CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
Laura sat down next to Nate at the desk, grateful that they at least had a private area to work in at this precinct. It felt a bit like a storage room, and there was only one desk with two chairs, but at least they had somewhere. It often felt like there was too much attention on them when they had to sit out in the bullpen. Here, they could focus on getting the job done.
“We’ve got to work through this the logical way,” Nate said. “They’ll tell us if they find anything with the freight. Meanwhile, we’ve got to try and see where we can make links.”
“What about the therapist?” Laura asked. It was the first thing she’d thought of. If the first two were his patients, then surely the third had to be as well. They had the complete list of everyone he’d ever seen, emailed over to Nate at their request yesterday evening. He opened up the file and quickly searched it, looking for Xavier Perez.
“No match,” Nate said, his voice heavy and tired.
Laura heaved a sigh. Despite a night of sleep, she felt the same way he did. “It’s social media time, isn’t it?”
Nate chuckled at her reaction. “Sorry, but yes.”
“Alright. You find John Wiggins, I’ll work on Kenya Lankenua. First person to finish gets Xavier Perez.”
“How lucky for them,” Nate smirked. They both knew it wasn’t exactly a prize. It was a punishment for being too good, almost.
Checking social media profiles was boring and often unrewarding work. First, they took the usernames that the locals had searched up for them on every social media network possible – a job that they sometimes had to outsource to their own FBI techs if the local police were limited, but thankfully here it had already been done.
Laura and Nate then navigated to the profiles of their chosen victims, and searched one by one through all of their follower or following counts. On some networks there was a search function, which made it easier – but on others, it was a case of literally scanning manually down a list of what could be thousands of names.
Whether or not there was a match, the next step was even less thrilling. They would scroll through posts and photos, looking for something that linked the victims together. It could be a comment or like from one of the other victims. It could be a photograph which happened to have all three of them in it – perhaps in the background of one another. It could even just be that they had all mentioned going to a certain bar or a yoga class or whatever other interests they might have had.
But as Laura scrolled down through page after page of data from Kenya Lankenua, she started to have a sinking feeling that they weren’t going to get anywhere at all.
There didn’t seem to be one single connection. Laura kept writing down the names of places Kenya had visited, checking them against Nate’s list, but there was no concurrence between them.
All three of these people seemed to have lived, worked, and loved in completely different spheres than one another, now that the link of Dr. Usipov was ruled out.
And if there was no link between them…
“We could be looking at crimes of opportunity,” Laura said, with rising horror. Crimes of opportunity were the worst. You had nothing to go on as to who the next victim might be. There was no way to predict it. You had to go after the killer alone, and when he was leaving so little evidence, that would be a huge challenge. There was no doubt in her mind that if they were dealing with an opportunity killer, there would be more bodies stacking up before they got anywhere close to catching him.
“It’s so deliberately arranged, though,” Nate argued, making a face. “I don’t know. It feels like he knows these people. Like he’s trying to send a message.”
“What if the message is about him?” Laura asked. “Not about the people. What if they’re just like – like mannequins to him. Once they’re dead, they can be posed and arranged however he likes.”
Nate nodded. “Alright, that does make a little more sense. You think maybe if he was able to kill two people in one place, he wouldn’t need the mannequin?”
“Yeah, could be,” Laura said. She didn’t know. Neither of them did. Without the visions, she felt like she was lost, trying to find some kind of direction without the knowledge to do so. Orienteering without a compass.
“Well, then, we should be focusing on the mannequins,” Nate said. Laura could see that he was working something through in his head, having an idea out loud. “Where does he get them from? I know we haven’t seen any identifying markings, but where could they come from?”
“I guess he could buy them,” Laura said. “I don’t know how many you can get in one batch, whether it’s wholesale only or you can buy them one at a time.”
“They don’t necessarily look new,” Nate replied. “If he’s buying them second-hand, it could be hard to trace them down. But you’d want a single source, wouldn’t you? To make it easier to find the ones you needed when you needed them. You’d want to know you could reliably get more.”
“Then you’d go to a wholesaler or dealer,” Laura said. “We might be able to trace the purchases through.”
“We could do that,” Nate said thoughtfully. He was tapping a pen against the side of his wrist, an almost hypnotic and rhythmic movement. “But I think we should ask Captain Ortega to put someone on it and look in a different direction ourselves.”
“What direction?” Laura asked, fighting back the urge to laugh at him for being melodramatic with the reveal.
“Thefts,” Nate said. “If I was picking up a bulk load of something that I needed for my crimes, and I knew it was going to stand out as a signature, I would steal them instead of buying them. There would be no paper trail. And since I’m already committing murders, I probably wouldn’t consider theft to be so huge of a crime, especially if I was already in a position where it would be easy for me to steal them.”
“Where would that be?” Laura asked with a frown. “An easy position, I mean.”
“I guess somewhere like a retail store,” Nate said. “A big one or one that changed the style of mannequins they used, so they have a lot in storage. If they don’t check on them often, that would be totally ideal, but then I guess it would also be a case of opportunity. He might take them wherever he can get them. Maybe even getting each one from a different place if he really has to.”