“Do you think you’ll be able to get fingerprints too?” Mark asks.
“I wouldn’t count on those, not with all this blood,” Ida says. “I’ll have something by the morning.”
Mark turns to me and suggests we go back to the apartment. Frankly, I’m jazzed up enough to walk every one of those ten paths Sojer mentioned and chase this killer down now, before day breaks. But a tiredness is also starting deep inside me, and I know it won’t get any better.
So I take his arm and lean on him as we start the walk back to our car, and don’t try to fight the tiredness.
“You’re thinking this death is the result of you getting involved,” Mark says and it’s not a question.
“I think that’s a safe bet, don’t you? Either that, or he’s escalating very rapidly. Which seems unlikely after sticking to three deaths a year for two decades.”
“We definitely stirred something with our investigation,” he says in that cold, monotone voice he gets when things are unfixably bad. “And we clearly made it worse.”
I squeeze his arm reassuringly. “We’re not responsible for this.”
And I wish I was as certain of that in my heart as I sound.