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CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN: FANTASY ( aka 04x09: 52 pickup )
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"VANESSA HOLDEN, TWENTY-FIVE," Todd introduced the blonde woman displayed on the screen. "Last Friday night, she was clubbing with her sister. A stranger, white male, roughly her age, picked her up. They left the club at 1am, went back to her place. He forced her on her hands and knees, and then he cut her open, just below the stomach."
"Whoa," Dallis gasped.
"Pretty rough," Morgan commented.
That was quite the understatement. Vanessa Holden's eyes were open and webbed with angry red veins. Blood dripped from the corner of her mouth onto the cream carpet she was sprawled across. The tight black dress that clung to her body revealed the ruthless slash across her stomach creating another much larger crimson stain beneath her. Not for the first time, Dallis dwelled on what those staring eyes had seen in their final moments. Some people believed the eyes were the window to the soul. If that was the case, Vanessa Holden's windows had been shattered.
"Gutting causes the intestines to spill out," Reid remarked, pointing to the clumps of organs scattered through Vanessa's bloodstain. "You can survive for a few hours, actually. Even days."
Subconsciously, each of them looked towards Todd. It took her a minute to realise they were waiting for more information from her. Don't get her wrong, Dallis was trying her best to get used to JJ's absence, and this was only the second case that Todd had approached them with, but if it was JJ presenting it to them, she would have known the ins-and-outs like the back of her hand. "Post-mortem indicates that he slit her throat at 5am."
"So he disembowelled her but didn't kill her for four hours," Rossi said.
He was leaning back in the chair opposite Dallis, the first two buttons of his shirt undone to reveal slim collarbones and a smooth expanse of skin. When he glanced across the table at her and found she was already looking at him, a sly smirk tugged at the corner of his mouth. He accepted one of the folders Todd was handing around with an unwavering gaze that Dallis was the first to admit defeat to.
"This could be a sexual sadist," she pointed out, making Todd sigh.
"Yeah, I thought so too, but then I found two priors from a year ago. Prostitutes, actually, in motel rooms."
"Okay, so keep running with it," Morgan encouraged her. "Why do you think this is the same unsub?"
Todd crossed her arms and turned back to the screen, a determined glint in her eye that Dallis had seen a few times now, particularly whenever Morgan opposed what she had to offer. Only a few days ago, the team had solved a local case involving a man posing as a college professor. He was abducting women who fit the 'golden ratio' and killing them in the vast underground chamber beneath his Chester home, hoping to seek revenge on Rossi for family skeletons he kept deep in his closet.
