Cut & Run (Cut & Run #1)(93)
Author: Abigail Roux

“made me start thinking the way the bodies were found was even more important than we thought it was.”

Zane glanced up at him before going back to the article. “Go on,” he invited.

“It’s not really the victims he’s after,” Ty conjectured. “It’s the situations,” he went on with a point at the next page. “His vics have to fit the situation he’s after, but other than that he doesn’t care who they are. He went after the ME and her assistant next.”

Zane glanced up at him with a wince.

Ty nodded grimly. “But it wasn’t in the same manner as the agents he killed, or like us or the other people he was trying to merely get rid of. It wasn’t like they stumbled across him as he was doing something. It was methodical. I think they were planned victims, killed in the morgue for some reason,” he said with emphasis.

Flipping through the pages, Zane stopped on that article, seeing the picture of the dark-haired woman they’d worked with. He shook his head. Ty must have done this just in the last few days, right before he got the call from Burns. He was still keeping up, somehow. Zane’s chest hurt with the thought.

“Goddamn,” he murmured. “They were locked in the autopsy lab. But why?

You’re right; there’s something off about it. Always before, there’s some sort of odd positioning. They were just there.”

“Right. In the morgue. I started looking back at the other ones. The first with the meth guy found in his bed. The second with the hooker found in the graveyard, which happens to be one of the most elite burial grounds in the city,” he added with a point of his finger at the binder. “Then the two girls with the dyed hair who were switched in each other’s beds. I don’t think it mattered how they were killed or who they were. Just how they were found.”

“What about the guy with the bird flu? Or the twins that looked like a mutual execution? What was off about them?” Zane asked.

Ty sighed heavily and shook his head, looking out the window as the plane began to taxi down the runway. “That’s the problem with my theory,”

he admitted. “The twins were the ones that were killed across state lines. They were the reason the FBI was brought in at all. That is the importance of their location. But aside from that? There wasn’t anything special about where or how they were found, just what they were killed with.”

“The one man with a rare disease and the others with their own twin?”

“Uh huh. Nothing else stands out.”

“Other than they were different from all the others,” Zane said.

Ty muttered as he looked out the window diligently. “There’s an answer there, but I’m just not seeing the big picture,” he added in frustration.

Zane kept paging through the binder quietly, reviewing the older cases and then reading up on what had happened since.

A shiver ran through Ty and he closed his eyes and bowed his head again. “I hate knowing this f**ker is smarter than I am,” he muttered.

Zane’s head snapped up. “He’s not smarter than you,” he said firmly.

“He just has inside information.”

Ty sneered at that bit of logic and snorted. “You saying he’s the kid in class with the teacher’s copy of the textbook?” he asked wryly as his knee began to bounce restlessly.

“That’s exactly what I’m saying. It’s easy to beat the other kids’ test scores when you have the answer key,” Zane pointed out.

Ty closed his eyes and rubbed them. “Still doesn’t mean the other kids have to like it,” he muttered as the engines roared and the plane lifted off.

ONCE they arrived in New York, a brief discussion established that they would contact Tim Henninger at the Bureau. It was fairly safe and probably the most expedient way of going about things. He’d risked his neck to help them before, and despite Ty’s inherent lack of respect for the kid, they both trusted him in their own ways.

When they called him, he sounded almost happy to hear from them.

Ty could practically hear him vibrating over the phone as he asked where they wanted to meet.

When Henninger arrived at the diner, Zane was eating as Ty drank a glass of juice. They sat on the same side of the table, Zane somewhat sprawled in the booth, Ty sitting up straight and slightly stiff. Henninger blinked at them, noticing the outward changes; Zane’s scruff set off by Ty’s more polished, professional look. For the first time, it was easy to see the former Marine in the FBI agent.

“Guys, it’s great to see you,” Henninger said quietly as he slid into the booth across the table from them, looking at them in mild confusion. He leaned closer, looking at them both oddly. “But why are you back?” he asked with a frown.

Ty gave Zane a glance and then looked back at Henninger seriously.

“They wanted someone who could fly under the Bureau radar, as it were. And the … the general feeling was that the killer…missed us,” he answered hesitantly.

Henninger’s dark eyes lit up with amusement, and he smiled and nodded as he laughed softly. The smile gave him an entirely different look, one that Ty probably would have found appealing in other circumstances. “It would appear that he did,” Henninger said with some amusement as the waitress sauntered over to take his order. “So, you’re here to draw him out?”

he went on after he ordered. “If you’re under the radar, how do you plan to make yourself known to him?”

Ty just frowned. That wasn’t exactly why they were here, but it made a certain kind of sense when put that way. If the killer had gone silent because they had abandoned the case, then it stood to reason that their mere presence would kick him back into doing something stupid. That also meant that their mere presence might cost someone else their life.

Zane pushed a bite of waffle around on the plate in front of him.

“That’s not exactly the plan,” he murmured half to himself.

“But you hope to catch the killer’s attention?” Henninger asked as he watched Zane’s fork distractedly.

“We don’t want his attention,” Zane answered carefully. “We want him. Tell us about the cases. We’ve both been out of the loop.”

“Have you?” Henninger responded with wide eyes, looking back and forth at them. “So you don’t know anything about the last two murders?” he asked, his brow creasing.

Ty shook his head in answer, lips pressed tightly together.