Laura stormed out of the interview room and back to her desk, a purpose forming strongly in her mind. She didn’t meet anyone’s gaze, avoided speaking to anyone or touching anything, single-minded in her directive. She needed to go back to the research.
She needed to find a pair of twins who had been broken apart. One dead, one still alive. Based in Milwaukee.
The good news was, she didn’t think she would need to spend hours combing through medical records or birth records to get this. A death of a single twin was tragic. The thought of the one left alive, alone for the first time—it was the kind of tragedy that would sell papers.
She went right to the homepage of the local newspaper and input her search term: twin dies.
The results were sparse. Of course they were. It wasn’t exactly a common event. There was a heartwarming article about a pair of elderly male twins who had died within a few days of one another at a nursing home, in their nineties, each one only ready to go if the other was. Laura discarded it.
But the next one down…
The next one down was exactly what she was looking for.
Laura got out of her chair, grabbing her jacket and calling Nate. She needed to find out where he was so they could get
over to this man’s address and arrest him.
She had a feeling that she’d found their guy.
CHAPTER TWENTY SEVEN
Laura found him sitting outside, waiting for her. He still hadn’t said, on the phone, what he’d been up to. Just that he would meet her outside. And there he was, on a bench outside the precinct, his tall frame held straight against the curved metal framework.
“Nate,” she said, tentatively, because she wasn’t sure that he would want to cooperate with her after all.
He looked at her. His face was blank, almost carefully so. “You have a new lead?” he prompted, recalling the words she had given him on their call.
“Yes,” she said. She hesitated again, then sat down next to him. He shifted uncomfortably, as though he hadn’t been prepared for her to come into his space. “I found someone who could be our killer.”
He frowned. “Last I heard, you were talking about twin women.”
“I know, I know,” Laura said. “Just forget about that. I’m talking about good old-fashioned police work. It’s different.”
“What, then?” Nate asked, shifting to face her a little more. She could sense he was more comfortable with this. With the idea that this wasn’t related to the reason they had fallen out.
“I was thinking about the profile of the killer,” she said. “Why someone would want to kill identical twins, specifically. And it hit me. You were right.”
Nate frowned. “About what?”
“Kevin Wurz. The killer was never after him in the first place,” Laura said. “He hasn’t been back to the apartment, hasn’t tried to get at him anywhere else. It’s like he’s given up. Or, since he never showed up that night no matter how long we stayed, maybe he was never after Kevin at all.”
“I thought you didn’t believe that,” Nate said reproachfully.
“I didn’t,” Laura said. “But the more time goes on, the more it seems like Kevin isn’t at risk. The killer went ahead and attacked Kenneth while the police were there anyway. Why would he hold back from Kevin just because he thought the police might also have gone to his place? He wouldn’t. He would have gone to check. He would have broken in, and we would have found him.”
Nate only grunted in response to that. He was clearly both annoyed that she had argued with him about it before, and vindicated now that she agreed.
“So, I thought about why he’d kill only one of the male twins. And it’s basic psychology, isn’t it?” Laura said. She paused to let Nate fill in the blank, but continued when he didn’t. “What if he was an identical twin himself, but his brother died?”
Nate nodded, almost reluctantly. “Yes. That would fit a profile pretty well.”
“That’s why I started searching local news.” Laura took her phone out of her pocket and showed it to Nate, already loaded up with the article ready to read. “There was a case about a year ago. Look. An identical twin was killed in a car crash. His brother survived the same crash.”
“Survivor guilt?” Nate guessed.
“More than that,” Laura said. “I was able to look into him a little more, through his own records. He was committed after suffering a psychotic break which saw the police called to his workplace to restrain him. He couldn’t take losing his brother. It broke him completely.”
“But if he’s committed, then he can’t be our guy,” Nate said.