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Gretchen said, “They’re always fully clothed.”

Noah poked his head around the corkboard. “Other similarities?”

“They’re always killed at night,” Josie said, flipping through the files. “They were all last seen or last in contact with anyone late in the evening, after nine p.m., and found in the morning. There are estimates of time of death here ranging from midnight to four a.m. Sylvia’s death is a bit of an outlier in that sense.”

“Only by a few hours,” Noah said, disappearing again. There was more squeaking from the marker. “Kills after midnight. What else?”

“There is nothing else,” Josie said, unable to keep the frustration from her voice. She had been through the files three times since they received them. There were no commonalities in the victims’ geographical locations, friends, acquaintances, employers, the places they frequented, the schools they’d attended—nothing.

“Maybe we need to look more closely at the first attack on Sylvia,” Gretchen suggested. “He stopped killing after that.”

“As far as we know,” Turner said. “He could have moved elsewhere. Hell, he could have been in California for the past fifteen years killing innocent women.”

“There’s nothing in the NCIC,” Gretchen pointed out.

The NCIC, or National Crime Information Center, was an FBI database that allowed local and state law enforcement organizations to share and search for crime information nationwide. Entering data was voluntary, but Josie was certain that if the Last Kiss Killer had continued murdering women somewhere else in the country in the past thirteen years, some department would have uploaded details that matched the Pennsylvania cases.

“It’s more likely he laid low for a while, and then went to prison for something else.” Noah walked back to his desk, capping his dry-erase marker. “I do think we should look more closely at Sylvia in general, though. Let’s start with her phone records. Anything of interest there?”

“Yeah,” said Josie. “Her boyfriend.”

Fifteen

Josie plucked the stack of records she’d printed out an hour ago. It wasn’t everything. Since Sylvia’s phone had been destroyed in the fire, they hadn’t been able to do a forensic download. Instead, they’d served warrants on both her mobile carrier and her cloud service provider, which had resulted in years’ worth of documents and photos.

Stretching over the desks, she handed the pages to Noah. “I only printed out what I thought was relevant.”

Turner tossed his foam ball from one hand to the other. “What we thought was relevant.”

Noah took a cursory look through them before handing them off to Gretchen. “Run it down for us.”

Gretchen pulled her reading glasses from the top of her head and put them on, slowly perusing the pages.

“You want the whole picture, LT?” asked Turner. “Or just the juicy stuff?”

“Let’s start with the whole picture.”

“In terms of the twenty-four hours before her death, as you all know, she had her interview with Trinity on Saturday morning. She went home after that. Her GPS log confirms it. She had security cameras at her front and back doors. Since her phone was destroyed we had to subpoena the videos from the company. The cameras have her returning home yesterday at 12:47 p.m. She doesn’t leave again. No one else comes in or out until Trinity arrives at eight a.m. Sunday morning—front or back.”

“It would be easy enough to find the blind spots if you know where the cameras are,” Noah said. “He could have broken in through a window along the side of the house.”

Josie continued, “The majority of her calls and text exchanges are with her sons and their wives. Carter and his wife, Erin, have two girls, and it looks like Sylvia spent a great deal of time with them. Most of her photos were of the girls.”

She paused as her breath caught in her throat. Sylvia’s granddaughters were young, likely both under five. She’d been able to surmise their names from the context of the messages Sylvia exchanged with Carter and Erin. The older one, Piper, bore a striking resemblance to Sylvia with long, straight blonde hair while her sister Molly looked more like Carter, with a riot of brown curls. They were beautiful and, in every picture stored in Sylvia’s cloud service, they looked bright, happy, and completely enamored of their grandmother. There were a handful of photos of Sylvia with the two girls. Those were the most heartbreaking of all. Josie hadn’t had a pleasant childhood by any means, but her relationship with her grandmother, Lisette, had been one of the most consequential of her life. It was abundantly clear how Sylvia cherished her own granddaughters, how devoted she had been to them, and the killer had robbed them of her. Robbed them of a lifetime of wonderful memories, fun experiences, life lessons, and a soft place to land when things with their parents grew difficult.

Josie hated him for it.

Turner’s chair creaked as he rocked forward and put his elbows on his desk. She couldn’t be sure if he had caught on to the reason for her hesitation or not, but he picked up where she left off.

“Turns out that Sylvia worked at that church of hers.”

“Which church is that?” asked Noah.

“Denton East Methodist. She practically lived there. Her calendar was jam-packed with church events. Bible study, social gatherings, charity shit.”

“Most of the numbers on her call log belong to members of her church,” Josie said, finally able to breathe. “There were calls to and from her credit card company, Spur Mobile, the hospital, a car repair shop, her pharmacy, the cable company, those kinds of things but mostly, it was people from the church.”

“We checked all of them out,” Turner said. “No red flags except her boyfriend. Name’s Louis Fisher.”