Caging a Copycat - Chapter 6

“We didn’t find the Charles Daggett file in his luggage or hotel room this morning.” Olivia had taken her seat as head of one of the most elite units in the bureau. Committed. Soft and strong in a way very few had mastered. She’d been thrown to the wolves when he and Harvey had taken credit for her insight into the Daggett investigation, and she’d come back leading a bigger, stronger pack. “That case has been closed for eight years. Daggett is serving life behind bars without any chance of parole. Harvey had no reason to reopen the investigation. Unless he believed Daggett’s claims that he’d been framed.”

“Whoever killed Harvey used Daggett’s MO. One stab wound for each of the wounds inflicted on his mother as a child, courtesy of his stepfather, who’d been an agent himself. You’re the one who found the connection, and we never revealed how many times each victim had been stabbed, to discourage copycats. I was there when CSU found the pen under the couch of the last victim. It wasn’t planted. There were signs of a struggle at the scene. Daggett killed the vic, got spooked, left it behind.” They’d been able to link Charles Daggett directly to the murder of that last victim, and to the other four through his signature alone. Because of her. Silas leaned forward in his seat, locking on her dark, rich eyes. “Charles Daggett wasn’t framed. We had the right guy.”

“I know we did, but you don’t find it odd that out of five scenes, he only left DNA evidence at one? That he’s been claiming he’s been framed, and now we have another death of a bureau agent across the country with the same MO?” she asked. “Either way, if the killer took that file after stabbing Harvey, there has to be a reason. There must’ve been something in it that caught Harvey’s attention and brought him to Seattle.” Short, gold-painted fingernails tapped on the keyboard in front of her. “We just need to find out what. I’ll search the NCIC database. See if there have been any other deaths with that MO during Daggett’s incarceration.”

No matter where they turned, this investigation kept coming back to Charles Daggett. The answer for why Harvey had come to Seattle, why he’d been killed, had to be somewhere in the case file. Silas had caught the case when a second agent had turned up dead in his home and worked it until Daggett had been arrested. He knew every element, every angle of the investigation, but there wasn’t anything that tied back to Seattle. Except… Silas focused on the three small lines developing between her shaped eyebrows, and the air crushed from his lungs. Except Olivia.

“Silas.” Olivia wrapped long fingers around the edge of her monitor and turned it toward him. The NCIC database logo filled the right-hand corner of the screen, but all he had attention for was the collection of crime scene photos. Nearly identical to the scene they’d found this morning in the hotel. Single victim. Female. Stabbed multiple times. Twenty-two if he had to guess. “I think Grant Harvey suspected Daggett had a partner after all.”

Silas’s mouth dried. “And it looks like he found him.”