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"Very similar."
Charlie put down his coffee and stepped up. "Zoom in between the hands."
"Why? Is there a secondary knot between the wrists?" Will pondered.
"That's called a sheet bend knot," Charlie explained. "It's used to join two pieces of uneven rope together. My best guess is he's tied the two wrists independently for some reason, then he's tied those together after that. It's pretty common for someone who operates a boat to know that knot."
"I didn't put you down as a sailor, Charlie," Will quipped.
"When I was a kid, my uncle took me and my brother, Marvin, out on a lake every summer. The boat was falling apart. I kept thinking we'd sink at any moment. But it never did. Sometimes my uncle would teach us how to do knots to pass the time as he fished."
Valerie nodded thoughtfully; her eyes still fixed on the screen. She knew that if they were going to crack this case, they would need to look at every possible angle. And she had a feeling that Charlie and Will's keen eyes for detail were exactly what they needed.
"What about the victims?" Charlie continued. "Any demographic similarities?"
"Not so far," said Valerie. "All different ages, two women, one man."
"And the proximity of the murder scenes?" Will asked, pushing his glasses back up the bridge of his nose.
"Over a sixty-mile radius from the first victim," Valerie answered. "Three days between each kill."
"Three days?" Will said, rubbing his neck. "The killer is well into his spree then. Escalation has begun."
"We're going to move faster than normal," Valerie sighed. "Two days is all we have. Tickets are booked. Let's get to the airport."
"I have a feeling I'm going to need a lot of these," Charlie said, tapping his coffee cup.
"We all will," Valerie said, gravely, looking at the three butchered victims on the touchscreen.
There was something stuck in her mind like a thorn. Something about the scenes, but she couldn't quite put her finger on it yet. In just a few hours, they would be in Kansas. She wouldn't have much time to figure out how to catch the killer before Heinlein would recall her. Every minute would count.
And the clock was ticking.
CHAPTER FOUR
Will felt his stomach turn as the plane rattled momentarily. He stared at the mirror in the bathroom and saw the same all-too familiar sight. The grays were getting more pronounced. And he now had some subtle wrinkles around his eyes when he smiled.
Mortality was becoming more evident to him, and he found himself thinking about how quickly the years of his mid-life were passing by.
The plane lurched again, and something rattled outside of the airplane bathroom.
“Man wasn’t meant to fly,” he said, patting some water from the sink onto his face.
He grabbed a paper towel, dried his face, and looked in the mirror again. He was looking like his father more and more with each passing day. He just hoped he didn’t turn out like him.
A memory flashed before his eyes. His father, sick in a nursing home, shouting at his son as though he was a stranger.
He shook the memory away as quickly as it had arrived. He’d gotten good at that. Two decades as a psychiatrist gave him equal ability to see the frailties in others as well as hide from them in himself.
Flushing the toilet, he opened the bathroom door and headed into the aisle.
They’re worried, too,he thought, looking at a sea of passenger faces glancing around nervously. The storm had come out of nowhere. The rain it had brought with it thrashed against the flimsy exterior of the plane.
Thunder roared off in the distance, blue flashes of electricity cutting through the malevolent clouds.
Everyone looked nervous, except for two faces. Charlie was snoring loudly, his head leaning backwards. Valerie sat by the window, her hair down and cradling her face. It vibrated to the rhythm of the plane engine and its struggles as she poured over the case files for the three murders they were investigating. Will’s seat was vacant between the two of them.
Walking down the aisle, Will stopped and stood over Charlie.
