Wants to stop abortion,â Dodd said. âEven if youâre at the clinic for condoms or a cancer screening, youâre going down with the docs performing the abortions.â
âAlong with any fetuses still in-utero inside the building at the time.â Teva frowned. âKilled like the people they wanted to punish for harming them. Doesnât make sense, though, because itâs not like this is a pro-choice bank, operates inside a rainbow building, or has fur rugs and only hunters for employees.â
âYouâre right, Rookie. But youâre thinking only about the want something part. Stop thinking about
who
they want dead, and think about the other half of the equation. Who do they want to fear them? Not the dead â¦â Dodd said.
âPeople who are alive to see the results,â Teva replied, nodding.
Sure. And after an abortion clinic bombing, that meant something. Scare the types of people who made abortions available at those clinics. But this wasnât a medical clinic or even some giant corporation raking it in on Wall Street.
But to the killers, it symbolizes something.
Jenna took another long look from one side of the room to the other, the crime scene in her vision like something she only wished were part of an action movie set.
Her gaze settled on the body of a young, white male splayed face first on the shiny wood floor. She wandered toward him, squatted beside his still frame. He was exactly where heâd fallen, according to the M.E. The first responders had left the initial scene completely intact for the FBI.
Jennaâs gaze drifted from the back of his closely-cropped hair the same color as the darkest roast coffee she had in her cabinet at home to his neck, torso. Heâd fallen face first into a decent-sized puddle of his own blood, and yet, the puddle he was in was closer to his stomach. The stab wound to the side of his neck â his carotid artery â wouldnât have produced that much blood and definitely didnât make sense with where the pool was in relation to where heâd fallen.
She crouched so her head was as close to level with the floor as she could get it, squinted at what she could see of the manâs shoulders, chest. Soaked red down his front. She sat back, glanced at the wound to the side of his neck that most likely had finished him despite the plethora of contenders for the honor. A bit of spatter from that stab on his right shoulder, but just residue. What sheâd expect.
Bending again, Jenna squinted to see his blood-soaked front. No way a jab to the carotid had soaked the collar and all visible portions of the guyâs white button down. She turned her head toward where the victimâs nose had cracked against the polished wood, leaned even closer. Sure enough, a deep slice stretched from under his chin across to at least his Adamâs apple. Still forcing herself to tune out her colleaguesâ conjecture behind her, Jenna hopped to her feet and circled to the victimâs other side, though she had a feeling sheâd see that his foe had carried that knife swipe cleanly across his trachea, left to right.
Throat slit
and
his carotid. Guy had a really, really bad day.
Jenna blinked, sat back on her feet. The sounds in her ears buzzed as a shade of ochre flashed in. The same shade sheâd seen when her dad had confronted her at age twenty about how she resisted any and all dating. Sheâd sat on the couch, afraid to tell him the reason sheâd never wanted to go to prom or to the movies with a boy in high school, never brought a guy home to meet the family in college was because she was terrified of making the wrong choice. Of picking a mate who ended up being a psychopath. She didnât want to tell her dad that life with Claudia had caused her not to ever want relationships of her own because she was scared sheâd make the same mistake he had.
The two scenarios that caused the ochre