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She’d tossed and turned constantly, swinging from bad dream to half-awake anxiety, until finally the cell phone resting on the bedside table had told her it was an acceptable time to wake up. She’d showered and dressed quickly, thinking of nothing else but getting back to the case and getting it solved.
She let something slip, yesterday. She hadn't been quick enough. She hadn’t managed to prevent the killer from taking another life. But she was going to be damned if that was going to happen today.
Laura walked out into the cold morning, expecting to have to knock on Nate’s door and get him out of bed. But instead, he was waiting for her, just locking up the door to his own room. They had taken rooms next door to one another, and he must have heard her emerging herself.
“Ready to get to the precinct?” he asked.
“Ready to catch this creep and get out of here,” Laura replied firmly, earning a weak flash of a tired smile from Nate.
They got into the car and drove, Nate taking the wheel again while Laura slumped into the passenger seat and wished for the sake of her aching bones that she'd had a few more hours of rest. “We need to figure out where to look next”, she said. “I don't have much confidence that we're going to have any fingerprint evidence or otherwise from forensics, given how careful he was at the previous two scenes.”
“I would have to agree there,” Nate said. “And from what I saw of the guy hanging up there last night, I'm sure the coroner is only going to be able to tell us more of the same. But we do have some very important new pieces of evidence. Two changes in the MO. That means whatever is left has to be considered even more strongly.”
“You're right,” Laura said. Trust Nate to spend the night coming up with a more positive spin on things. “So, what do we have? A victim set up on the platform, bound with ropes and gagged, and then hung by the neck until dead once the timer goes off.”
“It makes the clock look even more important,” Nate said. “The change of the time - there could be any number of reasons behind that. Maybe he thinks that men deserve less time to try and get away, or maybe he has this kind of sick system calibrated to just exactly the amount of time he thinks would give the victim hope but not allow them to actually escape.”
“This guy was bound even more tightly,” Laura said. “Did you see? His arms were bound around his torso as well as just his wrists. There was no way he was going to get out of that.”
Nate made a grunt of agreement. “So it's not about escape. I don't think any of them are meant to, even though they get all this time to stand up there on the platform. Which means that the time is really important to the killer, symbolic of something.”
Laura sighed. Her first sigh of the morning, but she thought grimly that it probably was going to be far from the last. “I just wish we knew what it meant.”
“You and me both,” Nate said. “Look, he's not giving us much in the way of evidence to go on. So that means we just need to look closer at what we do have. I'm thinking we might be able to get something out of these clocks.”
“It's the same type in all three, I think,” Laura said. “Some kind of custom build, from what I could see. I was thinking that those kinds of clocks are usually used as old kitchen appliances, you know? Where you can use the timer to tell you how long is left on your dish? But the digital timer itself must be a newer edition. The one I remember from my Granny's house; it just had a dial you could turn all the way up to an hour. No longer than that.”
“That's exactly what I was thinking,” Nate said. “I think our grannies might have had the same one. So, that's our first thing as we get in. We need to look at these clocks. Find out who makes them, where you can buy them. That kind of thing.”
He swung the car into the parking lot at the precinct, and Laura was grateful that the drive had not taken very long. Choosing a motel for its proximity to your local investigation headquarters, rather than the quality of the beds available, made for a poor night's sleep but a quicker start to the day's work.
“They’ll be in the evidence locker,” Laura said, unbuckling her seatbelt. “We should be able to get a closer look at them. Come on.”
They walked into the precinct, finding it already buzzing with activity despite the early hour. Most of the faces in the bullpen were unfamiliar, given that they hadn’t even had time to make it here yesterday. There were more than a few questioning looks sent their way, though Laura had the feeling that most of them would take one look at their suits and know right away that they were FBI agents.
It wasn’t every day that the FBI came down to work a murder case in your precinct. They would have to be very aware that Laura and Nate were coming.
Captain Blackford was, luckily, just heading into the precinct, seemingly only a handful of seconds ahead of them. He was carrying a takeout cup of coffee, which perhaps explained why they hadn't run into him in the parking lot. He was just opening his office door and going inside, a smaller structure set at the back of the bullpen where he could keep an eye on all of his officers.
Laura and Nate followed him, catching up just as he was setting the cup down on his desk and starting to sit down. He looked up at them with barely concealed annoyance, a frown cutting across his forehead. Laura could quite easily see where, in probably less than a year, he was going to have some very deep wrinkles across that part of his head. For all the youth he brought to the job, unusual at this level of the police system, he was going to end up aging very quickly.
“So, you didn't catch him last night,” was the first thing he said. So much for people from the South being more friendly.
“We didn't,” Nate replied, his tone even. At times like these, Laura was happier than ever to have him as a partner. She wasn't so convinced she would have been able to keep her tone level. “But we have some ideas on how we can stop him from striking again. We need to get a look at the clocks, the ones from all three crime scenes. Are they here at the precinct?”
Blackford nodded, getting up from his desk. There was a weary resignation around the action, like he was already accepting the fact that he wasn't going to get a lot of time to sit down today. He moved past them, leading them out across the bullpen again with a beckon of his hand. Another rudeness, not even bothering to explain where he was taking them. Laura gritted her teeth, telling herself it was far too early to get into an argument at this time of morning, and followed.
Again, crossing the bullpen seemed to draw the eyes of every officer in the place, all of them watching Laura and Nate like they were unusual specimens of some rare animal. Laura was used to that, given that they were always in new places and always ranking higher than those around them. Still, it could be unsettling, especially when you had spent the night watching a man slowly swing backwards and forwards from a noose and then dreamed it over and over again when you were trying to sleep.
At the end of the bullpen, two sets of stairs leading directly out to the street flanked an elevator. Blackford led them here, pressing a button on the inside of the elevator as they joined him to travel downwards.
“Do you have any kind of techs here?” Nate asked. “Someone who knows what they're looking at, when it comes to engineering? Any clock experts, by some happy coincidence?”
Blackford shrugged, shaking his head. “I don't know that we have any experts on that kind of thing,” he said. ?
?But I can bring in a local source, if you need one.”
“We'll see how we go,” Laura said, as the elevator came to a stop one floor down. “It might be that we can figure things out ourselves.”
