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Connor offered a sad smile. “We know that you’ve been harassed by a scammer who’s offered teenagers auditions over the years. Naomi’s experience seems to fit with this.”
“Your lieutenant said as much. How did you learn of the scam?” the headmaster asked.
“Unlike the reporter,” Connor said, “we do our homework before we charge in. What we’d like to know is how often these scams occurred, what times of the year, and what you did to track the perpetrator. Because we’re assuming you tried to stop him.”
It was a nice deflection and redirection, Kit thought. Good job, Connor.
The headmaster nodded once. “We did. Your lieutenant gave us an idea of what you wanted, so I invited Ted Bolin, our IT professional, to the meeting. Mr.Bolin, please tell them what we know.”
The IT guy smiled nervously. “The first time this scam occurred was fifteen years ago. I wasn’t here at the time, but my predecessor kept track. There was always a scholarship dangled as a prize, and the target of the email was always female.”
“Blond and under five-three?” Kit asked.
Ted nodded. “Yes.”
“Did they occur in specific months?” Connor asked.
“Yes,” Ted said again. “September and February.”
“The September occurrences always puzzled us,” the headmaster inserted. “We open the application process in the late summer, both for regular admission and the scholarship award. We’ve never done an audition in the fall.” She frowned. “Did some of the victims go missing in the fall?”
“Yes, ma’am,” Connor said sincerely. “February as well.”
“It didn’t happen every year,” Ted said. He handed them a sheet of paper with several dates. “These are the reported occurrences of the scam.”
The pattern was immediately identifiable, at least for the last five years. Every time a scam occurred, there’d been no video of a murder, including this past February, two months ago.
Kit had been right. The girls who kept the secret ended up dead.
The list of occurrences was short—only four in the fifteen years they’d been happening. Which meant that the majority of the girls kept the secret.
The killer had to have a good feeling who he could trust not to tell. Add that to the profile. But how had he lured his earliest victims if not using the scholarship scheme? Their first Jane Doe was murdered between seventeen and twenty years before—two to five years before the first occurrence of the scam.
And why had the “scam” begun only fifteen years ago? The Orion School had been operating for nearly thirty years.
Oh. “When did you start offering scholarships?” Kit asked.
“Seventeen years ago,” the headmaster said. “Why? Is that important?”
Kit glanced at Connor before answering. “Most probably, yes.”
The headmaster paled. “He’s been using our school to lure his victims all the time?”
“He may have had other lures,” Connor said. “We don’t know. It’s a puzzle and we’re just starting to see the major pieces.”
Because Sam Reeves had needed to do the right thing. Thank you, Sam.
Kit hoped he was okay. She’d hated leaving him so torn up. I never should have put him in that position.
But she’d needed to know. For the girls.
“Ted, did you or your predecessor try to trace the emails?” she asked.
“Yes, of course. We even brought in consultants to help. But whoever is doing this knows what he’s doing. He uses VPNs and routes his communications through servers all over the world.”
“We figured as much,” Connor said. “Would you be able to show our CSU team the analyses you’ve done? They may have forensic tools that look a little deeper.”
Kit didn’t hold much hope for that. Finding the living room in the videos would be a better use of their time. It had to be in the city because the girls had been able to easily get there.
