“Could be,” Laura said. But then she made a face, shaking her head. “But if he’s like the other two, we’re going to have to work hard to figure out who the connection is here. Someone who joins all of them. If we didn’t find the link yet, I have a feeling that this third variable is going to make it harder, not easier.”
“Surely it will be easier to narrow down the field of people who could have come into contact with all three,” Captain Ortega argued.
“Maybe,” Laura replied. “But to get there we need to sift through all his friends, his family, his coworkers, everyone he came into contact with. It’s like searching a haystack for a needle while more hay keeps getting poured on top all the while. We’ve already ruled out the therapist that linked the first two. We can check just in case, but we know he’s not the killer, so I don’t even know how much a connection there would help.”
“And this is going to keep being a problem,” Nate said, his voice a low rumble. “Because if he’s already set up three scenes for us to find, he’s not going to feel like he’s done and he can stop. He’s going to keep on killing until we stop him.”
Laura nodded. She had been thinking the same thing.
This was a relentless killer, the kind who could carry on racking up a huge body count if he wasn’t stopped. They couldn’t let that happen.
“I guess we’d better speak to this neighbor who found the body,” she said grimly, wanting to get on with this case as quickly as they could.