Waking Hours by Lis Wiehl Read Free Book Online Page A

victim’s stomach, and she asked Stuart to zoom in. It appeared to be a symbol, something like the letter G, and then its mirrored image, abutting at the vertical ascenders:
    The four of them stared at it a moment.
    “Anybody?” Casey said. “We found this on the girl’s stomach, written in blood. How long will it take serology to turn this around?”
    “Depends on the backlog,” Irene said. “The FBI office is in Federal Plaza, Manhattan. If they can’t do it, we send it to Quantico.”
    “So how long?” he asked again.
    “A week,” Irene said. “Maybe less.”
    “How many people do we think were involved?” Stuart asked.
    “The crime scene guys tell me between four and ten,” Casey said. “Based on multiple partial footprints in the dirt where the grass was worn away. Whoever it was cleaned up after themselves. No cigarette butts or beer bottles or swords with the killer’s fingerprints and DNA on the handle. We should be so lucky.”
    “Swords don’t have handles,” Stuart said. “They have grips, quillons, counterguards, or ricassos. I fenced in college.”
    “What are your thoughts, Dani?” Irene asked. “How would between four and ten people do something like this?”
    Dani paused. John Foley would normally be the one to provide analysis, but Foley wasn’t here. How she answered the question could determine the course her career would take. No pressure.
    “Well,” she said, “I’d like to think there aren’t ten people in the entire country who could do something like this. And if there are, I doubt they’d ever be in one place at the same time.”
    “Four to ten,” Casey reminded her.
    “Even four. I wouldn’t look for four psychopaths, or ten. I’d look for one leader and nine followers. One person with some kind of power over the others. Whether that’s charisma or fear or mind control is hard to say, but I think the kind of person who could actually do something like this is fairly rare.”
    “No offense, Harris,” Casey said, “but when you’ve had as many years in this job as I have, you see everything. Including guys who’ve been baked in a pizza oven.”
    Now Dani felt the hairs rising on the back of her neck. She saw Stuart and Irene exchange a glance.
    “Detective Casey,” she said, keeping her tone measured and in control, “during my internship in Africa with Doctors Without Borders, I worked with child soldiers who’d been forced or psychologically coerced into committing atrocities far worse than anything you could possibly have experienced. My job was to help put their shattered psyches back together, but to do that, they needed to talk to me about what they’d done. With all due respect, don’t tell me what I’ve seen in my twenty-nine years.”
    The room was silent.
    To Dani’s surprise, Detective Casey looked embarrassed.
    “I apologize for my thoughtless comment, Dr. Harris,” he said. “I was 100 percent out of line. I hope you can forgive me.”
    Dani was impressed. He understood that when an apology was in order, one didn’t say, “I’m sorry, but . . .”
    “I can do that,” she said. “And I do appreciate your sense of humor, Detective, but I think it’s better if we can all work as a team.”
    Casey gave her a nod and gestured for her to continue.
    “I was saying that it’s very difficult for a normal human being to take responsibility for this kind of behavior—to initiate it. It’s not so hard to say, ‘I was just following orders,’ or ‘So-and-so made me do it, and I was afraid he’d kill me if I didn’t.’”
    “You seem certain the killer is male?” Irene said.
    “ Certain isn’t the word I’d use,” Dani said, “but in order to do something like this to another human being, you have to depersonalize the other. Most of us have the capacity for empathy, but it’s not necessarily something we’re born with. A child has to learn it. It’s pretty well established that girls can identify and understand emotions