When Kate wokeup the next morning, her eyes opened, and her brain clicked on. To think that the two recent murders of Candy and Paula were connected to the death of Sally on her bike was something completely different. And it surprised Kate that the killer had positioned Candy’s body near Sally’s crime scene. Was that deliberate or accidental? Were there two killers?
At the same time, Kate wondered how much of Candy’s death scene was a copycat of Sally’s, and how much might be that the killer had seen Candy and Paula at Sally’s crime scene and had chosen his next victim then. Just so many options. She bolted out of bed and dressed quickly, realizing again that she still didn’t have any groceries and couldn’t keep existing on the leftovers from Simon.
She walked to work, her steps rapid and purposeful. Her mind buzzed with possible connections, possible links. But she needed to track them down and see if she could toss some of them out. Maybe if she got lucky, another autopsy would have been completed by now.
She thought about turning around, grabbing her vehicle, and heading up to the morgue, but changed her mind, as she should wait until the coroner came back with his reports for her. She stopped, picked up one more of those absolutely lovely pretzels that she really shouldn’t be eating all the time, and carried it into the station, still warm and steaming.
Grabbing some coffee, she sat down at her desk and brought up her emails. No autopsy report. It wasn’t even eight o’clock, so it was early yet. With her notepad, she wrote down all the possible scenarios she could come up with. Then she set up some searches. Way more computing power should be here than there was, but she would do what she could. She wondered if their analyst, Reese, had bigger and better tools at her disposal. Kate needed to remember to ask that of someone later.
Right now she started searching for more history on these bullying kids and then brought up anything that looked like UBC complaints in the local media. She was still trying to sort through the last cyclist-related accidents that had happened in the previous ten years in that same area, then widened the search to include a ten-block radius.
She wasn’t even sure what she was looking for, just a connection. The fact that she had a second ice-bullet victim now at the same intersection within four days—not one year later—meant something different was going on. That it was connected to these students was something else again. She just didn’t know quite what it was. Her computer hummed along steadily, as she wrote down notes.
When Rodney walked in, he stopped and looked at her. “Stop being so damn early all the time.”
“I woke up with my mind buzzing. I need to get some of this down on paper and rule out some of these scenarios.”
“Run them past me because I’m feeling like my brain is dead.” He went and got coffee, then sat beside her, as she went over her notes. “Yeah.” He contemplated her list of potential scenarios in front of her. “The connects are just pretty slim, don’t you think?”
“It’s possible the killer was watching the chaos after Sally, the first woman, died at that intersection recently. Maybe he saw Candy there. Maybe he saw the whole group of bullies, and they did something that pissed him off. I mean, they’re the kind of people who piss everyone off. They are callous and inconsiderate. They don’t give a damn about anyone else. For all we know, they may have laughed at our killer or something.” She was warming to the theory now. “Given the bullies penchant for pushing and hurting the disabled, what if our potential killer is in that group?”
Rodney turned and looked at her with respect. “Interesting notion.” He nodded.
“Not impossible, anyway,” she said.
“Sure, it’s a bit of a reach, but this kind of a killing is also distant. Or is this true for these ice-bullet pistols?” He swung over to his desk and punched in a speed-dial number. “Hey, Reese. Quick question. Are ice-bullet pistols long range or short?” He waited while keys clicked in the, background then nodded. “Thanks.”
“Wait,” Kate called out. “Ask her what her workload looks like?”
Rodney laughed. “Did you hear that?” he asked Reese. He paused. “Got it.” He hung up and swung around in his chair to face Kate. “She says heaped. If it’s important, she’ll get to your stuff fast. If not…”
Kate grimaced. “By that time, I’ll have slogged through it myself.”
“Impatient little devil, aren’t you?” Rodney laughed.
Kate waved him off. “What about the range of the ice-bullet gun?”
“Depends on the delivery mechanism used.”
“Of course,” Kate groaned, then motioned him over to her and her list again.
He pointed at one of her items. “But why are the dead cyclists always women?”
“I don’t know, unless of course a woman disabled our killer, our fictional killer, and put him on this revenge path.”
“It’s possible.” He nodded. “But…hmm. Let me check those witness photographs and see if anybody was obviously disabled. Like crutches, walkers, canes. Do you remember talking to anybody with a limp? Was anybody there missing a limb? Or had an obvious facial deformity?”
Kate shook her head. “Nobody immediately comes to mind, but I was more interested in their faces for ID confirmation purposes. You look at the photos, while I keep running this down.”
He nodded and swung his chair over to his computer. “I guess we don’t have anything on that kid Brandon, do we?”
“No, he’s at home, promising to stay in town.”
“Do we believe that?”
“Yes.”
“He probably will. He can’t take a chance of getting kicked out of the university.”