So Close the Hand of Death by J. T. Ellison Read Free Book Online Page B

the 1980s, then sent a letter to the police telling them his reign of terror was finished. He was true to his word for over twenty years. But then, the previous Christmas, the long-dormant killer resurfaced. Out of the blue four girls were viciously murdered in the Snow White style. Taylor’s team suspected a copycat, and they’d been partially correct. That was the first time the Pretender had come across their radar screens. But he’d existed long before he touched Taylor’s world.
    She popped the flash drive into Sansom’s laptop computer; Yeager and Polakis got behind to watch.
    Taylor narrated, trying to ignore the chill creeping up her spine. The last time she’d heard this information, FBI special agent and profiler Charlotte Douglas had been speaking. Charlotte had used the information as a weapon to make Taylor look bad. Her actions had backfired.
    Taylor didn’t think she’d ever forget arriving at that crime scene, the shock of seeing Charlotte’s fire-red hair commingled with her life’s blood, the setting sun echoing the bloody sheets.
    Taylor forwarded the slides, covering the original killings of the Pretender, sharing the details as they knew them. By the time he’d hit Nashville, he had eighteen confirmed kills under his belt already. He’d committed another four under the tutelage of the Snow White Killer, then he’d gone off the rails. He killed three more girls before he was shot and ran. Adding Charlotte to the mix took his total up to twenty-six homicides.
    Taylor heard an echo from the past, Charlotte’s voice ringing through her head in triumph. These four murders in Nashville have been directly connected to the other eighteen. You don’t just have a copycat on your hands, you have an obscenely prolific serial killer with victims in five states. The CODIS results are definitive. His pattern is undeniable. It is quite likely that he will move on to another state, kill more young women, if you don’t stop him here in Nashville.
    Despite her proselytizing, Charlotte Douglas had been right on the money. They hadn’t stopped him. And now look where they were.
    Taylor played with the remote in her hand. “As you can see, Susie McDonald makes twenty-seven confirmed kills. If the evidence matches the forensics we already have, of course.”
    “I thought you were certain this was tied to the Pretender. You have an eyewitness, after all, even if he says he can’t remember anything,” Sansom said.
    Taylor ignored that last comment. “You know as well as I do that we have nothing yet to definitively proveit was the Pretender. We need the DNA results, the forensics, to confirm it for sure.”
    Sansom opened a folder, laid out an Identi-Kit sketch. “I was under the impression that you’d seen him before. We have this picture we’re working from, and your sergeant thinks it was the same man.”
    Taylor glanced at the picture, at the electronic depiction of the man he’d seen. Remembered giving the description. Cruel eyes. Square jaw. Dark blond with a military buzz cut . Generic.
    “Fitz told me he thought it could be the same man but he never got a solid look at his face. Yes, he gave a description, from a moment’s glance at over four hundred yards through binoculars, of someone who might have been the same man we saw in Nashville, but we have no real proof he’s the Pretender. We need to tie the crimes together with actual evidence, and with DNA, and the only way we’re going to do that is by capturing him.”
    “Okay. I see your point. Tell me more about his earlier kills. I want all the gory little details.”
    Taylor clicked to the next slide. “In Los Angeles, he copied the Santa Ana Killer from the mid-fifties, the one who dismembered the bodies of the women he killed and left them in the desert. In Denver, it was the LoDo, the Lower Denver Killer, who preyed on prostitutes. He strangled them and left them posed on street corners. In Minneapolis, Minnesota, he copied the