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A few disappearances was a coincidence.
Half a dozen was a pattern.
Ten or more was worrisome at best.
That was when I started doing a little casual digging around to try to figure out what might be going on, if the cops had missed something in the people's backgrounds, if there were any breadcrumbs leading to their whereabouts.
The thing that really pushed me over the ledge that was casual interest and crashing into outright obsession was the fact that there was nothing. There was absolutely nothing to go on.
Nothing.
Not a single clue.
It was about then that I put on my trace evidence cap, and started visiting the houses that went up for sale or rent after a certain amount of time passed without the owners or renters coming back.
They were immaculate.
That was what struck me first.
Even if the units came "furnished" with the belongings of the missing previous inhabitants, there were no old dust bunnies under the bed, no cobwebs in the corners of closets or in the basements. There were lines on the couches from where they had clearly been vacuumed. I don't know about you, but someone like me—child and currently pet-less—I almost never had a reason to vacuum the sofa. Yet every single one of these missing people did?
Not only that, but there was the smell.
Each house had a very distinct, strong-smelling chemical cleaner mixed with a mint scent that was strange, unfamiliar, and very unique.
Out of curiosity, wondering if maybe my cleaning product horizons just weren't wide enough, I took myself to the local cleaning aisle of my box store. I smelled every single one of the sprays. Not one had the right smell.
It was a weird habit now.
Anytime I went to a store and found a cleaning spray I'd never come across before, I had to stop and smell it. Just in case.
A weird part of me believed that it was a proprietary blend, that whoever was using it to clean up the possible crime scenes mixed it themselves. Himself.
Let's face it, it was almost always a him when it came to serial killers.
Or maybe the women were just better at cleaning up crime scenes.
So maybe I shouldn't write off female suspects as a whole. Even if the pattern didn't seem to fit.
Then again, the pattern didn't fit because there simply wasn't one.
Not a single one of the graphs I'd created or rudimentary psych profiles I drew up made any sort of sense at all.
The possible victims were all too diverse. Different ages, sexes, races. They all came from different backgrounds, worked different jobs, ran in different circles.
Serial killers typically had some sort of pattern.
Women, a lot of the time—and for obvious reasons— killed men. They were also mercy killers—often nurses or caretakers who decided to take patients out of their misery. Once in a blue moon, but not so much anymore in present day, they would kill younger women who they saw as some sort of threat.
Men, overwhelmingly, killed women. And there was usually a type. If nothing else, an age.
Very few serial killers were all over the map.
I had middle-aged men and women, younger men, older ones, a few later teenaged girls, even one very old lady.
No small children.
Which was a relief of sorts.
As screwed up as my town was, most of the "bad guys" had a "no kids" rule.
Kids were probably safer in Navesink Bank than they would be in most places in the world.
Things started to really put me in a tailspin when, after a couple months of digging, I started to see that it wasn't just suspicious missing persons. Oh, no. There were several unsolved homicide scenes that had the same strange industrial and mint scented cleaners.
Like someone had cleaned the scenes, but left the bodies to be found.
How?
Why?
Typically, this kind of thing was done to taunt the police.
But that didn't seem to fit either.
Nothing seemed to fit.
Hence my obsession.
But I was undeterred.
If dedicated armchair detectives can solve cold cases ten, twenty, fifty years in the past, then I could certainly work to track down a currently operating serial killer.
I just had to dig a little deeper, find a little more evidence.
And then I was going to get the bastard.
Chapter Two
Finn
The office was quieter at this time of night.
Jules had a family now, and usually clocked out at a more reasonable hour instead of staying behind to make sure everything was "just so."
The thing was, I still sort of liked everything "just so," which meant I was actively making myself late for my meeting by restocking and rearranging things on the coffee station, then wiping down all the surfaces.
"Thought I heard you," Quin said, moving out of Nia's office. He didn't comment on my being late. He didn't even raise a brow on what I had been doing to become late. That was one of the many things to admire about Quin. He just... got it. He didn't press. He didn't roll his eyes. He just went along with it. "Are you ready? Nia's getting grumbly. She's almost out of Hershey Kisses," he added, tone going grave. "I don't want to think about what might happen if she runs out during our meeting."
