That he’d met her then had to be a sign.
Fate had brought him and Summer together, and who was he to argue with fate?
* * * * *
5:06 P.M.
“So, you know who the burned woman is?”
“Her name is Zoe Kitter,” Jonathon informed his boss.
Captain Heidi Kramer narrowed her eyes at him, her thin, bony face looked sterner than usual. “How did you ID her already? I thought the body wasn't in the best of condition.”
“Luck,” Allina replied.
“Tracey was able to get a usable fingerprint and started running it through databases, and she got a hit,” Jonathon expanded.
“She has a record?” Heidi asked, spinning a pen between her fingers. Heidi was approaching sixty and still extremely energetic, she was rarely still. Sometimes on days when five-month-old Brady had kept him up all night, he felt tired just watching his boss bounce about.
“Possession and prostitution,” Allina answered.
“She’s done a couple of stints in prison,” he added.
“Anything in her history that might have made someone angry enough with her to want her dead?” Heidi asked.
“I doubt it,” he replied. “During her last prison sentence, she gave birth to her only child. Apparently, having the baby taken from her right after giving birth was the wake-up call she needed. When she got out, she joined Narcotics Anonymous, she got a job, and did everything the court required to regain custody of her daughter.”
“Who reported Zoe missing?”
“No one. She wasn't reported missing,” he answered his boss.
“Well, where’s her kid?”
“With the cousin. When we went to see her, she expected us to tell her that Zoe was either back in prison or had died from an overdose.”
“When was the last time she’d seen Zoe?”
“Four days ago,” he replied.
“She hadn’t seen her cousin in four days and didn’t say anything? Why didn’t she report her missing?”
“She was worried that Zoe had relapsed, and she didn’t want her to lose the baby, so she was looking after the little girl with her kids. She was hoping Zoe would just turn up,” he said.
“Did she relapse? Could be what got her killed,” Heidi said.
“Tracey will run drug tests, but I don’t think her death has anything to do with a relapse,” he said. “The killer left a teapot at the scene. It’s the Nursery Rhyme Killer.”
Heidi tensed at that. None of them wanted to believe that the killer had turned into a serial killer. “His motivation for choosing these particular victims could be something to do with either drugs, prostitution, or criminal histories.”
Allina shook her head. “That doesn’t fit with the previous victims.”
“No criminal history in either of their backgrounds,” he reminded their boss.
“That you found. Just because they had never been arrested, it doesn’t mean there wasn’t something there. We’ll need to go back through their pasts and see if you can find something. There has to be something that connects Zoe Kitter with Adam and Macy Dove. We just have to find out what it is before he goes after someone else.”
Since he had made his third kill, he was now considered a serial killer, and most serial killers only stopped because they were caught. There would be more victims until they either found and arrested the guy or he was dead.
“The Doves had completely different backgrounds than Zoe. They were both college-educated, both had good jobs, had been married for twenty-five years, had one grown son, were foster parents, no history of drug or alcohol abuse, no arrests, not even any tickets,” he summarized.