Chapter One
FBI agent Conner Perigo knew throwing the file in his hand across the room would be childish and ultimately accomplish nothing except making a mess, but he was still tempted.
Ten months.
Ten months they had been on the trail of this psychopath. Ten months of being two steps behind and watching, helpless, as another woman was murdered. It wasn’t in Conner’s job description to attend the funerals of women he had never known. That hadn’t stopped him from attending one last week. Or three weeks before that. Or a month and a half before that.
Each time he saw one of these women buried, it renewed Conner’s determination to catch this bastard.
Five women dead in ten months. Most within a fifty-mile radius of San Francisco, which, of course, had the city in a panic.
“I’m not picking that up, so don’t even think about throwing it,” Conner’s partner and friend, Seth Harrington, said without looking up from his desk.
Conner looked at the file in his hand, then set it down. Maybe flying papers would make him feel better momentarily, but it wasn’t worth the aftermath. He sighed. “This case, Seth. I swear I’m about to lose it over this case.”
“I hear you, man. It’s messed up.”
It wasn’t just the murders, although those were bad enough. Now the perp was taunting them.
Yesterday the San Francisco FBI field office had received another package. It was the same thing every time. The outside was a box addressed with an innocuous label—like a care package. Of course, innocent-looking or not, each had gone through the extensive FBI bomb scannings and toxic screenings. There was nothing dangerous in any of the packages.
Every delivery was box after box, wrapped in plain brown paper, nested inside each other like one of those Russian dolls. Every time, inside the smallest box, Conner and his team had found a lock of a woman’s hair.
And every time, the dead body matching the hair had been found a few days later.
The packages also contained a handwritten note, in third person, with the killer referring to himself as Simon. As if this was all a game of Simon Says.
“Simon says, the FBI is too slow.”
“Simon says, you should try harder.”
“Simon says, uh-oh, there goes another one.”
They had kept all info about the packages from the public, knowing it would cause more of a panic. But around the San Francisco field office, the killer was known as “Simon Says.”
There was no doubt about it: this pervert was calling the shots. The game was consistent. The FBI received a package—with zero helpful forensic evidence—then ran around for the next couple of days trying to figure out where the woman was being held with only the city in the return address to go on.
They were always too late. A body would be found somewhere; usually local law enforcement would call it in, and the Bureau would rush to the address. The crime scene, just like the packages, would hold zero helpful forensic evidence.
And then the game would start all over again.
Conner and Seth worked in the FBI’s ViCAP division—Violent Criminal Apprehension Program—a subdivision of the Bureau’s Behavioral Analysis Unit. Their job was to help law enforcement agencies apprehend violent criminals through investigative analysis. They were the best of the best.