Page 35 of Wrong Mail

I told myself I wouldn't do this tonight. I told Kane I wouldn't do it at all, and then I told Cassandra I would, and somewhere between those two is the woman I've stopped being able to predict.

The photos are open on my phone, swiped into the order my hands sorted them into a week ago. Beside them, the laptop has a county paper's archive loading in one tab and a map in another. I write on the backs of envelopes because I can't find a notebook. Counties. Dates. How he got in. That's the one I keep coming back to.

Douglas County, four years ago. A husband and wife. They'd installed an alarm system eighteen months earlier. It never tripped.

Deschutes County the year before. Nothing forced. Nothing broken. In the fourth paragraph, the reporter slips in the only line that matters, the one they probably weren't supposed to write.

Investigators have not ruled out that the victims were known to their killer.

There were no signs of a break-in.

The archive tells me they did connect them in the end, though the papers never spoke to each other. Roseburg and Bend are a hundred and eighty miles apart. They had no reason to.

It took years. Then somebody put the assaults together and gave the killer a label. After that came a task force out of Salem, four counties in it, a consultant flown up from Quantico. After the task force came a great deal of nothing.

No suspect. No arrest.

Then he stopped two years ago, and the murders stopped with him. The file has been sitting in a basement ever since, waiting for a man who never came back.

That's what I keep turning over. Not that nobody looked. That everybody looked, but they all looked the wrong way.

And now, here, next door. No forced entry, Rodriguez said this morning, sitting on my sofa. He'd made it sound significant. He has no idea I'm looking at dozens of cases.

I sit back on the stool.

My hands are shaking, but I'm not frightened. I want to be honest about this, because I've been lying to a therapist for two years. I'm not frightened.

I want more.

David comes down at half past ten with his phone in his hand and his face rearranged.

"That was Helen."

"At this time of night?”

"There's a thing." He's already moving toward the hall, patting his pockets, doing the little pantomime of locating his keys. "The Hendricks patient. The numbers are wrong. The resident's panicking, and Helen wants me to look at him before she has to make a call she doesn't want to make."

"Now?"

"It's twenty-five minutes each way, Mal. I'll be back by one."

He finds the keys, and then he sees the island.

David stops. He looks at the open laptop on the kitchen island, the newspaper page glowing on the screen, the envelopes covered in my handwriting, and the wine glass at my elbow. He says nothing at all for about three seconds.

He frowns. "Mallory."

"Don't."

"What?"

"I already know what you're going to say."

He puts the keys down. He comes over. He does the thing where he crouches slightly so he's not standing over me. He puts his hand on the back of my neck, and it's warm, and everything in me wants to lean into it.

"Two people were just killed next door," he says quietly. "And you're at the kitchen table reading about murder. I'd have thought you'd want that as far out of your head as possible."

"These are from Oregon." I hear how fast I'm talking and I can't slow it down. "That's the point, David. I think they might be connected. Wealthy couples in their homes. No forced entry. That's exactly what happened to the Ericksons. What if it's the same person? What if whoever got in next door has done it before?"