Blind: Killer Instincts Read Free

me in the first place. And you can call it a murder. I’m not sensitive about it.” She shrugged and pulled a scrapbook out of a portable plastic filing box she’d brought with her. “TBK stands for, as you probably know, torture, blind, and kill. He gave himself that name, and we know that because he signed it on all his communications. TBK was known for sending letters to the police, newspaper, and even his victims. He liked people to be scared. Sort of a mind-fuck. Anyway, while a lot of the letters were sent to the police with details about his future victims, a couple of times he even told them how he was going to pose a body, and he did send some to his victims before the murders. My grandparents actually got several from him. The problem was that he messed up their address, so the letters bounced up and down the street before one of the neighbors walked them down to the house and left them in the mail slot after their death. They were actually boxed up when the house was cleaned out, and I didn’t find them until a few years ago, which is why they were never in the official evidence at the trial.”
    “Really?” He held his hand out.
    “I have to warn you, these are graphic.” She held the book to her chest and watched his face carefully. She kept the letters separate from the books about her grandparents. Not everyone wanted to be exposed to them. TBK had a flare for the gruesome and there was no doubt he’d positioned the bodies to have the most impact.
    His features tensed a little and he nodded. She handed the book over and let him flip it open. For several moments he stared at the first one, his brows drawing down and his lips squeezing together.
    “Are these consistent with his other letters?” Jacob continued to pore over the first page, which was the least offensive of the collection.
    “Yes. I had them compared to the documents in evidence downtown.”
    “And the cops didn’t want these?”
    She shrugged. “Why? TBK was dead. They didn’t need them. The notarized certificate of authenticity is on the last page if you don’t believe me.”
    Jacob flipped to the next page. “TBK.”
    “Yeah, he signed them all by hand, while the rest of the letter was a hodgepodge of words cut from magazines and stuff. I think he thought they could figure out who he was by his handwriting.”
    “But he still risked signing them?”
    She shrugged. “Ego maybe? It doesn’t make any sense to me, but neither does killing a bunch of people.”
    He quietly perused the last pages, only glancing at the notarized certificate before handing the book back to her after a few moments. “You have some other letters?”
    He was persistent. He didn’t even glance at her boobs now, and that was a shame. All business, no play.
    “I do.” She filed the scrapbook back in her box and retrieved a second thick book full of plastic sleeves and pages. She handed it over with a shrug. “I have letters from three-fourths of the murders.”
    “Really? How did you get to keep these?” He seemed horrified, but she couldn’t wrap her head around why. What was it he was looking for? She tried her best to stay out of her clients’ business. Maybe she should have asked Jacob a few more questions about why he was so interested in TBK.
    “TBK was meticulous about how he picked his victims, but he wasn’t so great about making sure the letters got to people who would open them. A lot of the families got the letters and hid them. Some of the letters were lost in the mail like my grandparents’. I really came into them by accident. Like the first family, they sort of threw them at me. They were ready to get rid of them, but didn’t want to trash them.”
    “The cops didn’t want these?”
    “The families never turned them over. It seems like some of them pushed stuff under the rug to try to move on.”
    “That’s hindering the investigation.” His frown deepened.
    “Maybe to you, but for them it was survival. These people