Chapter Eleven

"Kinda sucks, doesn't it?" Michael asked.

Faith looked down the well-maintained suburban street. She didn't see a single car driving. It was like something out of a movie, one of those surreal films where all of the fathers leave at the exact time and the women wear plastic, fashion-doll smiles on their faces as they wave goodbye. The lawns were manicured. The gutters were clean. The grass was green. Every house was a shade of pink, grey, or slate. This was the kind of suburb real estate agents put on brochures. Photographers snapped stock images from a place like this.

And murder had been done here. Out in the open where anyone could see.

And no one had seen it. Two hours of interrogating onlookers had given them a dozen variations on the same answer. "The dogs were all barking, and when I finally came outside to check, she was lying on the ground. No, I didn't see anyone else. No, I have no idea what happened."

"She" was Emily Chen. She was twenty-six years old and a recently graduated PhD in linguistics from Yale University. She had never attended the University of Washington, had never participated in any kind of study—hearing related or otherwise—and had lived in Delaware up until six months ago.

So she couldn't have known Maria Gonzalez and almost certainly didn't know Rebecca Wells. She did, according to her bio at Yale, have something called accelerated hearing, which basically meant the same thing as perfect pitch and hyperacusis for the purposes of the case. So that part of their pattern was still valid.

But the idea of the killer targeting former students at UW or members of Tate's study was out the window. Maybe they'd learn something when the CSI report came back, but as it stood now, they actually knew less than they did before this murder.

And she had broken her promise to Hector. This bastard had killed someone else, and she had done nothing to stop it. The fact that there was nothing she could have done didn't make that fact any easier to accept.

"Faith? Are you listening?"

She sighed. "Yes. Sorry. What sucks?"

"You get some kind of superpower and it only gets you killed."

Michael could just be wisecracking, but sometimes his wisecracks were his way of thinking through a problem. "You think this guy thinks of himself as a supervillain?"

Michael said, "I guess we've dealt with a few bad guys who are trying to prove how bad they are, but I think most villains convince themselves they're the good guys."

"So he's not trying to wipe out superheroes. What, then? Trying to be one? Maybe the killer has super hearing himself, and he wants to be the only one?"

"Maybe," Michael said. "Or maybe he thinks he's doing some sort of good for the world. A killer is either going to think of the victim as insignificant, nothing more than a pawn in the plan or otherwise as very significant. They're killing a threat and saving the world in the process."

Faith didn't know that she believed that. "There are plenty of killers who believe they're blessing the victim, not blessing the world by killing the victim. Some killers even believe they're offering them immortality. Sometimes it stems from a pathological depression-like state. They're saving people from the misery of life."

"So, you think that the killer is rescuing the poor, unfortunate folks cursed with excellent hearing?"

"It's not excellent hearing," Faith clarified, "it's extraordinary hearing."

"And the difference is?"

"When we walked into Tate's lab, those kids had their hands over their ears. They were in pain. Imagine walking around all day long seven days a week that sensitive to noise. Imagine you never miss any mean comment said under someone's breath. Imagine the honk of a horn feeling like an air raid siren pressed to your ear."

"So these are mercy killings?"

"It's worth considering," Faith said, "but I don't want…" A dog barked in a yard nearby, and Faith let the words hang in the air.

"You don't want to what?"

"Hush," she said. She tried to take hold of the thought in her mind. Another dog barked in response to the first. "Did you hear that?"

"The dog? Yeah."

"And one barked before this last one."

"Yeah. Why? Dogs were barking during the murder or leading up to it, too. Is that why?"

"That's not just this one," Faith said. "Check your notes. Didn't…" She thought for a second but couldn't remember the names. "…some of the witnesses say the animals were going crazy?"

He nodded slowly. "But, come on, Faith. Dogs bark everywhere."

"Yeah, they do," she agreed, "but nobody notices. At least, if you live somewhere with dogs, you don't notice. The dogs who just barked, the ones I asked you about, they're just normal barks. Nobody on this street noticed really or gave the dogs more than a passing thought. You don't. If you have a dog or your neighbor has a dog, you hear barks now and then."

"Exactly. That's my point. Dogs barking isn't unique."

"But that isn't your point," Faith said, "because if you live in the neighborhood, those sounds become inaudible the same way scratched paint on your car or a loose fixture becomes invisible. You see it every day. You hear it every day. It's nothing special."

"Okay? I'm not following."

"Think, Michael," she said. She felt the familiar excitement building. "Because all of the witnesses hear it every day. There's no reason they would have pointed it out as something special and unusual. We certainly wouldn't hear about it happening at more than one scene."

"Okay, but we already knew the killer was affecting dogs. So how does that help us?"

"I don't know yet," Faith said, "but I don't think it's as simple as using a dog whistle."

"Why not? Occam's razor and all that."

Occam's razor was a philosophical principle that stated that the simplest answer to a problem was usually the correct answer. The problem was that Occam's razor, like most philosophical constructs, was just a construct. It worked well in theory, but the real world—much to Mr. Occam's frustration, no doubt—was not simple.

Still, Michael had a point. It was too soon to assume that a dog whistle was the lure of choice, but it was too soon to dismiss that too.

"I'm only saying that we've gotten nowhere by focusing on the victims," she said. "Maybe we should start focusing on the killer instead."

"Well, that's what I was trying to do by asking the superhero question, but then you pulled us down this rabbit hole, and—"

"Can my CSIs start examining the scene yet, or do you still need to take a look?"

Michael and Faith turned to Wanda. Faith's cheeks flushed a little at Wanda's disapproving expression. It wasn't a good look for them to be caught arguing.

Faith turned to Turk. He sat glumly in between them and didn't sniff around for any more clues. He had come up empty, too.

"Go ahead," Faith replied. "Have the M.E. call us if he picks up anything unusual, but I think we've got everything we can from here."

Wanda nodded. "All right." Her expression softened, at least as much as it was possible for her features to soften. "Not that anything's jumping out at us either."

Indeed, other than the semi-public location, the scene was the same as the other two. Emily had been stabbed once through the neck, severing her windpipe and her carotid arteries. She had collapsed almost immediately and died just as immediately. One single blow.

Faith's frown deepened as an uncomfortable thought occurred to her. The semi-public location did mean something. Maria had been killed on her porch, just outside of her home. Rebecca had been killed in her business. Emily had been killed on her neighborhood street.

The killer was escalating. He was doing so cautiously. The victims were all murdered late at night and lured into distraction by a high-frequency sound device. But he was escalating.

So they knew a little more than they did before. It just wasn't helpful knowledge. All it told Faith was that they had to move faster, or their killer would strike again, maybe even sooner.

This kind of pattern was typical of the more prolific serial killers. Typically, they started by killing animals, then escalated to lesser violence against humans, usually some form of sexual aggression or assault. When they finally killed someone, it was usually a single killing. Then they often went years before killing again, waiting to see if the authorities would catch them. Once the cases went cold, though, they would be emboldened, and they would start killing more and more frequently. Usually, that pace was what got them caught eventually. The problem was that eventually meant more victims. Faith didn't want eventually, she wanted now.

She didn't need to express that sentiment to Michael as he drove them back to the hotel. He felt the same way she did. "I'm fine ixnaying sleep for the rest of the night," he told Faith. "I think we should follow your plan and start focusing on the killer instead of the victims."

"I agree."

"So we know this person's targeting women in their late twenties and early thirties who have enhanced hearing. He—or she, I suppose—isn't assaulting them sexually. In fact, he's not touching them at all. He's luring them with a high-pitched sound device and stabbing them once in the neck. There might be some significance to the fact that their windpipes are severed. Silencing them somehow. I know it's their hearing that's got him up in arms, not their speech, but it might be related."

"Might be," Faith allowed.

"So what's the motive?" Michael asked. "Is he trying to be a supervillain? A superhero? Is he afraid of them? Is he deaf and jealous?"

"That's the part that frustrates me," Faith said. "There's no connection that I can see. We don't know what's motivating these killings. My fear is that it's going to turn out to be something random like the last guy who was killing different artists because of a tangential connection to veterans' causes."

"Yeah, that's what I'm afraid of, too," Michael said. "We got lucky last time. If we don't get lucky this time…"

He didn't finish. He didn't need to. Last time, they had stumbled upon a connection between all five victims that had led them to the motive that finally gave them their killer. The difference was that last time, the killer had been staging his victims. He had wanted attention. This one was luring them to a position where he could stab them once and escape unseen. Maybe it was significant that the killer was severing their windpipes, but Faith thought he was just making sure that they couldn't make any noise.

A killer like that could keep killing for a long time before they caught him. Unless he got bold enough to kill someone in broad daylight or someone happened to actually look out their damned window in the next neighborhood, he could rack up a body count to rival Franklin West's before the agents determined who he was.

As they drove back to the hotel, Faith could almost see West's crazed grin. He had promised to break Faith, but did he really need to? There were so many people like him in the world. The exhaustion of chasing all of them while watching innocents die might break her whether or not West did.

She could fight her entire life, but nothing she did would stop people like this killer from stabbing someone through their throat just because their ears worked better than the killer's did.

And that was what frustrated her more than anything. It felt like the world suffered from a constant storm of evil, and Faith had little more than an umbrella to stop the downpour.

It wasn't enough. It was never enough.