Pursuing Aries Read online

  “I knew that is why I liked you.” The short forensic technician walked in. Lida had a long white lab coat, and her black hair was pulled back into a ponytail. Today, she was wearing bright-pink glasses. She started with the Houston police department right out of college and worked her way up. She was the go-to technician and the one I preferred to deal with.

  I grabbed a pair of gloves from the supply closet before touching the box. “I like having you on my side. We aren’t sure what is in the box, but today is the day HIS strikes again, so we’re worried it might be something to do with the case.”

  Lida ran a Q-tip over the box before dropping it in a test tube. “No chemicals on the outside.”

  Miles frowned. “The mailroom ran it through the x-ray machine, and it’s not a bomb.”

  SA Carson leaned over. “Is someone going to open it?”

  I let out a sigh and pulled the knife from my utility belt. “Hopefully, it’s something Tammy sent me.” She had an Amazon addiction and would order the stupidest crap, including things for me, even though I told her to stop numerous times.

  Miles crossed his arms. “I hope you are right, but it would’ve been delivered by a normal UPS driver.”

  There was no going back. I slowly cut open the top of the box. When I flipped the lid back, my heartbeat increased as I looked down into the box.

  Lida scrunched her nose. “A box full of hair?”

  Hair I recognized. It wasn’t the pile of blond locks that caught my eye; it was the streak of pink mixed with it. Tammy had put a streak in a week ago.

  “Blond hair doesn’t get us any closer. Millions of women have blond hair. The only thing this tells us is that he has his next victim,” SA Carson grumbled, with a sour look on his face.

  “Two percent of women in the world are blond. It’s about one in every twenty women,” Lida said as she reached for a strand of hair.

  “I know who it is.” My mind was still running a mile a minute. How would I find her in time?

  After a long day yesterday, Tammy met me at a bar down the street where we had a couple drinks and talked about the case. HIS was taunting me with each kill, sending me clues, but not enough to get to the victim in time. This was the first clue—three hours later, he would send me something else. “That’s Tammy’s hair.”

  Assistant Chief Miles blanched.

  SA Carson swore under his breath. “What makes you think this is your partner?”

  “The pink strand. She had it done a week ago. Plus, she isn’t answering her phone. We’ve been partners for five years, and she has never missed a day of work.”

  They would need to remove the hair from the box, because the killer always left another clue. I knew without looking at the hair that it wouldn’t have a follicle. HIS shaved the heads of his victims. This wasn’t the first box of hair I’d gotten. However, this was the first one sent to the police station. One was left on my doorstep and another by my car.

  “You know we shouldn’t jump to conclusions. Something could’ve happened on her way into work, or maybe she overslept. I’m going to send a couple officers over to her house and see if they can find anything,” the chief grumbled as he typed a text out on his phone.

  This was serious. I glanced down at my watch. We only had seventy-two hours. “Lida go with them over to the house.”

  She looked down at the box. “I will head over after we finish looking in this box.”

  Next to the box, Lida laid out a sheet of plastic. She reached into the box and pulled out the bound lock of hair. At the bottom of the box was a timer set to seventy hours and thirty-six minutes. Fuck. Even had less time than I initially thought.

  Next to the timer was a note. “Tick Tock.”

  Assistant Chief Miles’s jaw clenched. “Lida, head out with the officers. Wait for the place to be cleared first and make sure you have an officer with you at all times.” Miles looked from Lida to me. “You know you are going to have to visit him.”

  “Not happening.” I had gone twenty-six years without stepping foot in his cell and I didn’t plan to start today. “If we need something from him, someone else can go.”

  SA Carson tapped the desk. “I second your chief’s decision. We have less than three days to find your partner. Your dad won’t talk to anyone but you. Over the years, people have tried and he refuses. Hell, the man’s been in solitary for years.”

  I took a deep breath. “Solitary in the psych ward. Last I heard, he gets books and anything else he asks for.” If I had a say, my father would’ve gotten the death penalty for his crimes. Not worshiped as the top serial killer of all times.

  Miles's voice turned gravelly. “I know we are asking a lot, but we have no leads as to who this might be. The FBI’s behavioral team is having a hard time coming up with a profile. Each kill is different. The only reason we know they are linked is because each victim disappears on the first of the month and the body turns up three days later.”

  This was the first time since joining the Houston police department that anyone had brought up my dad to me. I knew people talked about him when I wasn’t around. Hell, some actually spoke about the man to me, but they didn’t seem to realize he was my dad. After my father killed my mom and sister, the authorities couldn’t find my mom’s sister and I spent years in foster care until I could join the military. Going to college wasn’t an option back then. When I turned eighteen, I changed my last name, and joined the military for a fresh start. “How do we know for sure he will have any insight into the killer? Fredrick was locked away twenty-six years ago.”

  “Your dad was the top profiler, and he had the highest conviction rate,” SA Carson said, his eyes locked on the board of dead women, men, and teens.

  My father’s conviction rate was high, but every one of the suspects was always dead when the authorities found them. He never let them have their day in court. Fredrick also liked to keep a piece of each of his kills. I’d come home early one night from a sleepover to find my father with his gun in his hands, standing over my mom and sister. He tried to tell me it was an intruder, but I ran from the house. When the police arrived to ask questions, they believed him.

  It wasn’t until six months after their deaths that I’d found a door in his office that led to another. That was where I found all the evidence and called the cops. “I haven’t spoken to him since court. Do you guys not remember I’m the reason he is no longer on the streets?”

  “We don’t have any other clues, and the next one won’t come until tomorrow.” Miles took a sip of coffee, a grim look on his face. “You could run what we have by your dad.”

  Lida bagged up the evidence and placed it in sealed bags with the date and her signature on it. She would take the evidence to the lab and have her employees start looking at it.

  Miles reached out and grabbed Lida’s arm before she left the conference room. “Remember, you aren’t to be alone.”

  “Yes, sir,” she said. “I will have an officer take me once I get this down to the lab.”

  SA Carla Smith walked into the office with a travel mug. Smith is Carson’s partner and a behavior analyst with the FBI. “I can make a call to Fredrick’s warden and get us in.”

  Carson was sending his partner text updates while they were talking. I wasn’t so sure I was ready to go down the path of talking with my father.

  “I think I should head over to Tammy’s house and look around,” I said.

  Miles let out a sigh. “We have officers and our best forensics unit going over there. What we don’t have is access to your dad unless you go visit him.”

  “Fine.” I looked over at SA Smith. “Make the call.”

  She nodded. “I know this won’t be easy, but it’s the best plan we have so far. He was excellent at finding clues in things most people missed.” SA Smith walked out of the room.

  I walked over to the board and looked at the victims’ photos. “He used to be.” Most serial killers had a type. My father liked to kill people he knew had commi
tted a crime. Then he killed my mom and sister—I knew for sure they hadn’t deserved to be killed. He never told me or the court system why he killed them. To this day, the empty look in my mother’s eyes when she was lying on the floor still haunted me.

  “We wouldn’t ask you to talk to him if we had another choice. The FBI has run this case through our best, including new pattern-recognition software. We are out of options, and now he has one of our own.”

  She was right, but we needed him to make a mistake. “There’s a bank across the street from the bar Tammy and I went to last night. Can we pull up the video from the ATM? I remember seeing one over there before we left.”

  Miles nodded before sending a text. Ninety percent of our lives were caught on camera. I only hoped we would be able to get information from where she was taken. We had yet to figure out where any of the victims had been taken. Tammy had bragged about her deal on cameras a few months back though, saying how she planned to put little cameras all over her house.

  SA Smith walked back into the conference room. “He will meet with us today.” She let out a long sigh. “On one condition—you bring your brother.”

  “I don’t have a brother.”

  “He gave us a name. I have an FBI agent en route to the man’s house, and we’re flying him down today.”

  I sat down in the chair, reeling from the information. I have a brother? After my father was arrested, they tried to find my aunt on my mother’s side, but nobody could find her at the time. She was the only living relative I knew about.

  3

  Sasha

  I bit the inside of my cheek to stop the words I really wanted to yell at my boss. One of the interns had accessed the code for the project I’d worked on the week before and deleted my work. Instead of going to the IT department and having the backup done, he tried to make more changes.

  Now I was in a conference room with my boss, the intern, and a couple other new engineers. There was no reason for anyone to touch the programming after I’d left. Jared and I had agreed it was ready for simulation testing and that wasn’t supposed to happen for another week.

  “Why haven’t you called IT to restore the files?” At least I hadn’t yelled or said what I wanted to say. I might have hated my boss and thought he should be fired, but I would never give him the satisfaction of finding a way to fire me. I tip-toed the line a few times, but Jared counted on me to pick up the pieces way too often.

  “We don’t want to get IT involved.”

  “Really?” I had to cut my vacation short because he wanted to save his ass. At lunch today, Jared would find out I was back in the office and ask why. “You think I can recreate the code and make sure it’s right by next week? All we have to do is go to IT and have them restore the file.”

  “I’m not sure which files need restored and which need to stay. If we restore all the files I think I worked with, it might delete someone else’s work for the last week,” Mike, the intern, said. “Maybe if I show you what I did, we can figure out what needs to be restored. I wasn’t sure.”

  I wanted to reach across the table and wring his neck for being so dumb.

  The minute I’d seen Mr. Walker’s name on my phone that morning, I knew I should ignore it. My loyalty to the Black brothers was the only reason I was sitting in that conference room, and it looked like I would be working a few long nights.

  Mike moved the cursor on the big screen TV in the conference room and clicked the simulation. “This is what happens now. I don’t know why the main menu isn’t there any longer.”

  The main menu wasn’t the only thing missing, the opening credits were gone too. Hell, it looked like the program was in the beginning stages again. I took the mouse from him and opened the program director. Ninety percent of the code was gone. “I’m going to need to head down to IT and see if I can figure out what we can restore.”

  Mr. Walker went to open his mouth, and I held up my hand. “You’re about to say you don’t want me to tell Jared, but if I can’t get the code restored, I will need him. I’m not the only one who wrote the program. That was months worth of work.” I turned to the intern. “What I really want to know is how you had access to it. Your credentials shouldn’t have let you into the file.”

  “He gave me his credentials,” Mike said, pointing to my boss.

  “I’m the boss and don’t have to explain,” Mr. Walker replied.

  I closed my eyes and counted to ten. There was no point in arguing with him. “So you gave him access to my code and he messed it up. Now you want me to fix it?” I didn’t care what my boss thought; I was heading straight to Jared’s office after I met with IT.

  “I want you to do your job,” he shot back before standing and heading toward the door. “Jared wants to run a simulation on Friday. I will send you the changes he wants to be added.”

  Then it made sense. Jared had asked for a change, and instead of doing it, Mr. Walker handed it off to the intern. “Okay, Mike, let’s go talk with the IT department.”

  Mike hadn’t been with NSS very long. He was one of Jared’s latest recruits out of MIT, and once Jared heard what had happened, Mike would be looking for another job. Rules were put in place for the interns. Their main job was to assist the engineers with what they needed. Most of the time, that involved running and getting us food. We never gave them access to working files until we knew their capabilities.

  “Can’t you meet with them?”

  I wanted to reach across the table and strangle the man. “You want to go sit back in your office while I clean up your mess?”

  He shrugged. “It’s not like you need help to find the IT department. Once you get the code back, can you show me how to make Jared’s changes?” I had sat in on Mike’s interview and afterwards. Jared and I talked about the preppy kid who looked like he was off the front of a GQ cover. His professors swore by his work. In the back of my head, I worried he coasted by with his parents’ money. It looked like my prediction was true.

  No words could express how pissed I was. “Sure, you will be the first one I call.”

  Without waiting for his reply, I grabbed my water and walked toward the door, ignoring the idiot at the table. The trip down to the IT floor was fast. I swiped my card and walked into the large room with the lights dimmed.

  Robert, the network administrator, sat behind a desk with three screens and a light-up keyboard. He started with NSS around the same time I did. He was the only IT person in the room. Usually, there were two other men, but I didn’t know them very well.

  I walked over to his desk. “Hey, Robert, how are things going in the IT world?” I asked as I played with his mini robot on his desk.

  Robert stopped typing and pushed his black-framed glasses up.

  “Busy, like always. Everyone thinks we sit around playing games all day. Hell, someday, I wish I got a lunch break, but you didn’t come down here to hear me complain. What can I do for you?”

  “Well, while I was on vacation, Mr. Walker gave his access to the intern, and he deleted the files Jared and I worked on. What are the chances you can restore the folders back to when I went on vacation? But we also need to not overwrite the files other people worked on in the last few days.”

  The door to the room opened, and Jared walked in dressed in his black suit, his hair trimmed short. His signature scowl was across his face. Robert swore under his breath. Most employees were scared of Jared, but I just ignored his grumpy attitude. It was part of who he was. Maybe one day, he would see the brighter things in life instead of the bad.

  “You want to explain why you are working?” Jared grumbled. “I clearly remember telling you to take two weeks off, because we’re going to be doing late nights in a week.”

  “You really think I wanted to stop watching my marathon of Game of Thrones and come in and deal with you?”

  Robert gasped. “He’s the boss.”

  “And an asshat.” I sighed. “Mr. Walker called me back into work this morning.”


  Jared crossed his arms over his chest. “Why did he call you in?”

  I wound the robot’s timer and placed it back on Robert’s desk before giving Jared my attention. “The changes you asked him to make. He handed them over to an intern, who deleted half the code and overwrote some other parts of the program.”

  Underneath Jared’s hard exterior, he cared about employees. He wasn’t the type of boss to delegate his work. There were times I had to tell Jared to go home when we were in the middle of trying to figure out what was wrong with a simulation. Often I wondered if he even went home at night.

  “I knew I should’ve fired him weeks ago.” Jared glared at Robert. “Can you get the code back?”

  “Yes, restoring the file to last week will be easy. The problem is picking the ones people worked on since then and restoring them,” Robert explained. “The simplest would be to go back to the other day.”

  “Let’s do that. The only changes are ones I requested, and I would rather go back to when I knew it worked.” Jared pinched the bridge of his nose. “Lock the file down to only me and Sasha. I don’t want anyone else in it.”

  “Since he restored the files, can I go back on vacation?” I was half-joking. It wasn’t like I had anything pressing to do in my one-bedroom apartment except spend quality time with my dog and TV. When vacation started, I thought about reorganizing my closet until I sat down and played the first episode of Game of Thrones, then a few days went by and I couldn’t stop watching the show.

  My apartment looked worse than when I worked. I hadn’t picked up in a few days and kept ordering Chinese takeout each night instead of cooking. From the look in Jared’s eyes, he wasn’t going to let me go home early. He would want me to stay and work to add the features he’d wanted added.

  Within seconds, Robert had restored the file. If they would’ve come to him days ago, we wouldn’t have lost much. Instead, they tried to hide it, and now Jared knew anyway.

  “You should be good to go. If you need anything else restored, you can shoot me an email instead of coming down.” Robert moved the robot on his desk back to the original spot. It seemed like the nerd didn’t like people playing with his toys.