“Oh, I get it,” he said. “Believe me. I do. I’m just wondering if there is any way to know whether or not anybody around here had some sort of an accident or a hardship. I’m thinking of a scenario where they would have come to this place with the intent to stop others from having what they could no longer have.”
“Aren’t motives great?” she stated, turning to look at him.
“Yeah, it’s like any excuse will do to take a life and to make you feel better because you can’t do something anymore,” he stated, with a chuckle.
“You know what? People are really simple. It’s usually about greed, selfishness, power, or sex,” she pointed out. “It’s often about sex.”
“Which is all about power,” he added, with a nod of his head.
She frowned at that.
“You really should talk to the staff shrink about this case,” he suggested. “It could go in all different ways.”
“Nah, it’s a single case,” she argued. “I can’t be bothered.”
“Or you just don’t want anything to do with her.”
“You know how creepy it is to think that her predecessor is up on charges on all these other pedophile cases?”
“I know,” he declared. “Believe me. It’s something that I’ve woken up to in the middle of the night myself, wondering where her head was that she would actually continue to feed her brothers’ fantasies in order to keep herself in the loop.”
“And yet she’s denying all knowledge of it.”
“What about the murdering pedophile suspect himself?”
“Oh, he’s singing his tunes just fine, pulling his sister into it all.”
“Of course, because misery loves company. Once again back to that criminal mind thinking that,If I can’t have a good life, you’re not getting one either.”
“Is that what this is about, you think?” she asked, turning to look around at the jogging trail. “I can’t run anymore, so you can’t either?”
“Well, it’s thin,” Simon admitted, “but it’s certainly a motive.”
“It is,” she murmured. She shook her head. “Now I need a shower and food.”
“Definitely food,” he murmured. “And, if we had brought our swimming stuff, we could have gone for a swim.”
She frowned, looked at him, and considered that. “We’re already soaking wet with sweat—at least I am. I don’t care about getting wet. It’s just shorts and a T-shirt anyway. It’ll dry fast.” As a matter of fact, all she had on was a sports bra, a loose tank over that and her running shorts. She asked, “You want to hit the beach?”
He nodded and grinned. “Yep, even if I lose these clothes to the salt, it’ll still be worth it to round out this day.”
She laughed at that. “I didn’t think to bring towels, even just for after a sweaty run,” she noted. She dug around in her trunk and pulled out two plastic bags, which she draped over the car seats. “This will have to do to help keep the sweat smell out of my car.” They got into the vehicle, drove down to the beach, and, as they parked, she pointed. “And look. It’s almost empty.”
“Well, the sun is going down, and it’s been an absolutely gorgeous day.”
“We hit the running trail just right, didn’t we?”
“Just right,” he confirmed, with a nod. “Just enough light to see and not enough light to be hindered by it.”
“That’s how the killer hit it in the morning too. He has to know that trail,” she stated, shaking her head. “He had to knowthe trail, had to know the victims, and had to know that they would be the only ones there.”
“Only if he’d seen them on a regular basis.”
“Which also means he’s scouting, either for them specifically or for somebody who would be there at that hour.”
“So then the victims fit the time slot because the hour is what he focused on.”
“Well, it makes sense,” she stated. “It’s still damn thin. A stretch, really. I’d like a lot hardier, heavier motive than that.”