She opened the doors of her office and strode over to the wall where she’d had a custom whiteboard installed. Floor to ceiling. She’d stuck up the crime scene photos. Written dates, names, personal information of the victims. On her large desk she’d spread out the actual police and autopsy reports.

Catherine was old school. While nearly everything she had was available in the FBI database, she liked having a physical copy. Things looked different in print; she could move pages around, analyze them singularly or as a group, turn and twist photos.

From the very beginning, when Catherine got this case three years ago, the random nature of the victims seemed incongruous with the pattern of his kills. Killers rarely deviated from a victim profile, yet the Triple Killer had—and that was a stumbling block. It made this case more complicated, but more intriguing. Catherine was certain that there was a pattern to his victims—she just needed to figure it out.

From her previous analysis, she was certain of only two facts:

First, the serial killer was a male between the ages of twenty-five and forty. Second, he was highly intelligent, though likely held a job beneath his capabilities; his job probably used his intelligence but didn’t require teamwork. He could interact with people without leaving any real impression, which suggested he was articulate and pleasant enough looking but didn’t stand out. Neither too fat nor too thin, too short nor too tall.

Catherine disliked the word normal because there was no true normal. To her, normal simply meant a person who flew under the radar, who didn’t register as good or bad, kind or cruel, attractive or unattractive.

What stood out to her was that the Triple Killer was meticulous in his execution, yet unnecessarily brutal. He didn’t so much torture his victims as most were unconscious when he killed them. He didn’t sexually assault them. Yet the way he sliced them open, then sliced them across—it was methodical, ritualistic. All the autopsies concluded that in each case, the first vertical cut would have been fatal. Why did he use a knife? Was there a level of comfort to him, of control? Did he want to feel their blood on his skin, smell their death, watch the life drain from their eyes? Or was the knife out of habit? A means to an end? Nothing more than a tool?

She didn’t think so. If only a tool, he would have changed his approach, choosing more effective knives or using any weapon at his disposal. The same type of knife was used in each murder, suggesting it was an important symbol to the killer and he would be hard-pressed to deviate. Yet he never used the same knife twice—at least that was her opinion, based on the fact that two of the knives had been recovered near the crime scenes. She suspected he’d disposed of every murder weapon. It wasn’t the actual knife that he was attached to. It was the size, shape or brand. A reminder of something—or someone.