“And did you get Missing Persons in on it?”
“Yes, I did,” she confirmed. “They’re running down ownership or tenants to see if we can find any connection to our cases, plus also checking utilities to see if any of these buildings may be turned off. I would think our killer would be using power.”
“If he needs a cold room, that is another angle,” Rodney added. “Remember that blood flows at a slower rate when people are cold.”
“Damn,” Kate replied, “I was hoping that was a way to knock down the numbers.”
“It might be, but I don’t think we can discount it totally,” Colby stated.
She nodded. “I went through the case files on the two Alberta cases, compared them to our two,” she told him. “The one thing I can say is that it’s the same guy. DNA was found on the one set of clothing for one Alberta woman. Not on the other, yet some was on her body.”
“Right, so we don’t have DNA here, outside of the kid. But, if he was locked up when these Alberta cases happened, it’s looking like we put the wrong person behind bars.”
She thought about that, nodded slowly, and added, “Something is still so twisted about this.”
“Nothing more than usual,” Colby stated. “Twisted is pretty much the norm in these cases.”
She thought about it and agreed. “I’m still looking for what the next plan of action would be.”
“Well, if you have nothing else to do,” the sergeant suggested, “there are always those nineteen locations.”
She winced. “I guess there’s no reason not to.” She stood. “Until the utility/ownership data comes in, I don’t have any other way but to do this on foot. I’m waiting on DNA too. So, it might be a waste of man-hours, but at least we could eliminate some of them. That would be something.”
“That’s a tangible accomplishment,” the sergeant agreed, “and it would do you some good to get outside for a bit.”
With that, she gave Missing Persons an update and walked out to her vehicle and looked up the addresses on her list. “Bloody BS,” she murmured, as she looked at them. “Still, with this guy, maybe he’s running a generator for power or stealing electricity off a nearby address.” She didn’t think so, but she picked the five closest to her and headed out.
As she walked up to the first building, she checked the location against the presence of that church window, then frowned and nodded, mumbling to herself, “You know what? It is possible, I guess. It wasn’t a very good sketch, so we still have a lot of possible rejects here. But it’s what we have.”
As she wandered up to the apartment building directly across from the church, once inside, she hoped to see her target window from certain landings, then choosing the floors which were the closest match to Simon’s vision. It still left an awful lot of options and a lot of interpretation between a couple floors—depending on the angle and how exact the drawing was.
As she stood at the end of her first chosen hallway, staring at the church through a small window here, she phoned Simon. “That sketch you gave me,” she began, “were you looking directly at the window, angle-wise?”
“Pretty close, yeah,” he replied. “Why?”
“Because I’m in an apartment building across from a church with a similar window, but I’m in a hallway landing, so I’m slightly off to the side of the church window.”
“My vision was directly on.”
“So, height-wise as well?”
“Yes,” he replied, completely understanding the point of her questions, “definitely the same height.”
“So seeing the lower part of the church window frame?”
He frowned for a moment. “Yes. The lower part of that large church window.”
“Okay,” she noted, “in some cases I might have to check apartments on the floors above and below.”
“Yeah, I could see that,” he agreed, “but I drew it as close as I could.”
“Good enough.” She disconnected from Simon, then turned and knocked on the first doorway. When a young woman answered, a baby in her arms, Kate introduced herself, with a smile. “Have you heard any disturbances in this area in the last week or so?”
The woman looked at her in surprise and shook her head. “No, it’s a very quiet area. It only gets busy on Sunday for church, when we get a ton of traffic outside. Other than that, it’s fairly calm and quiet.”
“So, nothing disturbing, nothing unpleasant?”
The woman immediately shook her head. “No, not at all. It’s one of the reasons we chose to live here. It’s all about families.”