Team 3: A Tinted Nightmare

Chapter 4

10 years ago a boy confessed to me.

He said we had been friends for way too long and that at some point he started seeing me as something more.

He said he knew how things had been hard for me since my dad died, but he wanted to be the one by my side. Though he couldn't do anything to make things better, he wanted to be the one I could lean and count on.

He wanted to be the one to make me smile on my bad days and be the first person I think of on good days.

But unfortunately for him, I already had someone.

And now standing in front of me in the meeting room was that brown-eyed boy with his black hair overgrown and covering his eyebrows like they always had.

It had been 10 years since I last saw Tyler Beckett after we graduated.

"Hi, Susan... been a long time huh..."

"You know each other?" said Dave

"Ah...yeah...childhood friends...", I replied.

"Oh, that's nice. No need for long introductory then. Settle in team and hurry up!", said Dave.

After everyone took their place, the nervousness took its time creeping up on my neck. This was the moment I had been waiting for, for the past 11 years.

I was finally going to find out the truth today.

Throughout these years I have been doing my own search after being accepted into the force. But the access I had to certain files and documents was limited. That was also why I gave it my all to make it into this team. But if dad's death had anything to do with this case, does that mean my search has been pointless all along?

"So this is Tyler and he will be joining us temporarily for this case. As you all know we have analyzed whatever evidence and data we could get our hands on for this case. But with Katy's murder being similar to the past ones, the chief is not happy with how little progress we have made.

I understand that this is a 12-year case we are dealing with and hardly have evidence to work with, but we need to start looking from a new angle and start from square one. Because now it's not just a case from 12 years ago but one that happened a few days ago.

Tyler will be working as our profiler and he will join Susan and Max for the time being. Tyler, Chico can you walk us through the suspect's profiling?"

Tyler walked up to the front and switched on the presentation. He had clearly worked on this in detail.

On the first slide of the presentation was a summary of all the victims we had encountered so far.

"As you can see all the victims of this case are females within their 20s and 30s. They were all murdered in places close to them like their home or workplace and were quite ordinary people.

But when you study the murder patterns, whoever this killer is, has some sort of strong grudge or anger against them.

Katy was murdered with an axe that smashed her skull and Amanda was pushed from a 20 story building.

And her case is especially different from the others because it has been framed to look like a suicide".

Tyler then shifted to the next slide with a close up image of the killer's signature that we were all too familiar with.

It always got me thinking why this dude would go through all the trouble to keep those imprints.

Like I get it he's marking his kill or whatever and enjoying the pain, but seriously why?