Lamar gestured to the bones. “There is damage to the bones consistent with multiple deep knife wounds.”
“Seven?” Paige asked.
“At least four,” Lamar said, “but it is possible that other wounds were present without damage to the bones.”
So there was nothing there to suggest that this wasn’t Nikki Ashenko. If there had been a dozen stab wounds, that would have been a problem, but as it was, Paige’s theory that this was the copycat still held.
“What physical evidence were you able to recover from the body?” Christopher asked.
“After three years in a stream?” Lamar said. “Almost nothing. DNA and prints have been washed away. There’s no flesh left, so there won’t be any evidence to recover from that. Frankly, we don’t even have a full skeleton yet. At least some of the smaller bones are still missing. My guess is that they were carried further downstream.”
Which meant that they weren’t going to get anything that was going to lead them to the door of the killer.
“Is there anything you can give us?” Christopher asked.
“Given time, I should be able to provide the dimensions of the blade used, so that if you recover one, I’ll be able to match it to the one employed.”
“Have you done that with the other cases?” Paige asked.
“The ones that I’ve seen. There should be similar profiles in the reports for any other cases,” Lamar said.
Meaning that they potentially had a way to work out which murders had been committed by which killers.
“Were all of the most recent murders committed using the same knife?” Paige asked.
“Yes, I believe so.”
Meaning that the copycat killer kept the same weapon for each murder. That might also prove to be useful.
At the same time, though, it didn’t seem as though it was enough. It wasn’t as if knives were registered like handguns. There was no way to trace a knife back to the killer even if they could identify it precisely. The best they could do was to use the evidence to link the killer to the crime once they caught him.
They still had to do that, and it seemed as if the only way they had to go about it was to follow the clue that Lars Ingram had given them.
“Thank you for your time,” Christopher said. “Can you call me directly if you find any evidence that might lead us back to the killer?”
“Of course,” Lamar said.
The two of them headed back out to the car, and there, Paige got her laptop out.
“Do you want to head back to the office?” Christopher asked.
“I want to try to find out what Ingram meant when he said Braeburn,” Paige replied. “It has to mean something.”
Christopher gave her a serious look. “It’s possible that it doesn’t. Ingram was a psychopath. This could be just another way to mess with us.”
Paige knew that was a possibility, but she also didn’t believe it, not entirely.
“You saw how he was caught off guard,” Paige said. “I think that he kept it to one word to mess with us, but I think the word itself means something. The question is what.”
“All right, start checking, see if you can find anything that might be relevant,” Christopher said. “Check police records, the DMV, everything you can.”
Paige checked the records, and the problem wasn’t an absence of hits, but an overabundance of them. Even though the name wasn’t that common, it was still common enough to bring in hits from around the country, with no way of telling which might be relevant or not.
Paige needed to try a different approach. She started to look back into Lars Ingram’s history instead. There was a lot there, but at least she knew that any mention was going to be relevant. She looked back through the case files, looking for any mention of the word Braeburn.
The murder files didn’t have any mention of the word, but Paige kept going as Christopher drove back towards the office, looking through news reports, trying to find any kind of mention.
When she found it, it wasn’t the name of a person, but of a company: Braeburn contracting services. It was there, buried in the transcript of a podcast devoted to Lars Ingram’s crimes, the kind of thing that wasn’t trying to do the kind of research Paige had been doing, but instead was mostly trying to get the maximum entertainment value from the viciousness of the crimes.