Dead twins had been a good start. The psychology fit. That was why she had been able to convince Nate to go after him in the first place—because it wasn’t just wild conjecture. It was a solid theory.
Laura opened up the browser, started a search the way that she had before. Dead twins in Milwaukee. She’d seen most of the results before, but she kept scrolling, hoping. Thinking something else might be there that she had missed.
But she hadn’t. She’d seen every case. Everything that was relevant. There were no other dead twins wh
o fit the bill. Which left her right at another dead end.
Unless…
Laura’s heart rate picked up as she typed in missing twin Milwaukee, feeling like she was on the verge of something. Something that made a lot of sense. Not every death was reported as a death, right?
Some people weren’t reported as dead until their bodies were found.
She had a hit in the results. An appeal for a missing twin, over on the other side of the city. A very small local paper running a story about a man who hadn’t been seen in a few days. She checked the date, and her eyes almost popped out of her skull.
The news story had broken less than a week ago. Only a handful of days before Ruby and Jade Patrickson turned up dead.
Why hadn’t this been flagged up in relation to the case?
“Frome,” Laura called out, right as the detective was hurrying past her desk. “Come here.”
“What is it?” he asked. He had a few sheets of paper in his hand, and he gestured loosely with them. “Agent Lavoie just asked me to—”
“Never mind that,” Laura said. “Have you heard of a missing person case in the city this week? Name of Clark Clifton?”
Frome frowned, shook his head. “I didn’t deal with it.”
“No, it looks like it was probably reported at another precinct,” Laura said. “Can you check with them?” She gave him the details. She would much rather talk to the detective who took the report than look it up on the system. If this was a lead, she needed to chase it down as fervently as possible. She needed to act fast, and that meant getting the most up-to-date and accurate information she could.
Frome walked back to his desk and picked up the phone, talking into it quickly. Laura moved to join him, listening in as he asked for the details. Within moments, he was apparently talking to the officer who had taken the report, and Laura held out her hand for the phone.
“I’m just passing you over to Agent Frost,” Frome said, polite as ever. “She’s got some questions about your report, eh.”
“Hello?” Laura said, the second she had the phone in her hand and pressed to her ear.
“Hello, there, Agent,” the detective on the other end—a young woman, by the sound of her voice—answered. “How can I help you today?”
“Tell me about this missing person,” Laura said. “Everything you can—and who reported him.”
“Oh, that’s easy,” the detective said, her voice almost annoyingly cheerful. “It was his twin brother who came in. Almost caused a bit of confusion, that, the two of them looking so similar and all.”
“They’re identical?” Laura asked. Her eyes drifted back to the pile of files on her desk. She’d been assuming the visions were triggering for the victims. What if it was the other way around?
“Oh, yes.” The detective chuckled lightly. “Anyway, he says he hasn’t seen his brother for a few days and there’s been no one at his apartment. Couldn’t give me much more detail than that. He was distressed, poor thing. Wanted us to make sure we brought his brother back from wherever he’d gone. I had the feeling he thought he might have wandered off or something, and there weren’t a lot of risk factors.”
“What do you mean?” Laura asked.
“He’s a healthy adult male. No history of poor health, mental health issues, or so on,” the detective said. “The twin mentioned something about him having a new girlfriend. He hasn’t reported in at work, but from the way I understand it, it was a bit of a dead-end job anyway. Doesn’t seem likely that he would be trying to harm himself or suffering in some way mentally. In fact, when I suggested to the twin that his brother might have gone off for a week with his new girlfriend, he even seemed to relax. Like he agreed.”
Laura chewed her lip, thinking. It would be the perfect cover, though, wouldn’t it? Report your twin missing if you knew he was dead, and let the police think he was probably just off somewhere having fun so they wouldn’t prioritize an investigation. Let the trail run cold.
“Can you give me the details of the man who made the report?” she asked, grabbing her notebook out of her pocket. She had a feeling in her gut that she was onto something here, and she needed to follow it down before something else happened.
She was going to have to pay this brother a visit—even if it meant she was going to have to go alone.
CHAPTER THIRTY
Laura looked at the house from a short distance down the street, out of the yellow circle of the streetlights. It was fully dark out now, everything lending just that little extra bit of chill in the atmosphere. The house itself was quiet and dark too, no lights in any of the windows. It was very likely that the homeowner wasn’t home.