The darkness hid him from their view once again just as it had the night before at the police station. His fingers gripped the steering wheel with bloodless knuckles.

She was working with the police. But she couldn't have remembered his face after all this time. If so, he had no doubt it would be plastered all over the news. 

He'd gotten what information he could about Paige Jeffries over the last twenty-four months. Found out that she couldn't remember his face and that the police didn't trust her for some reason.

That had worked to his advantage.

But it looked like they trusted her now. Or at least this new Detective Wagner did. He’d tried to explain that he was on Wagner’s side, on every man’s side, but he didn’t think the detective understood.

He probably should’ve killed Wagner tonight, but that would’ve been completely against the code.

Paige Jeffries was at fault, not Wagner.

He was going to have to make a change. The thought burned like acid in his gut. Because of her he was going to have to change the pattern again. Going to have to make a move sooner than he wanted.

But he couldn't take the chance on her living much longer. He would kill the other woman, even though it wasn't time, so that the pattern would be back to where Paige Jeffries belonged. She would burn.

Strangled. Stabbed. Burned.

His pattern, simple yet elegant, and had worked for him for years.

Until Paige Jeffries.

She had caused him to break his pattern and nothing had really been right since.

He would break his pattern one more time for her. Then she would burn.

And the pattern would be whole once again. She would be number ten. The end of this pattern.

It should’ve been nine victims. Three sets of three kills. The perfect union.

But Paige Jeffries had ruined it all. So now there would be ten. And she would be the last in this pattern to die.

In the most painful way possible.

He knew this would change everything for him, but it was a price he was willing to pay. Two last kills to fulfill this pattern then he would have to run. Hide. For a long time.

Then he would find a new pattern in a new place and start once again.

* * *

Brett and Alex spent the entire next day poring over the files. Brett had left Paige in her security team’s care and made sure they were completely aware that Paige was all but under siege.

Both physically and mentally.

Being connected to a killer and knowing that killer was coming after you? Not easy to handle.

He wanted to stay with her. Probably would've if she'd asked him to. But he was needed here. In the short run it might've comforted Paige more for him to go with her now, but in the long run, the only thing that was going to give her peace was to catch this guy. 

And now that they were certain the cases were connected it was easier to see links between them. 

Any possible remaining doubts melted away when Alex pulled up a map on the computer and plotted the locations of all the murders. 

"Holy shit," Alex murmured.

“Seattle, Medford, Eugene, Olympia. They’re all along I-5,” Brett said. Lined up along the map like that, it was impossible to miss the pattern. "The killer must work on that Interstate.”

Every murder had occurred in a town within two or three miles of it.

"Could be a trucker." Alex started a list of professions on a notepad by his computer.

"Yep. Or sales rep. Repair man."

"Whoever it is, has a route between Sacramento and Seattle."

Brett nodded. "Probably not a trucker then, right?"

"I doubt it. Just having that route over and over? That would be pretty unusual. But I’ll definitely look into it.”

"And now we have something we can take to Ameling. This is a pattern that he can't deny." Brett grinned. "He's going to wonder how we came up with this, you know. How we figured out to search these particular cases. I don’t want to bring Paige into it. He’s gunning for her hard enough as it is.”

Alex winked at him. "Haven't you heard? We’re brilliant detectives. Nothing slips by us. Plus, you let me talk to Captain Ameling. Just like you want to leave Paige out of it, I want to leave you out of it as much as possible. Easier for him to swallow that way.

Brett didn’t care about getting credit, he just cared about stopping this killer. So whatever Alex had to do was fine with him. “I’m glad he won’t be able to deny it, but coordinating this is going to be a bitch. Three different states? This is going to get turned over to the Feds."

Conner Perigo came to mind. The man probably wouldn't be given the case but it would still be one of the first calls Brett would make. But he didn't want to give up the case even to Perigo.

"We can't call anybody until we have Ameling's approval. He’s out today and tomorrow for that conference. So let's get as much info as we can before presenting it to him and it being taken out of our hands."

"I'll work on identifying the woman in Paige's last picture if you want to keep working on who might be going up and down that I-5 route," Brett said.

They had taken down the pictures and info on the whiteboard in the conference room just after Paige left. Until they were ready to officially go to Ameling with their findings, they needed to keep it to themselves.

Brett had all the case files and pictures sitting on his desk. He looked through the victims again.

The unknown woman's picture was being run through the facial recognition data bank which was a testament to how good the picture Paige drew actually was.

Unfortunately, unless the woman was a known terrorist or had committed a crime, she probably wouldn't show up in facial recognition.

Brett took the key info on each victim –whatever information they’d been able to fit on one note card– and placed them all on his desk.

Single. White. Between twenty-five and thirty-five years old. They all were pretty, but none of them so strikingly beautiful it would draw attention to them. They all had longish hair. Past their shoulders.

"He investigates them before he chooses them for sure," he called out to Alex. "That's how he knows they are not married. Doesn’t just randomly pick someone out.”

Alex nodded. “Okay. Maybe a sales rep or a repair man is a better fit than a trucker. Someone who stays in one place a couple days at a time.”

"Yes, would give him a chance to study them. To select who he wanted."

Alex turned back to his work and Brett turned back to the notecards. These women had more in common than just their age and marital status. But it wasn't something obvious.

Tox screens for all the victims had shown up negative, so none of them were on illegal drugs. Brett grabbed the files to see if there was a prescription medication link between the victims.

Maybe the perp was a pharmaceutical rep.

But there wasn't any medication all of them took. A couple weren't on any medications at all. So that was out.

Their professions were widespread. Paige was an artist, of course. Teresa Cavasos had worked here in Portland in the Nike office, in research and development.

One of the victims had been a nurse. Another a secretary at Boeing in Seattle. The woman from Medford had been a physical therapist. 

Hell, one of them had been a toy designer in Sacramento.

Brett spent the rest of the day researching what each woman did for a living and couldn't find any connection between them all. He checked where they all worked out, where they ate –at least based on their credit card history– any clubs or activities they were involved in but nothing he could find linked them all.

Maybe the killer wasn't connected to the I-5 route by his job at all. Maybe the guy didn't even have a job. Just spent his time wandering up and down the interstate until he found his next victim. Maybe the women were totally random. Had nothing whatsoever to do with one another except for vague general appearances. He just found one he liked, checked to see if she was married or had kids, and then waited until the next payday to kill her.

But he didn't kill every payday. Why was that? There didn't seem to be any exact measure of time between the kills. The shortest time between kills had been two weeks the longest time had been seven months.

Was that deliberate? A way of throwing law enforcement off of his trail?

Because detecting skills didn’t matter if the guy chose women completely at random off the street and had no timetable in which he killed. They’d never be able to anticipate his moves.

Hell, if they didn't have the pictures from someone who drew in her sleep, they still wouldn't have any proof of a serial killer at all.

"Any luck with anything, man?" Alex asked from his desk.

"Is less than nothing possible?" Brett rubbed his fingers over his eyes. Going all night last night without sleep was catching up to him. "I've got eight victims, nine if you count Paige. I can't find a single thing that ties them together. They all have vastly different careers, from a secretary to a nurse to an artist. They all have vastly different interests and activities."

"So except for the fact that they were killed somewhere near I-5 and are in one of Paige's drawings, there's nothing tying them together."

"Except for being dead."

Alex let out a sigh. "Nothing much on my end either. I was looking up companies that did repairs or sales in a three state area, but like you said, without knowing what sort of field we’re looking at it's impossible to narrow. Checked trucking companies too, found one possibility, but it was a woman who ran the route."

They knew for a fact the attacker was a man. Paige had known that much.

"Knowing one person killed all these women doesn't actually put us any closer to catching him." Brett said.

"Well, we know we've got at least ten days before he'll strike again. He's never deviated from the payday dates. And he doesn't know we're onto him. Doesn’t know we now know it’s one person responsible for all these murders and are working that angle. So we're still a step ahead."

“We’ve got to catch him soon, Alex. Paige is starting to crack under the pressure.”

Alex nodded. "It's a lot for anyone to handle. Especially someone not used to this sort of violence. And to be so closely linked to it. Most people would crack. I’m surprised she hasn’t before now.”

Because she was strong. She’d done what she needed to in order to survive. That had meant shutting herself away, cutting herself off from the rest of the world. But she’d survived.

"Turning this over to the FBI is probably the best bet." Alex shook his head. "I hate to cut us out of a huge case, but they have resources we don't. Manpower we don't."

Brett agreed. "Yeah, I don't like it either. As soon as the captain is back I think we need to go to him and get this passed along to the right hands.”

Brett still hadn't called Conner Perigo, but he would tomorrow as soon as they turned it over to the captain. Maybe Conner could at least keep him and Alex in the loop.

Brett’s phone rang and he answered immediately when he saw it was Tom, part of Paige's security team.

"Tom? Everything okay?”

"Security wise, we are secure."

"Is Paige all right?" 

"She went to sleep almost as soon as we got home. Had me double check the house, which was probably good for her peace of mind and mine."

"Sounds good. What's the problem?"

Because there was a problem. Brett knew it in his gut. The other man wouldn't have called otherwise.

"She just woke up not long ago. Jacob went in there to check on her before I headed out. There’s something wrong, Brett."

Brett had never heard the other man call him by his first name. His grip tightened on the phone.

"What's going on?"

"She's just sitting on her couch, staring out the window. She won't talk to either of us at all. Won’t look at us or move or do anything.”

"Has this ever happened before?"

"No, never. She's never been like this. Something has happened. It’s like she can’t even see us.”

But something similar had happened at the gallery yesterday, and it had been the killer. “Are you sure the premises are secure? One hundred percent sure?”

“Yes. But I’ll send someone to triple check.”

Brett was already headed towards the door. "I'm on my way."