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Nate stood with her and lingered for just a moment, looking down at Hart, and Laura knew that he was playing out his own revenge in his own way, trying to intimidate him. There was a little comfort in the thought that maybe he wouldn’t be so obvious with his behavior for a while if he thought that a big, burly FBI agent was watching him. Somehow, though, Laura doubted it. Men like that knew they could continue to get away with whatever they wanted.
She took a deep breath of the air outside as soon as she was out through the door, feeling like she needed to go somewhere to wash her hands and change her clothes.
“What now?” Nate asked in a low voice as they approached the car. “We’re at a dead end. Pun not intended.”
“Now, we do what we always do,” Laura said. “We find the killer by looking at the victims. Come on. We’ll find somewhere to sit and go through everything we know about both of them – and when we find that connection, we’ll know who we’re looking for.”
Of course, she added to herself privately, that was only going to work if there really was a connection between the two victims.
But without that, they would have nothing to help them get any further on the case – and Laura didn’t want to admit defeat yet. Because she was sure a man who had killed two women in such a way wouldn’t have stopped there – and it had not escaped her notice that with two years between each of the cases, the next two-year period would land right about now.
CHAPTER TWELVE
Laura closed the door and looked around with a nod. “This will do very nicely.”
Nate chuckled to himself. “I don’t know how you think of these things.”
“Well, I heard about private soundproof study rooms online,” Laura said. “I had an idea the local college would have one, and here we are.”
“In a student library,” Nate said, with barely suppressed mirth. “Hey, are you sure they’re totally soundproof?”
“I’m not certain you would get away with playing a drum kit in here, but we’re just going to be talking at normal level,” Laura said. “And you can’t hear anything from out there, can you?”
“No,” Nate admitted. He chuckled again. “The librarian’s face when you showed her your badge and said you wanted to requisition a study room.”
“Alright, alright,” Laura said. “We need to focus here. Let’s dig into them as much as we can.”
“It might be difficult, you know,” Nate said. “I know we would normally comb through social media profiles for some kind of a connection, but what I’m worried about is that anyone who died four years ago isn’t going to have much of an online presence left.”
“I know,” Laura said. “But we still have to make sure we do all the possible checks we can before we move forward with this. If there’s even the tiniest possibility of a connection between them, we need to know. I want some ammunition if we’re going to go and speak to either of their families – I don’t want to stir up that old grief if we don’t actually have anything new to bring to the table.”
“I get it,” Nate said. “But don’t you think the bar is connection enough? They might have met each other there, and we’d never be able to disprove it.”
“Unless we can show that, for example, July Hall never went to the Major Hart before two years ago,” Laura pointed out. “If their paths crossed in a bar, that’s one thing. I want to find an actual connection. A mutual friend, an interest group, the same class at school – anything that we can actually use as a lead.”
“I get it,” Nate said, though there was a touch of weariness in his voice. “I’ll start going through different sites. How do you want to divide them up?”
“Oh, we’re not dividing them,” Laura said. “You’re working on connecting them. I’m going to investigate the bar.”
Nate frowned. “How come you get the fun bit and I get the long, tedious, and probably ultimately unrewarding bit?”
“Because it’s my case,” Laura grinned. “Anyway, I’ve got to look at endless pictures of drunk, stupid people, so it’s not all fun.”
Nate’s face dropped. “Will you be alright?”
Laura brushed him off, waving a hand. “I’ll be fine.”
She bent over the tablet she had rented along with the room, quickly searching for and loading up the bar’s website, studiously avoiding his gaze until he looked away and got on with the task at hand.
She found a few galleries on the bar’s site, but they only seemed to be illustrative of the facilities they held – there was no long-running gallery of all the people who’d been present on certain event nights, something that always used to come up in the past. Times had moved on, which was a shame – it had always been a good investigative tool, looking through months or even years of past event footage.
Laura navigated to their social media instead, looking through photo after photo, seeing all the images the bar had posted as well as the ones they had been tagged in. There were thousands – far too many to take them all in one sitting.
Luckily, she didn’t need to take in all of them. In each case, she scrolled back as far as two years ago and then looked for posts made around the time that July Hall had died. She even found a few news posts in which the bar was tagged, talking about the case. She noted the comments on each one, scanning the usernames, trying to store them away in some compartment in her brain. It wasn’t unheard of for killers to insert themselves into the online dialogue about their victims.
Even though she went back over the course of a whole year, though, she couldn’t find any images that contained July Hall just enjoying the bar as a regular patron before anything happened to her. If she had been there before the night when she was killed, there was no evidence of that just yet.
Laura scrolled back further, but the bar had apparently not held an online presence four years ago – or if it had, all those old posts would have been archived or deleted. She sighed, shifting to the side to lean on one of her arms as she thought.
