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“Faith, I’ve been a detective for twenty years,” Desrouleaux replied. “You do want to know if you and your loved ones are safe. To which my answer is yes, to the best of my knowledge. But that’s not all you want. You want to be the one to bring him in.” He softened his voice. “I get it, Faith. He’s the ghost of the man who hurt you. You want to be the one to beat him so you don’t have to feel like—”
“Thanks anyway,” Faith said, hanging up.
She sighed and pressed her palms to her temples. Turk barked in concern and came closer, sniffing and concentrating hard to pinpoint whatever had threatened her. He whined plaintively when his nose remained useless.
“Yep. You can’t smell, and I can’t hear,” she muttered. “Not what we need to, anyway.”
The door opened and Michael entered with coffee and breakfast, a few muffins and apples from the hotel cafeteria. He glanced sourly at Faith. “Hard at work already, I see.”
“I’m thinking,” she snapped. “Is that still allowed, or do I need to give you a play-by-play of what’s in my head?”
“That would be nice,” he said, “then it would feel like we were partners.”
“All right,” Faith replied cattily. “Hmm. I have no idea who killed our victims. I wonder who killed our victims? Hmm.”
Michael sighed. “All right. I’m sorry. I’m just pissed off.”
“I’m pissed off too, Michael,” Faith reminded him, “but it would be really nice if we could take a break from the whole, ‘Faith screws everything up,’ Schtick.”
Michael’s lips thinned, but he nodded. “All right.”
Faith nodded and sighed. “Thank you for the coffee.”
“Yep.”
They fell silent for just long enough to make things awkward. Then Michael said, "So,doyou have any thoughts?”
She lifted her hands and let them fall back onto her lap. “All of our suspects have fit into corners of the puzzle. The evidence makes it look like itmightbe them, but not that it definitely is. We need to find someone who fits the entire puzzle.”
“The problem is that we don’t have the entire puzzle,” Michael said.
“Exactly. We have these little pieces, and they seem to fit, then something shows up and makes it stop fitting entirely.” Faith got up and started pacing. “Why storm shelters and silos? Why thosespecificbuildings?”
“Convenience,” Michael replied. “Stealth. If you kill someone in an abandoned building miles from anyone and anything, then you increase your chances of getting away with it.”
“But why those exact buildings? Whythatstorm shelter? Whythosesilos?”
“Because they were abandoned?”
“Michael, there are hundreds of abandoned buildings here,” Faith replied. “Why did our killer choose the ones he chose?”
“Maybe he just hasn’t gotten around to the others yet,” Michael replied.
“No, the buildings he chose are miles apart. There are dozens of abandoned buildings separating them. Why did he choose those exact buildings, miles apart, one a storm shelter and two old grain silos?”
“Did you check to see if there’s a pattern to the locations like the Demon of Morgan County?”
“I did, actually,” she said. “No luck there. The locations seem random so far.”
The Demon of Morgan County would pick the wells where he would kill his victims in a cross pattern due to his religious beliefs. That allowed Faith and Michael to predict his next crime scene and catch him before he killed his final victim. Faith had checked the locations of this killer to see if a similar pattern would show up, but she hadn’t found any.
“Are you sure it’s the location that matters?” Michael asked. “It seems more opportunistic than calculated to me.”
“It’s the one angle we haven’t tried,” she replied. “We’ve checked the families and friends, they’re clean. We’ve followed up on the tornado survivor lead, and that went nowhere. We went for the haunted house angle, and that’s a dud too. I don’t know where else to look.”
"We might be overthinking it," Michael said, "This could just be a garden-variety psychopath who got lucky enough to work in a place where it's easy to find victims and remote places to bury them."
If that was the case, then this case could drag on for months and lead to many more deaths. Not to mention leave David and Ellie in real danger for far longer than Faith hoped. Hell, it was already too late. David was returning to Philadelphia. Ellie might agree to stay with her sister indefinitely, but odds are Franklin West could find her too. In fact, he might go there first.
