I awoke the next morning lying in my bed and not remembering how I got there. Then it all came flooding back. Holy shit.

I pulled on a robe and walked into the living room. Carol was gone and the massage table had been folded up and stored against one wall. There was a note on the table that read, “Will be back at 6pm. Don’t be late this time.”

I chuckled to myself and went to grab a shower.

Half an hour later I was dressed and in my kitchen making myself breakfast, remembering the paprika. Half and hour after that I walked out of the building and flagged down the officers assigned to follow me and asked them to take me to the 12th precinct. They called it in and were given permission, so I hopped into the back and pretended to be a perp on his way in.

It was only then that I realized that I wasn’t in pain at that moment. Carol had skills.

First thing I did when I checked in was to ask about Agent Borges. Out of surgery and expected to make a full recovery. I made a mental note to go visit him later in the day, then asked about the surveillance video.

“Were your tech guys able to do anything with it?” I asked Eric and Captain Gold.

“Not that much,” Eric replied. “Borges was right; it looks like the room suddenly explodes. No matter how much we slow down the video we never really get a clear picture of this ‘Freddy’ you spoke with.”

“Sit me down with a sketch artist?” I asked.

“Good idea.”

A properly trained sketch artist is kind of like a therapist. In addition to the art skills they are trained to draw out from you the tiniest details about what a person looks like. From the curve of the jaw to how thick their lips are to how close together their eyes are. It’s a slow process, but the good ones can produce striking results. This guy shot me in the head. I remembered what he looked like pretty well and within a couple of hours I thought we had a good sketch of him.

I then sat down with Agent Faulkner to try to pry his brain. There was something that had occurred to me and I wanted him on the same page.

We sat in one of the conference rooms, he with a coffee and I with a hot chocolate. We spent a bit of time going over the events of yesterday and then I started steering the conversation in the direction I wanted it to go.

“If we ignore the strangeness of what happened yesterday what are the results?” I asked.

“The killer is still on the loose,” Faulkner replied. “Even worse, he has the murder weapon again.”

“So how would you profile someone like this?”

“Smart. Ruthless. Frustrated.”

“Frustrated?” I echoed, knowing that this was exactly what I wanted to hear.

“Yes, frustrated. Based on all the evidence and ignoring the strange parts, we stopped his killing streak short. Whatever he wanted to do he’s not finished.”

“So he will kill again.”

He nodded. “Most certainly he will kill again, and soon. We never got a feel for his cycle but in general frustrated serial killers tend to speed up. The good news is that usually this makes them sloppy.”

“Does this guy seem sloppy to you?” I asked.

Faulkner sighed. “No, he doesn’t. He strikes me as terribly smart and probably with a fallback plan.”

“What usually happens in a case like this?”

“One of two things – the killer stops for a while or they move elsewhere and start again. He will want it to be somewhere close and where he can work on victims that fit his profile, but far enough away that he can keep the things that got him followed before from biting him in the ass.”

“You need to put out an alert for this type of crime that goes nationwide,” I said.

“Already done, but that’s only going to help once people start dying again. We need to figure out where he will start up again.”

“Do you think he’ll start with prostitutes again? Hit a massage parlor?”

“I don’t know but it seems likely. The problem with that idea is that he would want to hit a place rich with this type of location and San Francisco is a bit unique on how well it tolerates such activity.”

Now I struck. “San Francisco County stops just 5 miles south of here. There are two cities in the Bay Area that are larger both in size and population, and the police departments between them don’t really talk all that much. I would recommend we try San Jose.”

“Why San Jose? The prostitution stats there are no higher than in any other major city.”

“Because James Chalone lived closer to there than to here. It seems to me that no serial killer, even one who was following orders, starts with 13 kills. I’d bet you anything that there were practice kills in another jurisdiction. Put out feelers to everywhere in the Bay, but I’d start with San Jose.”