Page 54 of Wrong Mail

"Or someone let him in,” he says.

"Or it's someone they weren't afraid of." I turn a page back, and then another. "Dogs. Four of these households had dogs in the house. None of them were drugged, none were hurt. So either they didn't bark, or..."

"Go on."

"Or nobody heard them, which I don't believe, not in four houses. Or..."

"Go on."

"He'd already met the dogs."

"Good," Henry says. "I wondered whether you'd get there."

I stop at the Pruitts, a photograph of a gray-shingled house that could be any house on our road. "That's what's wrong with all of it. These are careful, wealthy, private people, and every one of them opened the door in the dark. So either he was very good at looking like he belonged, or he did belong. He could stand on a doorstep in a good coat at nine at night and have the door opened to him without a second thought."

I stop.

Henry hasn't moved. "What is it?”

"Or they never opened a door at all." I go back through the pages, faster now. "What if he was already inside. What if he'd been in the house before, on a day nobody was home, and gave himself a way back in. A window. A slider that looks locked but isn't."

"And the dogs?"

"The dogs had met him." I hear how certain I sound and I don't stop. "That's why they didn't bark. He wasn't a stranger to them. He'd stood in their home. He'd probably fed them something out of his own hand."

Henry drums two fingers against the windowsill. "Which would tell you what?"

"That he watches them first." I look back at him over my shoulder. "They aren't random. He picks them."

Henry smiles.

"Anything else?"

"Not without diving into each of the case files. That's as far as I get from scanning what's on the table." I turn back to the Pruitts. "He's familiar with the layout of houses like these. He's someone who could get close without neighbors asking questions."

"Someone with access," Henry says.

We build a column after that, slowly, the light going gold and then amber across the folding table. We consider what the killer must be, never jumping ahead to who. He's patient. Knows how money behaves, and how to look as if he belongs near it. He has access to the insides of protected lives. Someone who travels, or whose work carries him across county lines. The murders cover more of Oregon than any ordinary life should.

Someone who travels.

I write it on a card in my own handwriting, and I look at it, and a cold thread goes through me, gone before I can name it. I set the card face-down.

"You've done this before," Henry says. It isn't a question.

"Of course. I was a crime reporter. I told you."

"You were more than that." He's looking at the card in my writing. "The way you went through that just now, that isn't reading the news. That's someone who's worked cases. Stood in the rooms. Seen the bodies."

I frown. "I've never worked a case like these."

"No," he says. "I don't suppose you have." And he lets it go, the way he lets everything go. He moves us back to the map, to how far the killer drove between one county and the next, and I go with him.

Henry watches me a moment longer.

"At the start you said people like this lock up. Care to elaborate?"

"I meant people who live in expensive homes,” I say.