Page 28 of Wrong Way

"Looks that way. It's not a stretch." Sarah closed the window she'd been reading from and looked directly at the camera. "I know this breaks slightly from the established pattern with the elemental murders. Those killers are usually responding to Kane's framework, not to a personal loss. But I think that's what's different here. I think our killer has built a framework around something he was already feeling. The intimacy of the method, the specific people he chose, the manifesto language about false light and fraudulent healers. It's too personal to be purely ideological. Maybe Kane sniffed that out and knew Owen would be easy to exploit."

"He's not punishing a category or an element per se," Miles said. "He's punishing specific people."

"People who had contact with his sister before she died. People she had trusted and said failed her." Sarah sat back slightly. "The church, the fortune teller, maybe the energy healer. And then she went and grabbed two hundred amps of current from a neon sign cabinet at two in the morning."

Miles looked at the food on the table in front of him without really seeing it. The whole shape of the case had just changed. Not the method, not the evidence they had already gathered. The shape of the thing underneath all of it. He had been building a profile of a killer who selected victims based on an ideological framework, a man who had absorbed Kane's philosophy and was applying it to a category of people. And instead he was looking at a grieving brother whose sister had suffered, had reached out to people who took her money and couldn't help her, and had then died with her hands on a neon sign terminal. Everything after that was consequence.

"The manifesto notes," Vic said. "He named Valdez specifically. He described exactly what she charged and how she operated."

"Because he knows," Miles said. "He probably looked into all of them after Rachel died…trying to understand what she had paid for, what she had been told. He built a case against them and then he started executing it."

"And he used the element that killed her," Sarah said. "He didn't just land on neon because it fit the elemental framework. He chose it because of what it means."

"Okay," Vic said. She opened her laptop and started pulling up records. "Owen Gallagher, thirty-one, former employee of Nightly Neon. Does he have a current address?"

"Last known is a rental property on the east side," Sarah said. "I'm sending it to you now along with everything else I've compiled. DMV record, employment history, the social media archive from Rachel's accounts, the ME report."

Miles looked at Sarah on the screen. "How certain are you?"

"Certain enough that I'd want to talk to him," she said. "But of course, I’m not there…I’m stuck behind a desk and a series of screens.”

“But that’s where you work your magic,” Vic commented.

“The employment history alone puts him in the right professional category,” Miles said. “The connection to Rachel and at least two of the victims is documented in her own words.”

“And the timeline works,” Sarah said. “Nightly Neon closes, Owen is suddenly unemployed, and six months later Madame Celestine is dead." She met his eyes through the screen. "I'm not saying it's airtight. I'm saying it's the most coherent picture we have."

"It's more than that," Miles said. He looked at Vic, who was already reading through the files Sarah had sent. "It's the only picture we've had that actually makes sense of all of it."

"What do you want to do?" Vic said, eyes still on her screen.

Miles picked his burger back up, more out of automatic motion than appetite. It was still good, even cold. He thought briefly about all the lists and timelines and electrical schematics they had been working through for the past two days, and how none of it had pointed here. Sarah had pointed here. She had shifted her filter and sat with the data quietly and come out the other side with Rachel Gallagher's name. "We speak to the father of the Gallaghers," he said. “And then we go speak to Owen himself.”

CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

The warrant denial had come at 10:15 in the morning, delivered by a county clerk in a flat, expressionless hand-off. Hahn had stood in the corridor outside the judge's chambers for a full three minutes afterward, holding the paperwork and staring at the wall. Insufficient probable cause. The purchase records, the employment discrepancy, the social media post, the storage unit name change. The judge had decided it wasn’t enough to get access to Parsons’ storage unit. Hahn considered finding a way to speak to the judge himself, but he knew that was unlikely and would only cause more problems.

So instead, he figured he should find some other way to get the answers he needed.

He had returned to his rental car and sat in the parking structure for a moment, thinking about Ortega's three-day clock. He had just one day left. In fact, if it were a firm clock, he should be heading back to DC no later than nine o'clock tonight. In other words, whatever he was going to do, he needed to start doing it now.

That was how he had come to find himself watching Jennifer Parsons's apartment. He’d been parked across from her building since 11:40, with a clear line of sight to the front entrance. His original plan had been to stake her apartment until about five in the evening and then go back to the storage unit and try bribing whoever was working. It would be frowned upon at the bureau, but if it helped nail one of Kane's disciples before they could become active, he was pretty sure such a little slap on the wrist could be overlooked.

As it turned out, he didn’t have to worry about that.

Parsons emerged from her apartment building at 12:10, dressed in a gray jacket and dark jeans. Hahn watched her as she got into a silver Honda Civic parked on the street outside her building. Hahn gave her half a block before he pulled out and followed. When he did, he wasn’t nervous at all. No, he was locked in and fully prepared to do whatever it took to find out if Parson’s was indeed one of the Elementalist’s disciples.

The first twenty minutes were unremarkable. Parsons drove to a grocery store on Commercial Street, went inside for approximately fifteen minutes, came back with two bags, and drove back in the direction of her apartment. Hahn stayed three cars behind her on the main roads and dropped to one car on the smaller streets. She stopped at a red light on Middle Street, and he pulled up two car lengths behind her and studied her in his mirrors. She was looking at something on her phone, propped against the steering wheel.

After this, she drove south instead of back to her apartment.

Hahn followed, wondering what communication might have made her redirect from her apartment, regardless of the grocery bags currently sitting in her back seat. She took a right onto Market Street and then a left that put her heading east, away from the residential area and toward the older industrial blocks near the waterfront. The traffic thinned considerably once they cleared the main commercial corridor, and Hahn added distance between them to compensate. Out here, a car that stayed at the same interval for more than a few blocks was easier to notice.

She changed lanes without signaling, cutting left when there was no apparent reason to do so, then cutting back right at the next intersection. Hahn watched it happen and did not follow the cut immediately. He remained in his lane and picked her up again at the cross street. Two minutes later she took a right that added four blocks to what would have been a straight route south. He followed from a full block back, watching her brake lights through two additional turns that accomplished nothing in terms of destination but a great deal in terms of confirming that she was not simply driving.

She was checking. She was being careful.

Hahn understood this with a certainty that settled cold and quiet in his chest. The erratic lane changes and unnecessary turns had a specific geometry to them: they were designed to make anyone following her break cover or fall behind. She was running a counter-surveillance pattern, and she was running it with enough composure that he had almost missed it as routine inattention.