Page 99 of Fatal Pattern

“Both, I guess.”

“Where did you sit?”

Hoult’s rubbing motion stopped abruptly. His hand clenched into a fist. “I stood.”

“The entire ride?”

“Yes.”

“But earlier you said you were tired from work.”

The contradiction hung in the air like smoke. Hoult stared at the table, his chest rising and falling in rapid, shallow breaths.

Tori caught Edwards’s attention and gave him a slight, sharp nod. Time to close.

Edwards’s voice remained calm. “Jeremy, I think we both know you weren’t on any bus last night. Your alibi at Waffle House has a two-hour hole in it. And you weren’t robbed by two men in hoodies.”

Hoult’s attorney started to object, but Edwards continued.

Edwards leaned forward across the metal table, his kind eyes hardening into something sharper. “Let’s talk about your sister, Jeremy.”

Hoult’s breathing turned ragged, shallow gasps that bounced his shoulders. The color drained from his face, leaving him pale as parchment.

Tori felt her own pulse race. She’d expected Edwards to press the stalking charges, to challenge the timeline inconsistencies. Not this. Not yet.

“What’s her name?” Edwards coaxed.

Hoult’s lips trembled. “Victoria.”

His gaze found hers across the table, and the anguish in his expression sent ice through her veins. Gone was the nervous defendant, the skilled liar, the calculating predator. What remained was something broken and desperate and achingly familiar.

Then the dam burst.

“She was so little,” Hoult sobbed, his words tumbling out in a torrent of grief. “Four years old, just like me. We had matching purple pajamas that Mom bought us for our birthday. Victoria’s was a purple nightgown. She loved that thing. Wore it every night.”

Tori cocked her head and stared at Hoult. The sobbing from the killer across the table felt wrong. Like someone had flipped a switch. Serial killers didn’t fracture like this. They didn’t pivot from calculated lies to raw hysteria in seconds. Especially killers who stabbed their victims with such violence, then staged their bodies with a fractal signature.

But the purple nightgown.

He was faking it. She could see deception all over this guy, but what exactly? No one outside the sealed case file could’ve known about the purple nightgown she’d worn that night. Not her foster parents. Not even Blade.

Yet Hoult spoke as if he’d been there.

“We shared a room.” Tears rolled down Hoult’s face. “Bunk beds. Victoria always made me check under her bed for monsters before she’d go to sleep. I told her I’d always protect her from the scary things. But I couldn’t protect her that night. I hid under the bed when the bad man came. I left her alone in the closet while he hurt Mommy and Daddy. I was supposed to take care of her, and I failed.”

Each detail hit Tori cut after cut. The shared bedroom. The matching pajamas. The promise of protection. Details that were too specific to be fabricated. Details that only her brother could know.

Jeremy looked directly at her through his tears. “I’ve been looking for you my whole life, Victoria. I never stopped hoping I’d find my sister.”

The man who’d shadowed her steps, broken into her home, drawn her blood. He was the same four-year-old who used to crawl under her bed, hunting monsters for her.

And her brother had become the very thing he’d once promised to protect her from.

A monster.

27

The uniformed officer’s hand closed around Hoult’s elbow. The cuffs clicked against the metal chair as Hoult stood, his movements loose and cooperative. Hoult allowed himself to be led through the doorway, his shackles scraping against the floor. Schmitt gathered his papers, but Tori remained frozen at the table, staring at the empty chair where her supposed brother had just confessed to stalking and trying to kill her.