The Night Serpent. Anna Leonard
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about him, despite his practiced charm, despite his intensity, that almost made Lily forget her original discomfort. Almost. He cared about what he was doing. That made him likable. The fact that he was likable made her even more cautious. Charming men were men with agendas and ambition. Men with agendas and ambition were not to be trusted. It wasn’t any one bad experience that had drummed that into her, although it was proved, more often than not. No, that knowledge, that wariness, was born in her, it sometimes seemed.
This wasn’t a date, she reminded herself, wondering at his pleased smile at her choices. It was, as he said, a business meeting. Over food. So what if he had an agenda?
Everyone wanted something. Everyone had a secret. Even her.
“So why is the FBI investigating this?” she asked again, taking a bread stick for herself.
This time, unlike earlier that day, he answered her.
“The FBI normally gets called in for certain things. Kidnappings, bank robberies, crimes that cross state lines or involve national issues…This…isn’t really one of them.” He cracked a crooked smile. “Except it falls in that gray area of ‘might be of interest.’Courtesy of the twenty-first century and modern paranoia, just about every investigated crime gets entered into a national database. Mostly they just sit there, unless there’s something in them that triggers an alert somewhere else. In my case, I look for tags that indicate animal-abuse cases.”
He waved the remains of his bread stick at her, as though lecturing. It should have been annoying, but wasn’t, mainly because his intensity was so real, and focused on a thing, not her. Whatever it was that he did, it meant a great deal to him. She admired that.
“Animal abuse is—it’s one of the things we’re taught to look for in the background of suspects. I’m working on a particular theory that, if I can prove it, could lead us to a way to identify and stop potential killers. So, if a police department reports a notable case of animal abuse it pings on my radar. If there are certain elements to the case, I follow up.”
“Certain elements?” The waiter came with her glass of wine and his soda. Lily nodded her thanks, but kept her attention on Patrick.
“A level of ferocity, or indications of repetition. Something that suggests escalation.”
“That whoever it is, is getting ready to move on to something bigger,” she guessed. “Like humans.”
“Exactly. Abuse, especially of cats, is considered one of the ‘terrible triad,’of indicators that’s often found in the background of a serial killer. That, and arson, are historically two of the major warning signs of serial killers before they turn to human targets. It’s almost as though they’re trying to vent themselves on weaker beings, or—by some theories—are working up their nerve to go to the next level. Nobody really knows for certain. It’s an inexact science.”
Lily was horrified, but fascinated. Everyone knew about serial killers, of course—even if you never watched the nightly news, you had to have heard of Silence of the Lambs. But she had never realized that there was a pattern, or a science, to it. Or that cats were so very much a target.
“And you try to find them before then. But how do you know that they’re going to go to people next?”
“I don’t. Most of the time they don’t, either. But if I can stop them before that line is crossed, that’s all that matters. Law enforcement isn’t all about punishment. It’s about being a deterrent, too.”
She nodded. It made sense. “So this one incident brought you out here?”
He hesitated, taking a sip of his soda before responding. “No. Not the one. This goes no further than this table, Lily.” He paused until she nodded her agreement. “Three years ago in the next town, there was a couple of scattered cases—cats being cut open and left, like some kind of sacrifice. By itself, that’s nothing, unfortunately. Wannabe Satanists, or just one kid with a cruel streak, or even a budding coroner who wanted to start small. They wouldn’t even have been entered in the system, except there was a small media fuss.
“And that was nothing, until now. The reason they called me is that here have been two incidents prior to this in the past two months. All involving cats. All young males. None of them quite so…formalized as today’s offering. Whoever this guy is, assuming it’s the same guy from three years ago—he’s working out a pattern that satisfied him. If it was him three years ago…he’s on an evolving scale, an escalating one. And that’s a major danger sign.”
“So you think…” She shuddered involuntarily. “You think we have a baby serial killer right here in Newfield?”
She’d had nightmares about that; not often, maybe three or four times, but unlike most of her dreams they tended to stay with her even after she woke: of women dying, one after another, in terribly bloody ways. She hated those dreams, all the more so for never being able to figure out what caused them or how to prevent them.
“No.” He shook his head, almost as though he regretted that lack of serial killerage. “The indicators I’ve seen so far suggest that he hasn’t crossed that line. I’m not sure that’s the direction he’s going in, either. His pattern is…Different. Odd. Intriguing.”
Lily cocked her head and studied him. “You find strange things intriguing, Agent Patrick.”
He accepted the jab with self-aware good humor. “Nature of the job, Ms. Malkin.”
The conversation was interrupted by the delivery of their meals, and the resulting pause to sort things out.
“No,” he said again once they started eating. “I don’t think he’s a serial killer. The specifics line up—cats, violence, repetition. That’s what pinged on my radar. But seeing it—the feel of it is all wrong.”
“Intriguing?”
“To a person with my background, yes. Serial killers have a variety of reasons for acting the way they do, by their standards. The files—” and he made a gesture with his fork to the file at his side “—the first two cases, and now this one, they don’t show the kind of…passion normal to a serial killer’s buildup. This was…”
“Restrained.”
He looked at her with surprised respect. “Yeah.”
Lily didn’t know why she had said that, but when she thought about it, it was true. The violence had been contained, the cats carefully tended, the scene almost designed, like a stage set…
Going back there made her insides queasy again, so she changed the subject. “So what’s the third thing? You said there was a—terrible triad? You said two, so what’s the third?”
“Bed-wetting.”
Lily stared at him. “Bed-wetting.”
“It shows up often enough in established serial killers that it’s considered an indicator, yes.”
She wasn’t going to laugh. It wasn’t funny. “But not a crime.”
“No, not a crime. We don’t investigate anyone on the basis of soiled linens.”
“I’m not laughing,” she told him.
“Nobody ever does,” he assured her, his dark eyes creased around the edges with humor. “Joking is frowned on in the FBI.”
Lily ate a few bites of her veal, letting the moment pass intentionally, and then looked up at her companion. “All right. You said you wanted to ask me something about the case. About the cats?”
He took a bite of his own ziti, chewed and swallowed before responding. Good table manners, she noted. Another point in his favor, were she keeping any sort of list. Which she wasn’t.
“Yeah. About the cattery that you said he had. You work in a shelter—it looks like you have a full house there?”
“Always. Females, unless they’re