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As they walked carefully down the stairway, Cami asked, "The only thing that doesn’t make sense is: why did she have a knife on her?"
He glanced at her. "I'm wondering that too. But some people do carry weapons for self-defense. She might just have been one of them. Or else, she’d heard about these other murders and was taking precautions.”
As soon as she was downstairs and out of the house, feeling thankful to be in the fresh air again, Cami started researching Tracy Hardy.
It didn't surprise her that Tracy, too, was one of those who lived her life fairly openly and advertised her whereabouts. But she didn’t do it as publicly as the other two had.
As she walked slowly to the car, she told Connor what she was finding.
"I'm looking Tracy up. She was a product manager for a cosmetics company," she said. "There wasn't a need for her to advertise her every move on social media. She was very public about her business trips, obviously, but I see that she only posted about her vacations after the fact."
"Has she been away recently? The others had," Connor said, and Cami raised her eyebrows. For sure, that was a common thread.
"I'm going to look," she said.
She scrolled back through the various social media feeds related to Tracy, knowing that if it was a business trip, this would be an easy job, as everything was so public. And it was.
"She was away for a week, about three weeks ago," Cami said. "She was out of state, doing a launch in New York and New Jersey according to this post." But then Cami frowned. It wasn’t going to be so easy. On this site, she’d only spoken about this trip after the fact. So where would a killer have found out before the time that she was traveling?
She read further, wondering if there might be any hint or clue that Tracy had left that could possibly take them further. And as she looked, she struck gold. "Connor, I've found something here!"
"What have you found?"
“There is a community group here. My searches have come through at last. And all three victims are members of it.” Cami felt a sense of achievement, but also regret that it had been too late for Tracy.
“What group is it?”
“It’s a private chat forum on a Boston Neighborhood page. It has thousands of members, but it seems quite locally based. It’s definitely a community group that serves people who live in this local area, I would say, within a radius of about eight miles.”
“That covers all the victims’ homes,” Connor agreed.
“They’ve just accepted me as a member. No questions asked,” Cami said. “Tracy commented on this group quite extensively. I see here that she was asking for recommendations on how to keep house plants alive for a week, because she was on a business trip. She gave the dates.”
“So that would have confirmed to the killer that her house was vacant.”
“Yes. And this is interesting. I’m looking here on a thread about crime, and Tracy commented recently.”
“Did she think she’d been a victim of crime?”
"She was very upset. She wrote here that after her business trip, she thought someone had been in her house. She said she’d seen food was missing and that things had been moved." Cami read on. "She was asking people if she was going mad, or if anyone had heard about similar crimes.”
"What were the responses?” Connor asked.
"I see someone else on the chat said it could have been a vagrant or a squatter breaking in. That would explain why she kept the knife with her. That would feel like she was doing something to defend herself against that level of threat."
Connor nodded, his face stony. "That makes sense. So, she had the wrong impression of who the intruder was. But for sure, there was an intruder."
The pieces were finally slotting together in Cami's mind.
"I seriously think this man is so weird that he's living in their houses for a while. He must be on this community group. He knows that they are away, so he comes and stays for a night or two. And then, since he's familiar with the house, it makes it easy when he then returns to kill them."
"That's a good theory. Now, we need to find out who this person is. Anyone who’s had run-ins with all three of them? Who’s made nasty comments?" Connor pressured her. “That would be our first prize to find that person.”
Cami now switched to a different set of programs. She needed to run a search for comments, with key words, in this specific group. Hopefully, that way, she’d pick up if anyone had targeted these three women and had issues with them.
The program ran, the data scrolling by. Cami stared anxiously down at the results.
And then, she looked up at Connor with hope flaring.
