keeping her mouth shut as she watched them interact—but Sam spoke before any of them could.

"Unless they were just that."

"What?"

"Well, we've got between five and seven days with each of the previous victims between the time they disappeared and when they were killed and dumped, right? And we know that he tortures his victims. What if part of his ritual involves drawing out that torture?"

""We know he draws it out," Gina said with a frown. "He starts with the extremities and moves inwards; we've seen that since the first victim."

"We know he starts at the extremities and moves inwards, but each wound might not be from just one cut." Prophet said slowly. "You get a sharp enough knife and that kind of thing would be easy for the ME to miss, especially since we know he's keeping them restrained."

"And between the starvation and the severe dehydration they wouldn't have much fight left after the first day or two anyway," Beth added after a moment of thought. If he'd reopened and deepened each cut multiple times…it made a sick kind of sense. She pulled her pack up onto the table beside her and dug out her computer. There had been pictures from the original autopsies included in the files that Sam had sent her, but when she'd originally looked at them she'd been more interested in comparing patterns than examining the individual cuts. And she'd almost bet that the ME's had been doing the same, using the tissue at the opening of each cut to time it rather than examining the internal tissue as well.

"Did we get anything new from the crime scene?" Sam asked as she turned it on.

"Just another dump site," Mick said with a shake of his head. "Body stripped and dumped in an alley, and once again no restraints found despite the bruise patterns. The CSI team collected what they could, but I'm not holding my breath."

"It was within a three block radius of the other dump sites, too," Gina added, "so if he was interrupted, it obviously didn't affect his disposal pattern. And, of course, nobody saw anything, heard anything, or just generally knows anything."

"Square one, then, except for the change in timeline," Sam said with a nod. "We're going to have to expand our search and try and find this friend, even if it is a long shot."