Crime Series #14

 Predator by Patricia Cornwell 

This was more twisty, more tense, and more intense than some of the previous books; not that that's a bad thing. There were a lot of terrible characters in this book, and I was jumping to conclusion left right and center trying to tie all of them together. Kay and Pete are on the outs. They are working in Florida and Pete was in charge of some of the training but then one of his "death scenes" goes awry and now nobody trusts him. Enter Joe (maybe, can't remember). He is the fellow studying under Kay. He sucks. Not only is he a misogynist, but we later learn that he is a fake and a fraud; all of his recommendations are faked. He is also cheating on his fiancee constantly with some hot young thing from each class of students. He and one of his paramours cook up the issue with the "death scene" that gets Pete removed. While investigating everything else, Pete is the one that discovers that he has been getting into Lucy's secure servers and has been stealing case information. Pete is also the one that finds out his is a fraud and gets him arrested. One suspect down. Meanwhile, Lucy picks up a woman in a bar and takes her to her room. The woman has hand prints on her breasts and thighs but she never really tells Lucy about them. Also, Lucy is acting strangely and we find out she has a brain tumor. Benton is at Harvard studying the brains of killers to see if they have any visual differences or observable reactions that are abnormal to help understand killers. One of his patients gives him a tip about a kill he made which was unreported and outside of his normal pattern. Kay, Lucy, and Pete all investigate it from different angles. Meanwhile, we also have the death of a prominent doctor, who just so happened to be treating Lucy. We also have a psychologist who has been treating Pete, treated one of the missing boys (but not his brother or his guardians), and has been collaborating with Joe. She is unhelpful until she gets targeted by a fruit inspector and then gets a crazy call on her talk show. It turns out, the murder the patient was talking about only partially happened; he killed the mother but not the daughter. The daughter was sent to live with an uncle (?) and he abused her. During the abuse she developed another personality; she ends up having multiple and they discover she has Dissociative Identity Disorder. She was the woman that Lucy picked up. She was also the male citrus inspector. She was also the man that kidnapped and murdered the two boys and their guardians (one guardian killed herself instead of getting killed). She was also the man who was going to break the patient out by volunteering to participate in the study as a normal subject for comparison. The breakout was foiled. Lucy figured out that abused girl with DID was the bad guy and they were able to arrest her. This was a lot. None of my theories were correct.