Double Vision by Colby Marshall Page A

his piece, and then he joined Porter with the local task force leader here. Now we pursue your gut feeling, Jenna. Just don’t make me regret it.”
    â€œOh, you won’t,” she said. She opened the Triple Shooter case files in front of them, gingerly laying out pictures of the three early victims in a neat line across the table. “The grocery store killings are the exception, not the rule. The older victims are how we’ll find him, by smoking out a pattern. Every kill he commits, he gives us another clue, and sometimes he gives us a retroactive one without realizing it.”
    â€œWe’ve already established that the Triple Shooter kills compulsively. He isn’t searching for fame or notoriety. He
is
doing it to
stop
something from happening, i.e, he’s paranoid. Paranoia makes him dangerous, unstable. If spooked, he might run farther, hurt someone, take hostages. His pathology would escalate, maybe trigger a spree.”
    Teva leaned her elbows on the table, propped her chin on her fists. “Isn’t it safe to say he’s already
on
a spree?”
    â€œNot anything compared to what’ll happen if he gets scared and angry,” Jenna replied.
    â€œOkay, so paranoid, dangerous nut job who may or may not see threes that cause him to kill people. What’s up with the religious connection you mentioned on the phone?”
    Jenna stood and went for the coffeepot. She poured herself a paper cup, dumped in two sugars, then stirred as she sat back at the table. “I talked to the little girl who was a witness at the grocery store. Kid has a sharp eye, notices things others don’t. She’s also obsessed with numbers, so I thought maybe I could get a childlike perspective on what the numbers might mean.”
    â€œAnything good?”
    â€œMore than I bargained for,” Jenna said. She swallowed the hot coffee hard, the liquid leaving her throat searing.
    Jenna took another gulp to stall even as she willed herself to continue. Her suspicion that Molly was pointing her in the right direction might not be seen as valid by most. “We spent time looking at a print of the restored version of
The Last Supper
in her stepfather’s study, and she ended up telling me tons about numbers and deities, symbolism. Call me crazy, but I think we should take a harder look at the religion aspect.”
    â€œWhy do you say that?” Saleda coaxed.
    Jenna stood and continued to sip her coffee, pacing the burgundy carpet. “When someone kills another person, they can have a variety of motivations. Passion, financial gain, revenge, political agenda, self-defense, religious fanaticism—that sort of thing. But this guy, he kills because something sets off his compulsions, typically repetition of the number three.”
    â€œSo the threes align, his sensibilities are, what, offended? So he strikes?” Teva asked.
    â€œNot exactly,” Saleda interjected. “Something about the threes lining up has to threaten him or otherwise set off his compulsion. The compulsion isn’t the number three alone. Robbery and revenge can be and often are motives, just like Jenna said, but in the case of OCD or schizophrenia, you’d be killing someone because the repetition of the numbers was somehow threatening to you—or because someone told you it was.”
    Teva nodded. “Okay. So the threes align, the Triple Shooter gets spooked, annihilates the threat before it can annihilate him. So what about the threes freaks him out?”
    â€œCould be anything,” Jenna said, pacing the room some more. “Molly talked about deities—for all we know the Triple Shooter could think God is pointing an enemy out for him to kill by showing threes near that person.”
    Teva strolled slowly past the victim photographs. “We’re assuming the deity is the Christian God. Plenty of other religions use threes in conjunction with holiness. Are there any other