She didn't notice the coffee until it was cold and she'd gone through at least three hundred pages of reports going back eight years—just to be safe. The lines were starting to blur together and she pinched her nose as she stopped scrolling to write yet another note. Reese had found reports on missing women from seventeen counties, some thirty of them between the ages of twenty-five to thirty-two, all save one were still missing. Correlating dates and places took up most of her time, most of her thought processes, too, but she'd narrowed down the missing persons list to fifteen within the height/weight and hair/eye color ratio. According to the pictures she'd seen at the Langly's house, Annette had been blue eyed. It wasn't much to go on, but she let her gut lead her. An addendum to one woman's file had said that she turned up at a local hospital two years ago without her eyes, and had nearly bled to death as a result. Reese marked it for further investigation, pulled away from the keyboard and scribbled down the woman's name a number before putting in a request for her medical files.
Glancing down at her coffee, she realized that she'd forgotten it yet again and moved into the break room to reheat it, letting herself steep in the information she'd uncovered. Officers came and went around her, the noise flooding in from the bullpen as she watched the twenty-second time tick down. She stared through it and nearly missed the call that buzzed her phone at her belt.
"Reese," she said absently, taking a sip of her coffee.
"You still looking through those reports?" Tidwell, not Crews. And she'd been hoping it was Crews with some decent news. Reese made a face and contemplated her mug for a long moment. The only thing she had was an eyeless woman who might or might not have been a victim.
"Nope." She swallowed the coffee down and let it pull her rising dread down with it. "But I got some promising leads. Found a woman missing her eyes. A missing persons case turned into an assault charge, but they never found the perp. Was gonna go see if I could find her and see if she had anything for us."
"That at least sounds like something." Tidwell sounded like he was in his car and she heard a woman's voice in the background—crisp and decidedly not American. "FBI Agent Mancini landed fifteen minutes ago, we're headed back in from LAX. Crews?"
She scrolled through a few text messages, scanning them for anything positive, but they were mostly dead ends. One neighbor had heard a cat in a trash bin and another swore that he saw a man in a hoodie, but couldn't give them anything more concrete. Not even age or height.
"He's still out there looking," she said quietly. "I should be out there, too."
"Get him back to the office," Tidwell said. "Agent Mancini has something for you both." He hung up abruptly and Reese stared at her phone, shook her head, and dialed Crews. As usual, it took more than a few rings before he answered. She could hear the sound of machinery close by with the sharp chatter of a jackhammer pounding down on concrete.
"Reese? Hold on. I'm going to—get in—" The ambient nose level dropped considerably as she heard his car door slam. "You found something?"
"Two years ago, a woman was found on the East side of L.A., no eyes. She nearly bled to death. I'm pretty sure we need to track her down. Tidwell's got the Fed and is on his way back here." She took a sip of coffee before sifting through a preliminary report that she'd found on her desk. "M.E. Still isn't finished with Annette's autopsy, but the physical examination showed needle marks and bruising on her arms. They were covered up with foundation and talc powder. Makes me wonder if this guy worked the mortuary scene." She skimmed over the rest of the report, but there wasn't much there. "It looks like the tox screen is going to take awhile. She's still pretty frozen."
"You need me to come back in?" he asked, but she knew he was already driving back.
"Yep. We're supposed to meet with Mancini ASAP," Reese murmured, before printing out the reports she still wanted to go over. "It sounds like she's got files for us, too." At this point, with what little they had from the extremely clean scene, she wasn't sure she'd be entirely displeased as long as the woman gave them something to help. Reese almost hung up on him when another detective handed her a page.
"You still there?"
"Mm. CSU report."
"They found something."
"Not sure what good it's going to do. The only foreign fiber they found was horse hair. White horse hair." She leaned against her desk and sat, frowning at the paper.
"I'm coming up the stairs," Crews said and then hung up.
Horse hair?
Reese glanced out the window at the bright blue sky and wondered what the hell kind of case had landed in their laps. No real witnesses, no real evidence, and a dead woman with no eyes. When the elevator doors opened, she expected to see Crews, but the shock of red hair wasn't his. Kateri Mancini was a small woman, dressed in a black suit with a bright turquoise blouse, her hair was clipped short, emphasizing her narrow features and her pale blue eyes. She held her briefcase like it contained a treasury of secrets and her knuckles were white.
Their eyes met.
"Detective Reese," she said, her voice crisp and surprisingly Irish. "I've been told your partner is on his way, then?"
"He's on his way up," Reese said, her eyebrows arching. "Knowing him, he took the stairs."
"Good." Her blue eyes traveled to Tidwell's. "I can commandeer a conference room? We're going to need it."
"Sure," Tidwell said, nodding as he shifted his weight apprehensively. "You need anything from the tech department?" Mancini shook her head and her hand tightened around the handle of her briefcase again. "Okay, then. After you."
The woman paused as the stairwell door eased open, her eyes flicking to wander over Crews as he breezed in. Reese thought she was going to say something, but she turned away to follow Tidwell, leaving her with Crews. He pursed his lips for a moment and she arched her eyebrows before shrugging. She didn't know what the hell any of this was about, either.
Behind the closed conference room doors, the busy sounds of the world outside were muted. Far below them, the city went about its business in the brilliant light of day, but somewhere in the ordinary world with its ordinary faces was a murderer. He'd bought a paper, coffee, had lunch, walked across a street, gone grocery shopping, and blended in with everyone. The problem with highly intelligent criminals was the fact that they knew how to be quiet, calm, and attract no attention to themselves. This one was different—she could almost taste that in the air.
Kateri Mancini opened up her briefcase against the long, polished table without a word and began to pull case files from it. Each was lined up precisely next to another, perfectly spaced, until she had all thirteen of the out. Her eyes flicked between Crews and Reese as she leaned into the table, her expression earnest.
"I'm not taking your case from you," she said. "In fact, my SAC didn't even want me to come down here. I had to convince him that what I had was pertinent to your investigation. Your search sent up red flags for me as I've been trying to find similar elements for the last eight years. They crop up here and there every few years or so. Sometimes inexpertly frozen, sometimes they've lost an eye before he's killed them. Sometimes, they're killed in different ways, but—" Mancini half shrugged. "It's him. I know it's him. And I'm here to help you put him where he belongs."
Reese felt whatever defensiveness she had drop immediately.
"This will be your collar," Mancini added. "I'm...I don't even need the credit. They tried to close the case on me several times, but I haven't let them. There's too many elements that line up, too many coincidences. He's a man of details, Detectives, a man of compulsion. A man who needs to leave his mark."
She began to pull photos from each folder. The sun glinted off the glossy paper and all of them, Tidwell included, leaned forward. Each of the thirteen photos had a tiny wound shaped like the infinity symbol at the base of the skull. Reese studied it and realized it wasn't a wound, it was a brand.
She dug through the preliminary examination file the M.E.'s office had sent her way and flipped to the section on identifying marks. Pulling it out, she laid the photo down next to the others, her expression grim.
Nestled at the base of Annette Langly's skull was a perfect replica of the infinity symbol.