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“Right, but they didn’t all live alone,” Nate said, tapping that pen again. Laura wanted to reach out and yank it out of his hand, but she didn’t want to risk their skin touching.
“Nate, please,” she said, gesturing to his hand.
Nate gave her a momentary and lopsided smile, dropping it. “Sorry.” He took a breath, rubbing his eyes and shaking his head. “Dammit, there’s still too many of them. How are we supposed to figure out which women are going to be alone tonight? It doesn’t even have to be all night—Paul Frost was on his way home.”
“And the child was still in the house,” Laura said. She had not forgotten that horrible image: the innocent child lying asleep upstairs while his mother was brutally murdered. If he had come down for a glass of water, what would the killer have done?
Nate let out a frustrated breath. He leaned back in his chair and read from their board. “He calls them first. He finds a woman who is alone and has the right name, and breaks into the house after she answers. Then he strangles her to death before leaving.”
“Add in the fact that phone records show the call going to Nadia’s cell phone, not her landline, and it doesn’t give us anything,” she said, but an idea was beginning to take hold. “Nothing except the way he likes to do things. What if we could stop his usual technique from working?”
“I’m listening,” Nate said.
“We have to warn them. Let them know that there’s someone going
around doing this. Tell them not to stay home alone.”
“All of them?” Nate gave her a sideways look, his eyes wide. “Laura, there are hundreds of people on this list. And that doesn’t even include anyone who might have just moved here.”
“And we have a whole station of deputies and receptionists and assistants, not to mention the media,” Laura said. “We’ve got to do this. We’ve got to warn them.”
She didn’t wait for Nate to agree with her. She knew he would, even if it took him a short while to think it over. They didn’t have a short while. They needed to get on this now. She headed for the door, straight down the hall toward the sheriff’s office.
Sure enough, he followed. He always had her back.
Except that someday soon, he would be dead. If she couldn’t stop it.
Laura pushed the thought away along with the roiling sickness that threatened to bubble out of her stomach. So many things she needed to concentrate on. So many people whom only she could save. She had to stay focused, had to remain on-task. Ed Bronston first.
***
Laura stood at the top of the bullpen ten minutes after she’d had the idea, watching ten members of staff seated at desks with their phones, calling through their own sections of the phone book to every single Alex they could find. Warning them not to go out alone, not to be at home alone, just in case. Telling them to go and stay with family or friends if they needed to. Warning them about not answering the phone if they didn’t know the number.
Laura listened anxiously in the bullpen as the first calls were made, making sure the deputies had all the details right. They couldn’t afford for this not to reach the people who needed to hear it.
“Hello, is that Alex Allen?”
“Hi, am I speaking with Alex Busch?”
“Yes, hello, I’m looking for Alex Carmine.”
She glanced up to the glass window at the back of the room. Sheriff Lonsdale was visible through it in his office, making calls to local news stations about an emergency press conference. Somewhere behind them, in another room, the dispatch team were working hard to recall every member of law enforcement they could from breaks and nights off, trying to get them back in to join in the effort.
“We should join them, at least until we hear anything different,” Nate said, casting around for a desk phone. Then he shook his head at himself and pulled out his cell. “Come on. We can start going through some of these batches that haven’t been assigned yet.”
“Wait,” Laura said, calling him back. Something was happening in her head. Not a vision: a thought. A realization. It was right on the tip of her tongue, something that she could almost grasp. “Why does he call them?”
“You know we haven’t figured that out yet,” Nate said. “Probably just to check that they’re home. Maybe he asks for someone else in the household, to make sure that they’re alone.”
“But Carrie lived alone,” Laura said. “And he wouldn’t need to make a call like that if he was watching them. Didn’t we work out that she was killed pretty soon after she got home from work?”
“Yeah,” Nate said, frowning. “I don’t know, then. Maybe it’s all part of it. Maybe he gets off on talking to them first.”
Laura shook her head. “It’s too significant,” she said, biting her fingernail. She spun in a circle slowly, thinking. She was visualizing the last moments of each of the women, the ritual the killer had to go through. Trying to see it from his side, not theirs. “There must be a reason why he has to talk to them first. He goes to all the trouble of getting the stolen phones, knowing that they might potentially be traced back to him if he isn’t careful enough. That’s the one piece of evidence we’ve had that went anywhere. It has to be significant enough to justify the risk.”
“Is it a risk?” Nate asked pointedly. “We still got no closer to figuring out who he was, even when we knew how he got the phones.”
“He’s right outside,” Laura said, almost to herself at this point. “He knows they’re in there. He waits for them to go in. Maybe… maybe for Nadia Frost, he waited until her son was in bed. He knew. So why call them? What else could he need to be sure of?”
