“Depends on whether he was talking in real time?” Lilliana guessed.
She shrugged. “I don’t know.”
“That’s the thing about psychics, isn’t it?” Owen asked. “One time it’s good information, and the next time it seems like it’s screwed up. Just like this church thing. We spent how much time—no, you spent how much time looking for windows that matched it?”
“Yet how do I say it was wasted time when it’s how we found our latest victim,” she reminded him.
“I know. That’s what I mean, but it was so vague, and now Simon’s wondering if it’s a church window after all.”
“I get it,” she agreed. “I just don’t know what I’m supposed to do about it. I can only tell you what he told me.”
“So, why don’t you fill us in on what you thought you were thinking of earlier,” Rodney suggested.
She looked at him in surprise. “Oh, that.” She looked down at her paperwork. “Back to the vicarious theory, I guess I’m wondering if the kid has a partner.” She looked up from her notes. “And if it’s somebody close to him.”
“What do you mean?” Lilliana asked.
“I think the kid’s directing this. Or at least somebody in his circle is directing this.” Kate hesitated.
“So, somebody is actually giving orders, and somebody else is following them?” Rodney clarified.
“Does that fit with the angry man who we suspect has Chelice?” Colby asked.
“I don’t know,” she admitted, “unless he’s waiting for instructions or waiting for a sign or waiting for I don’t know what.” She raised both hands. “But the fact that the kid was physically there in these provinces at the same time as these women were being killed makes me very suspicious that it’s either somebody moving along with him—as in authority figures even, perhaps healthcare individuals, or somebody who came to visit him, or somebody he had contact with on the outside, and the kid was actively participating in the tortures and the murders.”
“We’re going back to motive then,” Colby stated.
“And I don’t know what that is. I was doing another check into his sister, who we think is victim zero, but she was a fairly innocent teenager.”
“Not that innocent,” Owen argued. “She was very heavily involved in church, infixinga lot of things. But she was anti-drugs, anti a lot of stuff on the surface. Did you know that the family was pretty broke?”
She looked over at him and shook her head. “No, I hadn’t heard that.”
“They were, and there was talk that they got a life insurance settlement on her.”
Her jaw dropped. “On the daughter?”
Owen nodded. “I’m getting confirmation of that now. There was a policy, but I don’t have confirmation yet that it was paid out.”
“Jesus, but, if it was on a child, it wouldn’t be very much, would it?”
“It was ten thousand dollars,” he replied.
“I would really hope that nobody would kill her for ten thousand dollars,” she replied slowly.
“People have killed for far less,” the sergeant reminded her.
“I know,” she admitted. “The world sucks, and we don’t need any more reminders of that fact. But that doesn’t seem like a big enough motive for the torture element.”
“No, and I don’t know about the torture either, unless it was to throw us off. And then what? Somebody decided they liked it?” Colby asked.
At that, they looked around at each other.
“You know that happens,” the sergeant stated. “It’s not the most common methodology of developing a serial killer, but, if you actually participate in something, and then you enjoyed it to the extent that you couldn’t stop thinking about it, you would turn around and do it all over again. I mean, in the sense that you’ve already killed once, therefore, the value of life is obviously pretty low.”
She added, “It’s possible, but it still feels like we’re missing something.”
“It mightfeellike we’re missing something,” Rodney noted slowly, “but it does feel like we’re getting somewhere.”