Blood Dreams by Kay Hooper Page A

out of bed and took a quick shower, unable to relax even after she was dried and dressed. She skipped her usual coffee for toast and weak tea, hoping to settle her jumpy stomach. It even worked.
    Until she unlocked and opened her front door.
    A dozen red roses that had been propped against the door fell over the threshold.
    She didn’t even have to bend to read the card nestled within the green tissue wrapping. There was no envelope, just a plain white card with two words written in a flowing hand.
    Hello, sweetheart.
    Maybe another woman would have been charmed by a secret admirer leaving flowers. Maybe another woman would have enjoyed a much brighter day with that thought in her mind.
    Maybe Marie would have. Except for that creepy walk home last night.
    And the necklace left inside her locked apartment.
    And the fact that the hair on the back of her neck was standing straight up once again.
    It was broad daylight, and Marie’s apartment was less than a dozen blocks from the sheriff’s department.
    She closed and locked the door, leaving the flowers outside. She got her pepper spray and her whistle, holding both in shaking hands.
    And then she called the sheriff.
     
    A ll we can do is work with the information we do have,” Marc reminded the group in the conference room. “We have crime-scene data, forensics reports, victim profiles. From Boston as well as here. Right?” He looked at Hollis with his brows raised.
    She nodded and gestured to a very thick accordion file folder on the conference table. “In there is every bit of information Bishop felt we needed concerning the investigation so far. It’s not all the case information, obviously; that would fill boxes. But in there is a complete background and profile of each of the Boston victims.
    “And his victim preferences are very important, we believe. In Boston, that was his only really consistent trait, and Bishop believes he won’t stray far from it, now or in the future. He always chose the same physical type of woman. Small, delicate, dark brown hair, brown eyes. Almost childlike.”
    Jordan frowned, but before he could comment, Hollis was adding, “We also have Bishop’s latest profile of our killer.”
    “Latest?” Paris asked.
    “He started revising the original as soon as we knew the next hunting ground would be so far from Boston. So different from Boston. Plus…well, one other thing I did get from Becky was that the killer had definitely escalated in his sheer brutality but in so doing took a pretty large leap as serial killers go, which is unusual. That alone required a revision of the profile.”
    Marc frowned. “A leap?”
    “In the speed and degree to which he escalated in violence. The twelfth victim, Annie LeMott, was savagely beaten, and she was stabbed multiple times—but her body was left more or less intact. All of the victims in Boston were.”
    “But not Becky,” Marc said. “And not Karen.”
    “Shit,” Jordan muttered. And when everyone looked at him, he added, “I guess we
are
sure Karen’s dead too?”
    “We’re sure there are at least two victims,” Marc confirmed. “And I’m willing to accept Hollis’s word that Becky is one of them, unless and until DNA results contradict her. Karen’s our only other missing person, Jordan.”
    “Yeah. Yeah, I know. I just really don’t want to have to be the one to tell Bob his wife’s dead.”
    “A friend?” Hollis asked.
    “Not a close one, though we went to school together.” He shrugged. “Small town.”
    “With the traditional small-town grapevine?” she wanted to know, shifting the subject. Maybe.
    It was Marc who said, “People around here tend to keep their business to themselves when it comes to outsiders, but that isn’t to say that they don’t know what’s going on around them and talk about it among themselves.”
    “But they’ll be slow to do anything like alert the media?”
    “That’s been the rule around here as long as I can remember. At