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He didn’t respond immediately. Faith studied his face. He agreed. She could see his eyes light up with the prospects of a new mystery but just as quickly grow dark with resignation. “Well, we’re not going back in time to figure that out,” Michael said, “and I don’t even know where we’re going moving forward.”
In some ways, being proven wrong completely felt better than things being amorphous but her doubting her conclusions. Those ways didn’t feel nearly as better as the other ways that made her feel angry, hopeless, and frustrated.
“Wait a minute,” she said.
“Go ahead,” Michael replied.
“No. I mean it literally. Wait a minute. Something’s forming.” She closed her eyes and fought against the inclination to force the conclusions she could feel working themselves out. If she tried to force them, she’d lose it entirely.
Could he really have gotten away with killing his own wife without anyone suspecting?
It seemed impossible.
But that had to be the answer.
But then again, stranger things had happened.
“We weren’t wrong,” she finally said.
“Well, then,” Michael said, “I guess everything I know about investigation is wrong, then.”
She shook her head. “No. I mean, we weren’t wrong about the profile. The killer is killing wifey over and over, just like he killed his actual wife.”
“Oh. And so, there’s another crazy head case released from prison for his wife’s murder and killing married people?” He shook his head. “You’re not making sense, Faith.”
“He killed his actual wife but never got caught.” Michael didn’t seem to register what she said so she added, “The man killed his wife just like we predicted. First dead wifey. He got away with it, though, got a taste for it, and started killing her over and over again.”
“You think we need to go after the first victim’s husband?”
She shook her head. “No. Not that.”
“Okay, let’s not play twenty questions. Just tell me what you mean.”
“We need to take a different approach. We have the right profile, but we’re looking for men whose wives were murdered. We found the suspect so quickly that we assumed we were right. What we need to do is check the databases and background checks and all the rest of it. We need widowers who didn’t get charged in the deaths of their wives.”
“Well, we already have the list, then.”
“No, no,” she said. “I mean, deaths where they weren’t ruled a homicide. I mean, the guy got away with it completely and that’s what spurred him to do it again.”
“So, suicides?” Covering up a murder was difficult and required careful planning. For some reasons, killers favored making a death appear as if it were suicide. The key, though, was to make sure that any evidence of foul play wasn't detected by investigators.
Suicide was foul play.
Suicide raised dozens of questions and always led to more investigation.
“Yeah, maybe,” she said, “but probably accidents.”
“You think?”
“Yeah. You poison someone with their own medicine, you make it look like suicide. You slash their wrists or whatever. Accidents are harder. You have to … I mean, we look for jumpers, of course, because—”
“Because people can be pushed off the balcony,” Michael finished. “So, we look for jumpers. We look for accidental falls too. And, of course, we look for other accidents, lots of trauma. Fires. Things that obscure the cause of death because there’s so much damage it can be anything.”
“And when a body is burned to a crisp, the ME isn’t looking for other causes,” Faith said, “but let’s not look at this narrowly. Let’s be broad. Maybe a car accident. Drowning. Gas explosion. Who the hell knows? We need widowers, though, where the coroner assigned accidental death rather than homicide.”
Michael nodded slowly. “Murder cover-ups are difficult and rarely successful, but in the right circumstances, they can be pulled off. It all comes down to planning and, well, and not being so perfect it’s obvious.”
“Accidental death,” Michael said. He said it. He didn’t ask. Just like that, they were on the same page. “Harder to fake that than suicide.”
