Double Vision

by Colby Marshall

  “Sounds good to me,” Saleda answered.

  Jenna scanned the crowded room, looking for the littlest witness. She’d have asked Daly about her, only technically, this wasn’t the FBI’s case yet, and Jenna didn’t want the locals homing in on the girl if it wasn’t necessary. She knew how she’d feel if it was Ayana in this room and there weren’t any parents here to look out for her.

  She wove through the crowd of people, and finally she spotted the pint-sized brunette sitting in a corner, arms wrapped around her knees. She wasn’t alone.

  The man crouched across from her looked to be in his late fifties. He gestured with his age-spotted hands as he spoke, the wisps of his tawny hair thicker at the sides of his oval-shaped head than on top.

  As Jenna approached, she could hear what he was saying to the little girl.

  “And what happened after you hid behind the meat bin?”

  She folded her lips, appearing deep in thought. “I talked to the man on the nine-one-one call. I told him the gunshots had stopped. I crawled out to see if the shooter guy was gone. To check on G-Ma.”

  The kid’s composure made her sound about thirty. Totally calm. Poised even.

  “Was he gone?” the man in plainclothes across from Molly asked.

  Who is this guy?

  “Excuse me,” Jenna said, inserting herself into the conversation. “Could I have a word?”

  As he turned to look at her, Jenna realized that not only was the guy about her dad’s age, but about his height, too.

  He glanced back at Molly. “Back in a jiff,” he said, winking. He stood and straightened the tan jacket over his black mock turtleneck. When they were a few steps away from the child, he cleared his throat. “May I ask—”

  “Dr. Jenna Ramey, BAU,” Jenna said.

  “Ah. Dr. Ramey. It’s a pleasure,” he said. “Gabriel Dodd.”

  Jenna flinched. Too bad she and Saleda hadn’t stuck together. No need for Saleda to waste time looking for him anymore, but no way Jenna was about to leave him with this kid without her for another minute. He’d already broken protocol by skipping the team briefing. How did she know he wouldn’t compromise a child witness, too?

  “S.A. Dodd. Nice to know you. And who’s your friend?”

  Dodd smiled a warm, grandfatherly smile, and a smattering of contours like dents of wood grain branched from his eyes. “You know who she is, or you wouldn’t have been so keen on finding her. Remember, Doc, we’re on the same team.”

  All I know is she’s the kid Yancy talked to on the phone.

  “Kid made a nine-one-one call is my only lead, actually,” Jenna said. “What do you know about her?”

  He shook his head. “Well, now I know that her grandmother was actually one of the victims, one Rita Keegan, and for a kid so young who just lost a grandparent in front of her eyes, she’s calm and composed. Not as surprising to me as it might be to some, I guess. I’ve found some kids deal with death better than most adults just because they aren’t all taught to fear it. But at first I only came over because she is a kid, and kids are different. Kids are honest, notice things some people don’t. She has a unique point of view.”

  Is that why Yancy thought I should find this kid? Surely there’s more to it than that.

  “Right. Anything good so far?”

  Dodd shrugged. “Haven’t had time to ask much. Join me if you like.”

  With that, he turned back to his interview, squatted next to Molly.

  If you can’t beat ’em, join ’em.

  Jenna sat down cross-legged across from Molly, next to S.A. Dodd.

  “Did you notice anything about how the man with the gun looked, Molly?” Jenna asked. It would be nice to be able to ask clarifying questions like whether he was tall or short or fat, but unfortunately, those were considered leading questions. With a child, it was the kind of thing that would get anything Molly said thrown out of court in a heartbeat, if they ever found the guy.

  The dark-haired little girl nodded. “Yes. He had on a mask. But do you need to know more about what he looked like when I saw him or more about what he was doing before that?”

  Ominous. “Is there something you want to tell us about what you noticed?”

  Now Molly looked at the ceiling like she was trying to figure out a really hard math problem. “I know how many steps he took from when I started to count. Eight, like on the fortune-teller ball my friend Jana has. He tapped, too.”

  “Tapped?” Dodd echoed.

  She bobbed her head. “Yes. He tapped his gun with his hand.”

  Jenna squinted, searched the girl’s eyes. This kid was sharp. Observant. No wonder Yancy had thought she ought to talk to her. “How so, Molly?”

  Molly brought her hand to her knee. She slapped it three times.

  Jenna felt her eyebrows lift. “When did you notice that?”

  “Just once. When I saw him coming toward the aisle where I was.”

  “Can you do that for me again?” Consistency was key here. So important.

  Tap, tap, tap.

  Again, it was three.

  Green burst forth, the color Jenna always associated with the number three. Three taps. A thought she couldn’t fully identify tickled at her mind.

  “Oh, thank God!”

  Jenna whirled around to face the direction from where the voice had come, but the man was already to Molly, scooping her up and hugging her to him. He held her face hard to his chest, closed his eyes as he bowed his head toward her.

  “Sorry to interrupt,” Saleda said, laying a hand on Jenna’s shoulder. “Dr. Jenna Ramey, this is Liam Tyler. Miss Molly’s stepdad.”

  Jenna blanked her face to keep from tearing up at the man’s obvious relief over seeing Molly in one piece. Hank would’ve done the same with Ayana had the situation arisen. As much as Yancy loved A, and as great as he was with her, she’d wondered so many times if a man who wasn’t Ayana’s real father could be there for her, love her as much as a dad now that Hank was gone. Watching Liam Tyler overcome with emotion at finding Molly tugged her heartstrings. Maybe it was possible.

  Jenna stretched out her hand. “Nice to meet you. We were just chatting with Molly a bit about what she saw today.”

  Liam Tyler’s eyes went wide, seemingly at the thought of Molly having seen something so gruesome, but then he pulled back from Molly to look at her face. He smiled wide. “And are you being helpful?” he asked Molly.

  Thank ya, Jesus. Not one of those parents who plants thoughts in the kid’s head by freaking out over the shooting. Makes things a lot easier.

  “Of course,” the precocious little girl said, sighing heavily as though it were the silliest question in the world. “I told them the number of steps the bad man took, the number of times he tapped. I was about to tell them about what time it was, but I didn’t have a chan—”

  Liam looked away from Molly and toward S.A. Dodd. “I’m so sorry. She does this sometimes. We’re working on it, but it’s unfortunately still kind of a preoccupation.”

  Jenna cocked her head. “Pardon me? What is it you’re working on?”

  Liam put Molly down and straightened her coat as he looked over her head at Jenna. “The numbers thing. She’ll tell you everything you want to know about every number she counts, but I doubt it’ll help you—”

  “Oh, no,” Jenna cut in quickly. Better to interrupt him and seem rude than give him the chance to plant thoughts in Molly’s mind that there was any sort of information she should hold back because it wouldn’t be helpful. Parents always meant well, but they never did understand that even the slightest cues given to kids could mean the difference between answers and a missing puzzle piece. She looked at Molly, who was exasperatedly trying to wiggle away from her stepdad’s attempts to tidy her up, and smiled. “The numbers are super helpful, Molly. As is anything you remember. What time was
it?”

  Molly looked up at her and grinned, clearly proud of herself. “Three forty-five. I remember it because it lined up. Three-four-five.”

  You’d have remembered it if it hadn’t. Jenna could practically see the wheels spinning in Molly’s head, latching numbers onto events, people, words. She wasn’t so different from Jenna at all.

  “That was when I looked at my watch, but I’m not sure what time it was when the popping first started,” Molly said. As she did, she glanced up toward Liam Tyler.

  Subtly seeking parent’s approval. Check. This interview would serve them better if they got Molly to a place where they could question her without the parent there to offer even the most well-meant nods of encouragement.

  Jenna squatted in front of her. “We’ll probably have some more questions for you later, but in the meantime, you tell Mom or Stepdad if you think of anything else that might be important, okay?”

  Molly nodded in earnest. “I will think about it hard.”

  Jenna didn’t doubt it.

  “Can I take her home now?” Liam Tyler asked, holding Molly’s hand. He wore a desperate frown, an expression as worn as his nerves must’ve been.

  Saleda smiled. “Sure. Here’s my card. Please call if anything comes up. We’ll be in touch, probably arrange another interview down at the station within the next day or two.”

  Liam nodded. “Thank you.”

  As they walked away from Molly and her stepfather, Jenna nodded toward S.A. Dodd. “Saleda, this is S.A. Dodd.”

  Saleda didn’t break stride, but Jenna could feel her tense beside her. “Nice to meet you, Special Agent. Tell me, is it standard practice for you to arrive first at your team’s crime scene? Are you just incredibly prompt, or is there some sort of early-bird prize the rest of us don’t know about?”

  Dodd chuckled. “More that I was in the neighborhood.”

  Saleda stopped walking. “Well, from now on, understand we attend briefings as a team and report in as such, even if you are Mr. Rogers.”

  Ouch.

  “Duly noted,” Dodd replied, not a hint of animosity in his tone.

  You damn sure took that better than I would’ve.

  “What have we learned?” Dodd asked.

  I also wouldn’t overstep my bounds right this second, either.

  Saleda’s eyes narrowed, but she faced forward and started walking again. “Not much, considering most of the witnesses are senile, confused, and traumatized.”

  “The workers?” Jenna asked.

  “Most didn’t see a thing. They either didn’t have sight lines, or they heard shots and ducked under counters for protection, scared shitless. What about the kid?” Saleda asked.

  Tapping. “She mentioned a few things. She did actually see the guy, but no description, really.”

  “Could she work with a sketch artist?” Saleda asked.

  “Doubtful. She didn’t notice enough of those kinds of details.” Tapping. Three taps. What is it about that?

  “Kid’s bright, though. She noticed more than most people around her,” Dodd chimed in.

  “Yeah, I definitely think we’ll want to talk to her again,” Jenna mumbled. She made a mental note to jot down some ideas later, think about how she might be able to relate looks to numbers when she interviewed Molly again.

  “Local cops are setting up roadblocks with a sixty-mile radius. He couldn’t have gotten much farther than that, but unfortunately we have virtually nothing to go on. No clue whether he left in a vehicle, on foot, or anything in between. He could’ve ridden a goddamned Clydesdale horse for all we know,” Saleda said.

  “We should also check with local psychiatric hospitals for any recently released inpatients. This thing reeks of someone with voices in their head telling them Governor Holman was about to let aliens rule Virginia,” Dodd said.

  Jenna caught herself nodding. She wasn’t sure about the governor and the aliens, but from the moment she’d walked in, the lack of training in the shooter combined with the obvious planning of the event had brought the color blue to her mind. She associated the particular royal shade with a variety of things, but in this case, her gut said whatever its other implications might be, it indicated submission. She usually associated reds with power, blues with submission. One of her most high-profile cases last year had been a classic example, one in which two shooters came together, one red and one blue in her mind—the dominant and the submissive, respectively. In this single-shooter situation though, she had a feeling the submissive blue meant the perpetrator was submitting to some urge he couldn’t control. Mental illness, be it schizophrenia or not, was a likely explanation for such a compulsion. True psychopaths, unlike the kind the media portrayed, were scarily sane, and usually displayed a great deal of control over their actions. The problem was they didn’t have consciences, so they just didn’t care about right or wrong.

  Jenna’s phone vibrated in her pocket. She reached for it reflexively, her heart leaping into her throat. Every time that phone rang, the worst possibilities flashed in. She could practically hear Claudia’s voice on the other line, taunting that she had gotten Ayana somehow. With Ayana at home, away from her after everything that had happened last year, Jenna would just as soon turn herself in as the grocery store shooter than not answer that phone.

  “Sorry, have to take this,” she said with no further explanation. She’d already told Saleda one of her conditions for returning to the team would be that she would have her phone on her at all times for this very reason. Saleda hadn’t had enough better options to argue.

  When she was a few steps away from Saleda and Dodd, Jenna answered the phone. It wasn’t Claudia, nor was it her brother or her dad telling her there was any kind of problem with Ayana.

  It was Gerald Fitz, her ex’s attorney.

  “Dr. Ramey, I’m so sorry to bother you, but I need to have you come down to sign a few papers in the morning so I can file them,” he said.

  Not more of this. As if the horror of Hank being murdered wasn’t enough, she’d found out in the days following his death that he’d named her executor of his will. She’d also learned that when a cop takes out enough life insurance to cover his daughter’s entire future in case of what, compared to other professions, could be thought of as a very likely job-related incident, family members he hadn’t spoken to in years would somehow assume his will contained equally as much to take care of his loved ones. Even though in reality the only assets he’d had to his name to leave were the fixer-upper he’d bought as a foreclosure and a plot of land near his childhood home he’d inherited when his dad passed. But the insurance money made those long-lost relatives come out of the woodwork, sniffing around and subsequently finding out that the plot of land Daddy Dearest had left him was worth a great deal more than they’d have ever known or cared about otherwise. They’d claim it was rightfully theirs, and unlike the insurance money, the will left more room to be contested. After all, Hank named Ayana alone on his insurance policies. And while he’d named her in his will, too, that will hadn’t listed her until a year after she was born. Whoever used to be on it could argue they were still supposed to be. After all, the person running the show was someone who—in their eyes, anyway—stood to gain from them being missing from it.

  “I’m at work right now, Mr. Fitz. It’ll have to wait until tomorrow—”

  “Can’t,” he said. “Have to get this in by the fifth of the month, Dr. Ramey.”

  “Well, then tomorrow will be fine. It’s only the third,” Jenna said.

  Her breath caught. Three taps. March the third. Third month, third day. A recent crime scene she’d seen in the news flashed in. “Son of a bitch.”

  “I beg your pardon?” Fitz replied.

  “Oh, sorry,” Jenna mumbled. “Not you. I need to go. I’ll call you shortly.”

  She hung up, striding toward Saleda and Dodd.
No wonder this crime scene hadn’t felt politically motivated to her. It wasn’t. At least not the way it might seem.

  Three. Time was of the essence right now.

  She reached Saleda and Dodd just as Saleda was giving instructions to Sergeant Daly on what to release at the press conference based on the shooter’s current profile.

  “Don’t do that,” Jenna said, interrupting her supervisory agent. Sometimes insubordination was called for, damn it. “This isn’t a random shooter. We’ve seen him before.”

  5

  When Jenna, Saleda, and Porter returned to Quantico, Irv had the files and photos they’d requested pulled and ready for them. Dodd had insisted on hanging back at Lowman’s to poke around, and Saleda had been so irritated with him, Jenna doubted she wanted him close by anyway. She’d agreed he could stay at the site and interview witnesses as long as Teva stayed to help—or babysit.

  Now Porter approached the cherrywood table and lifted one of the photos by its corner. “If the Triple Shooter is the person who shot up Lowman’s, why didn’t he shoot each of the victims three times?”

  As soon as Jenna realized the grocery store shooting had taken place on March the third around 3:33 p.m., Molly’s statement about the shooter tapping three times had clicked into place. Until about six weeks ago, the Triple Shooter had kept the Southeast both terrorized and captivated for two months. Still at large, the killer shot his victims only after somehow, in his vision, they lined up with a series of the number three. He had been inactive for a good three fortnights as far as they knew. Either that, or they had missed a few bodies.

  As to why the killer had abandoned his MO of shooting each victim three times, Jenna wasn’t even ready to venture a guess. It didn’t make sense to her, either. But this was him. It had to be.

  “All I can think right now is that the Triple Shooter is still young, kill-wise. He only has three victims, barely enough to qualify as a serial. Serials grow, develop. They experiment and figure out what works and doesn’t. The Triple kills because of bizarre coincidences, which definitely supports the theory that he’s obsessive-compulsive, maybe schizophrenic. But if he is schizophrenic, just because he kills because voices tell him to doesn’t mean he can’t learn and adapt,” she replied.