AllFreeNovel
Share Us
“You made it,” Annette said when she opened the door. “Come on in.”
Alex followed her into the kitchen, where Annette had dinner in the oven—a rack of lamb that filled the house with a savory scent.
“Can I get you a drink? Beer or wine?” Annette asked.
“I’ll have a water, if you have one.”
Annette grabbed a bottle of Pellegrino from the fridge.
“So, tell me who this guy is again,” Alex said.
“Dr. Lane Phillips. He was once, and is still today, considered the FBI’s most famed profiler. His PhD dissertation was centered on understanding why killers kill, and proved his innate ability to climb into a killer’s mind in ways no one else can.”
“But how is a profiler going to help me with my family’s murder?”
“I’m not sure. I only knew that alone I could not, so I reached out to Lane. He’s not only an accomplished criminal profiler, he’s the creator of the Murder Accountability Project, a program used by countless police departments and homicide units across the country that helps solve cold-case homicides. Basically, Lane and his company analyze random homicides to see if and how they are linked to one another. I showed him the photo of your evidence board and he became quite interested. Then, with your permission, I sent him the details of the things you’ve discovered over the years.”
A week earlier, Alex had turned over the details of her decade-long journey into understanding the night her family was killed. She’d given Annette everything she’d ever learned about that night in the hopes that a forensic psychologist named Lane Phillips could somehow make sense of it all.
“After looking at all your work,” Annette said, “Lane believes he’s found a pattern. He wanted to talk, so here we are.”
Alex felt a sudden pulsing in her rib cage and tried to control her emotions.
“He came from Chicago just to tell me about this pattern?”
“He has business in DC, so the timing worked out.”
The doorbell rang.
“There he is,” Annette said.
Alex closed her eyes and took a deep breath as Annette headed for the front door. Her anxiety came not from the thought of listening to what Lane Phillips had to say, but from the idea that his insights might actually lead to answers. She’d searched so long for a resolution to her family’s murder that looking became her identity. Answers were a mythical thing too far down the proverbial road she’d been traveling to worry about. Her personality had been built from the hunt. But here she was, potentially arriving at the faraway place where her work and research collided with answers.
“Lane,” Annette said. “This is Alex Armstrong. Alex, this is Dr. Lane Phillips.”
Alex worked herself away from her fear and smiled. “Dr. Phillips, thanks for coming all the way from Chicago.”
The man was not what she expected. In her mind Alex had conjured the image of an academic-looking older man with white hair and glasses and a resigned personality cultivated from a lifelong exposure to the most ruthless killers society had known. But instead Lane Phillips was a vibrant-looking fifty-something-year-old man with a full head of bushy hair who could pass for someone much younger. He wore jeans and a light gray sports jacket over a button-down shirt and smiled pleasantly when he looked at her—affected not at all, it appeared, by his lifelong obsession with killers.
“Call me Lane, please. Only my students use such formalities.”
“Dinner will be ready in about thirty minutes,” Annette said. “Let’s sit at the kitchen table to talk. Lane, something to drink?”
“Sure. You have beer?”
“I have a variety.”
“Something light. The hazy stuff gets to my stomach.”
A minute later they all sat around the dining table. In front of Lane was a leather-bound folder. He opened it and removed three packets.
“I’ll just jump right in, if that’s all right,” he said.
Alex nodded.
“And excuse me ahead of time. I understand how emotional and traumatic discussing the details about your family’s case can be, even this many years later. So I apologize in advance for my directness. It’s an affliction that I move from cordial conversation directly into clinical diagnosis mode.”
“Understood,” Alex said. “Did you . . . find anything?”
