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“Not yet, we’re not,” Nate said. “There are still a lot of names to go – oh, look at this one.”
Laura read from the screen. “Reported missing after leaving downtown area bar… found strangled by roadside on outskirts of town in a quiet area. What’s the date?”
Nate scrolled down. “Six years ago.”
Laura hit the desk, causing the two local cops who were quietly working on the other side of the room to look up in alarm. She waved at them in a quick apology, then returned to the screen. “I knew it,” she said. “This is him. This is a pattern. Once every two years.”
“It’s not exactly two years, though,” Nate pointed out. “It’s not the same date each time, or even the same month. They seem to be happening at random times through the year.”
“That doesn’t matter,” Laura said. “It’s once every couple of years. Something happens every couple of years – or maybe that’s just the period he needs to cool down from the last one and start feeling that irresistible urge again.”
“Then let’s look back at eight years,” Nate said, refining the search again.
Laura held her breath and bit her lip.
Then it came up: three results. Nate clicked on two of them and ruled them out quickly. “This one is a suicide… let’s see the other… no, this one is domestic abuse. Looks like she ran away from her husband and he filed a report, but she was in a shelter in town the whole time.”
“And the last one?” Laura asked, feeling like her heart was beating inside her throat.
Nate opened it and they both read in silence, looking for any red flag that would tell them it didn’t fit the pattern.
“This fits,” Nate said with some excitement. “A drunk woman, heading home on foot from a bar, found strangled to death in a quiet alleyway behind several disused buildings. He must have waited until she walked by there and then pulled her in.”
“It fits perfectly,” Laura said. “Two years ago, four years ago, six years ago, eight years ago. How far back does it go?”
“Only one way to find out,” Nate said grimly. He clicked around on the screen, changing the parameters once again, keeping everything the same but the year. Ten years ago.
One result came up.
Nate clicked on it, and they both read with bated breath.
“A single woman walking home from a bar,” Laura said, the words almost choking in her throat. “Taken and strangled in an area of woodland, but it looks like not the same place as before. Somewhere in the south of town. It was St Patrick’s night. They must have been dealing with a lot of drunken incidents, and this one didn’t get the amount of manpower it deserved.”
“Twelve years ago?” Nate asked, searching one more time.
The system returned no results.
“Then that’s it,” Laura said. “Ten years he’s been operating for. At least, ten years here. It’s possible he might have targeted a different area previously.”
“Or gone to three year intervals, instead of two,” Nate said. “Maybe he sped up over time.”
“Or his earlier victims weren’t found, or weren’t reported,” Laura said. She rubbed her forehead with one hand. “We could sit here all week running different searches and checks, trying to ascertain whether St Patrick’s was his first. We need a full team if we’re going to do that. We can’t do it alone, not when we’re not even supposed to be here right now.”
“But we have information now,” Nate pointed out. “We know enough to put a profile together. We have five victims.”
“July Hall, Joy Kingsley, Alayna Honeysett, Sarina Waterman, Allison Park,” Laura said, reading their names in reverse chronological order. “So much for our idea about them being connected to the letter J.”
“This is good,” Nate said. “It means we’re not wasting time chasing down something that doesn’t actually have any bearing on the case. And we can see his MO clearly here. Each time he goes to a different bar, he picks a woman who seems to be random, and he waits for her to go through an abandoned or secluded area so he can kill her without being disturbed.”
“It’s only the fact that the last two victims were at the same bar at different points in the night that would even connect these cases at first glance,” Laura said. She reached over and clicked the mouse on the printer icon, thinking they should have physical copies of these files to look over. “I’m not surprised no one connected them otherwise. They look like random attacks.”
“And with the time between them, I’d bet there aren’t a lot of officers here who are still working the same type of cases over the whole ten years,” Nate pointed out. “People quit, retire, get promoted, move to different cities or different departments. Without one person working on every case and spotting both the MO and the time between each case, it would be almost impossible to put them together. Young women getting strangled on a night out – it’s sad to say it, but it’s not rare enough to raise huge eyebrows.”
“Especially not when they have the volume of other cases,” Laura agreed. “The other disappearances and, I’m sure, other murders of women. And given they weren’t all even found the same night they disappeared, I’m guessing there was sometimes suspicion of other types of foul play – maybe a woman being abducted and kept for a few days was a possibility in some of them.”
“Definitely for Allison Park,” Nate said, pointing at the screen. “She wasn’t found for three months. By then, they had no real way of narrowing down the date of her death precisely enough. They just knew she’d been dead for the majority of the time, but not whether it happened immediately or not.”
“Well, I’m glad we’ve put this together,” Laura said. “Maybe there’s a way to connect them and get some justice, find a way to link together what little evidence there is. There’s just one thing that bothers me.”
