that she could display them to both him and the police officer. “Special Agent Mandalay,” she said. “Don’t worry about it, I’ll vouch for him. Mister Gant is one of our consultants. He isn’t insane that we’re aware of. Just a little…” She paused thoughtfully then added, “Quirky would probably be the best way to describe it.”
I shot her an annoyed look. She returned fire with a glare that said in no uncertain terms “shut up and let me handle this.” Since I had asked her to intervene on my behalf, I figured it best to comply. Besides, she could have easily told them something quite a bit worse and still been completely truthful.
The paramedic objected, “Unexplained hemorrhaging isn’t ‘quirky,’ ma’am, it’s possibly a life threatening issue.”
“Believe me,” she replied. “He knows.”
He turned back to me. “Mister Gant, you really need to go to the hospital.”
“I appreciate your concern, but my vitals are pretty much normal, right?”
“Yes, but that…”
I interrupted again. “And I have the right to refuse medical treatment, am I correct?”
“Yes, sir, you do.”
“Okay then. That’s what I’m doing.”
“Sir, if you still insist on refusing treatment then I would strongly advise that you call your personal physician as soon as possible,” he told me. “You might have a serious underlying condition.”
“Trust me, I’m not the one with th…” I started but noticed Constance glaring at me once again before I could finish. Changing my tone midstream, I nodded and lied. “Yeah. Okay. I’ll make sure I do that.”
Once the paramedics had gone, Constance and I headed back up to our rooms. The restaurant staff gave us a wide berth, which was fine as far as I was concerned. At this point, the light of my earlier brightened mood had officially been extinguished, so I definitely wasn’t up to the intrusion, no matter how well meaning it might be.
Constance finally broke the silence as the elevator gave a slight jerk and started upward to the seventh floor. “Are you sure you’re okay?”
I turned toward her and nodded. “Physically, yeah. Mentally, that’s a whole different story I’m afraid.”
She leaned back against the side wall and crossed her arms. “So, is this whole incident about what I think it is?”
I backed up and imitated her posture by resting against the opposite wall. “Guess that depends on what you’re thinking. I experienced spontaneous hemorrhaging just like this in connection with the case I worked last month.”
“Ben told me about it, and yeah…that’s exactly what I’m thinking,” she said. “The guy the media was calling Count Dracula.”
I gave her another nod. “Then yes, I’d say we’re probably on the same page.”
The elevator stopped with a quiet thump, and then the brushed metal doors parted down the center, revealing the opposite wall of the corridor. Fortunately, no one was waiting on the other side, so for the moment at least, my somewhat gory appearance was a non-issue. If I could make it to my room without running into anyone else, all would be fine. I motioned Constance ahead of me and then followed her out and to the left.
“But isn’t that investigation closed?” she asked as we walked down the hallway. “As I recall the suspect is dead, correct?”
“Suspect, yes,” I replied. “But maybe he wasn’t the actual killer. Or maybe there was more than one… I don’t know… All I can say is something felt very wrong about the way that case ended.”
“Wrong how?”
“Wrong unfinished. Like it was some kind of a set up.”
“Set up how?”
“It was too convenient. Especially from my end with the visions and such. The answers came too easily.”
“Okay, then set up by whom?”
“That’s the burning question. I’m beginning to think maybe Miranda.”
“How could she do that?”
“Another good question, and one I need to find an answer to before it goes any further.”
“Did you tell Ben about this?”
“Of course I did. And to his credit, he was perfectly willing to follow up on it too… But no more victims surfaced, so in the short term it appeared that the killings had stopped… Plus, I didn’t have any more episodes… And then there was all the hard evidence at the scene itself…” I allowed my voice to trail off for a moment before continuing. “We pursued it for a couple of weeks, but I couldn’t give him anything solid to go on. All I could say was that something still didn’t feel right.”
“And now this happens.”
“Yeah. Now this. Which also feels very wrong to me.”
“Because of the timing?”
“Yeah… Pretty much.”
“I haven’t seen all of the details on the original case,” she said with a shrug. “So I only know what Ben told me, but wasn’t it all actually connected to the vampire subculture?”
“That’s how it appeared on the surface,” I said. “Sanguinarian vampirism. People who have actually convinced themselves that they are vampires and really do drink blood. Everything from Renfield’s syndrome to kids looking for attention. It’s pretty strange, even by my standards. But in the end, everything stopped at the dead suspect. No solid connections to the local vampire community that we could find.”
She pursed her lips and nodded. “Maybe you were dealing with a transient.”
“I guess it’s possible, but that wasn’t how it felt to me.”
“Well, we know what it usually means when you have one of your feelings…”
“Unfortunately.”
“Okay, for sake of argument, say we assume the suspect had a partner who has now resurfaced. If you apply the Holmes criteria for defining serial killers, the timing itself could speak to an emotional cooling-off period between murders. It’s been what, a little over five weeks? That could easily fit depending on the original cycle of activity and the triggering stressor.”
I nodded. “True. But the original case had a period of acceleration. A spree that occurred in the days leading up to a full moon. We’re a few days past that this month. So, why now? Why today of all days?”
“Maybe the killer isn’t actually on a lunar cycle. There could be a different stressor,” she said. “This might just be a coincidence. They do happen, you know.”
“Yes, I do. And maybe that’s the case this time, but something in my gut says no.”
“Well, like I said, we know what your gut feelings usually mean.”
We stopped at our rooms, which were positioned directly across the hall from one another. I dug around in my pocket for my keycard. Constance already had hers in hand.
“But what about the loss of the partner?” I asked.
“What do you mean?”
“Wouldn’t that affect the pattern somehow?”
“That would all depend on the emotional investment. There’s almost always a primary partner with paired killers. The one who calls the shots and most often literally controls the actions of the other. There may or may not have been a bond between them.”
“So a dominant and a submissive.”
She nodded. “More or less.”
“Miranda is definitely dominant,” I offered.
“She would certainly fit the profile, but she’s currently incarcerated.”
“No. Annalise is, not Miranda.”
“Okay, that’s more your area of expertise than mine.”
I cocked an eyebrow. “Speaking of expertise, with all that information floating around in your head, why aren’t you working with the BAU yourself?”
