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“I’d be willing to bet my next royalty check that it was him, and he killed her when she told him about the pregnancy.”
“Solid theory.” Cal picked up a fry, swabbed it through ketchup, and pointed it at him before popping it into his mouth. “Except for the fact that the first victim, Jennifer, wasn’t pregnant. So what set him off with her?”
Connelly lifted one shoulder in a shrug. “Maybe it was as simple as she rejected him, and he didn’t take it well.”
“Okay.” Cal nodded. “The first two victims were personal... and then there was the eight-year gap before Maria. You think he tried to stop killing.”
“It’s not unheard of with serial killers. Maybe he got married and had a family. Life was good for a while, and the urge to kill went away, but then something happened that triggered him again.”
“Divorce?”
“Or a woman from his past reappeared in his life with a kid and threatened everything,” Connelly suggested and picked up his burger. He hadn’t realized how hungry he was until he took the first bite, but suddenly he was famished. The burger was big, juicy, and fantastic. He reached for the napkin holder. He was going to need a few of them.
“Holy shit,” Cal said as he took a substantial bite of his burger. “I see where you’re going with this. You think Maria’s kid was our killer’s son, and when Maria popped back up, threatening his new life, he got rid of her.”
“Exactly. Do we know what happened to the boy when he went into the foster system?”
“Ah.” Cal wiped his hands and mouth on a napkin, then drew a folder from his briefcase, passing it over the table. “Now it’s my turn to share my thought. After our last meeting, I started wondering about the kid and looked into his whereabouts. His name was Kwane Socktish. He was held in foster care while Maria tried to pull her life together, but after her disappearance, he was adopted.”
Connelly opened the folder and scanned the stack of photocopied court records. “Do we know the name of his adoptive family?”
“We do not. It was a closed adoption.”
“If we’re going on the assumption Kwane was our killer’s son, do you think he adopted the kid after killing Maria?”
“Well,” Cal said with a short laugh, “I don’t have a royalty check to bet, but if I did, I would.”
Connelly found a copy of Kwane Socktish’s birth certificate and read through it. “No father listed.”
“C’mon. That would be too easy.” Cal typed something on his laptop, pulling up a map of the West Coast marked with a scatter of fourteen red dots. “I searched for kids named Kwane in the county and found nothing. Expanded the search to include the rest of California, Oregon, Washington, and Nevada, and this is all I got. Fourteen hits, but none of them were the right age.” He zoomed out on the map to show more dots. “Nationwide, there are only seventy-four people named Kwane, but again, none fit our kid’s statistics.”
“His adoptive parents changed his name.”
“Most likely.”
Connelly sat back and exhaled his frustration. “There has to be something else we’re missing.”
They finished their meals in brooding silence, deep in thought.
“Well, fuck.” Cal pushed his plate away and took a swig from his second beer. “We’re no closer now than when we started.”
Connelly checked the time on his phone. It was closing in on eleven. He told Veronica he’d be back by eleven. He packed up his laptop and dug a twenty out of his wallet, setting it down on the table for his half of the bill. “I gotta go. I’m sure Veronica is looking for excuses to escape girls’ night by now.”
“Was...” Cal hesitated and ran a finger through the condensation on his glass. “Was Ellie there?”
“She was.” Connelly grinned at him. “Man, you got it bad for her, don’t you?”
Cal gave him the finger, which made him laugh on his way out the door.
chapter thirty-one
Cal sat for a while after Connelly left, nursing his second beer as he continued looking for cold cases that fit the Stalker’s M.O.
But, inevitably, his mind wandered away from murder and back to her.
Ellie Summers.
Yeah, Connelly had hit the nail on the head. He had it bad. Ellie was beautiful and brilliant and funny. He adored her freckles, and her unruly spirals of hair, and her brightly colored glasses that never seemed to sit straight on her nose. But her quirks, as cute as they were, only masked her toughness, tenacity, and fierce loyalty. She was a force of nature, unstoppable when she had a mission. He had been half in love with her by the end of their first date…
