Jakob went to the living room wall, standing sentry where he could see the front door and window.
It was the place he stood to keep watch, the place he stood when she had bad nights, nights she couldn’t bear to even sleep. On those nights, she would sit up on the couch, essentially taking over his bed, and he would stand guard.
“They were on familiar ground,” he said softly.
“Yes. Which means that their guard may have been down, as you said, but it also made them inherently less vulnerable. That, plus the public nature of where they were taken most likely means that the unsub approached them and used some sort of ruse or pretense to get them to deviate from that routine enough to be vulnerable.”
Jakob nodded. “And English is widely spoken in all those countries?”
“Yes, I checked, and over half the population in both Belgium and Poland speak English fluently.”
“And most of them are probably in the large cities.”
“Precisely.”
When she smiled, Jakob smiled back. It was for only a moment, but it was enough to take her breath away.
“Do you believe you have enough to start a profile?” he asked.
Annalise glanced at her notes and took a deep breath as something she hadn’t felt in a very long time washed through her.
Excitement? Self-assurance? The thrill of the chase?
All of those things that had made her good at her job were suddenly there again, and she was tempted to rise from the couch, walk over to Jakob…and what? Hug him? Kiss him? Drag him to her bed?
She dismissed those notions and picked up her pen, flipping the pages of the notebook until she found a blank sheet of paper.
“Yes. Yes, I do.”
Chapter Five
Walt added another teaspoon of sugar to his coffee after taking a sip as Eric smirked. The fleet admiral drank his coffee black and strong and obviously viewed Walt’s desire for added sweetness as a personal flaw.
Walt rolled his eyes in response, unconcerned what Eric thought. He was a Southern boy through and through, so that meant he liked sugar. A lot. In his coffee, in his iced tea, and in his mama’s so-sweet-you-get-a-cavity-looking-at-them Christmas cookies.
Maybe the flaw was Eric’s. God knew the man could use a little sweetness in his life.
They’d arrived at the restaurant in Frankfurt a half hour before the meeting time they’d arranged with Dr. Annalise Fischer and her bodyguard, Jakob. Eric claimed he wanted to do some reconnaissance of the place.
The fleet admiral took paranoid behavior to the next level. But considering his position and the current case they were working—he, Walt Hayden, was on a case. Ha!—Walt didn’t have a problem with the extra precautions.
He and Eric had spent the last few days cooling their heels in a Frankfurt hotel, while they waited for Annalise to create her profile of the serial killer. It was safe to say no one would ever accuse Eric of being a patient man. He’d prowled the room like a caged tiger, until Walt had hit his limit and gone out to play tourist in Frankfurt, a city he’d never had the opportunity to visit before.
“Hello.”
Walt rose at the sound of Annalise’s voice as she approached their table.
“Dr. Fischer. It’s good to see you again.” Walt reached out to shake her hand and watched as Jakob shifted closer. The man took his responsibility as Annalise’s bodyguard very seriously.
“Please, call me Annalise.”
Walt nodded, smiling.
Eric gestured at the other chairs at the table. “Join us.”
Annalise took the seat next to Walt. Jakob hesitated for a moment, glancing around the restaurant.
“Sit, Bauer,” Eric growled. “I’ve already checked the place out.”
Walt thought it spoke to Jakob’s level of professionalism that he didn’t take a seat until he finished his quick survey of their surroundings.
“Fleet Admiral,” Jakob said as he sat. “Dr. Hayden.”
The waiter stopped by to see if Annalise and Jakob wanted to place an order. Well, that’s what he assumed, since the server was speaking German.
Jakob’s and Annalise’s accents were crisp and sort of hip, the “s” sounds becoming “z’s”, yet also intimate in the way the words flowed and paused. Walt’s knowledge of German accents was mostly from American-made movies. Neither Jakob nor Annalise had the harsh, guttural Indiana-Jones-Nazi accent he’d always associated with German. He was going to go ahead and never admit any of that out loud, since it was cultural racism. He’d just do better.
Eric was clearly pissed off by the interruption, impatient to discover what Annalise had found.
“We ordered coffee,” Walt said, gesturing to their cups, hoping he was adding that comment at an appropriate point.
“That sounds good,” Annalise said, then looked to the waiter and repeated her words in German.
The server replied in somewhat more heavily accented English. “Coffee, for you, very good.”
Jakob raised two fingers. “And cream for her, please.”
Annalise smiled at the Ritter, obviously pleased with Jakob’s order. Walt wondered if there was something going on between the pretty psychologist and Jakob. The sexual tension between the two was unmistakable.
Once the server was gone, Eric sat forward, seeming both eager and grim as he looked at Annalise. “You have something.”
She nodded. “Very preliminary. I only had time to go through the files you’d grouped under dismemberment.”
Eric frowned. “But we don’t know if Josephine was dismembered.”
“Precisely. You don’t know.” Annalise pulled out file folders. “From the dismembered victim group, I’ve identified two potential victims.” The top folder was labeled “Dr. Hayden.” She passed it to Walt, then handed Eric and Jakob equally innocuous folders. She set her own stack of papers, which was a bit thicker, on the table in front of her.
Walt opened his, blinked, and muttered, “Jesus.” The first page was a full-color autopsy photo.
“You’re a doctor.” Eric glanced at him.
“Yes, I like alive, breathing people.”
“Dr. Hayden, I think the place we should start is with you.”
“Me?” Walt raised his eyebrows comically high and was rewarded with a smile from Annalise.
“I’d like your assessment of the skill of the person who did the dismembering.”
“Okay, give me a minute…” He glanced down at the papers and grimaced. “Actually, do you have higher-resolution versions of the photos?”
“Jakob had suggested you might ask for that.” She reached into her bag, pulled out a tablet, and passed it over. “I loaded the images on this.”
“Wow. It’s exactly as bad as you think it would be in high def.” Walt was inwardly horrified, but he was perfectly capable of viewing the images with a clinical eye. “I’ll need a few minutes.”
Eric craned his neck to look at the tablet, then turned his attention back to Annalise. “Start talking. I don’t want to wait.”
That was, undeniably, a command. Walt shook his head and sighed, but if Eric saw him, he ignored it.
“I always begin my first lecture on the first day of abnormal psychology with a single question.” Annalise had a lovely speaking voice, calm, authoritative, and with that smart-sounding crisp accent. Walt could listen to her all day. “Do you know the definition of a serial killer?”