Jamie
Jamie looked at the young woman in the other chair, from her sensible flats—worn with ankle socks—to her brown hair more or less held back in a casual bun. She seemed young, honestly too young to care about murders from a quarter century ago, but she was also … what? There was something different about her, something magnetic, and was it the straight set to her shoulders or the fact that there were clearly thoughts whirling behind her brown eyes or another aspect entirely?
Jamie didn’t usually notice near-strangers as individual people. There were repeat customers who’d greet him on the street, sure, but none of them caught him quite like this.
He looked down at his watch again and passed the map back. “On average, I’ll be here another six hours,” he told her, this Jo Lewis who had a paper business card. Of course he’d piled things wrong, so he had to pull the blank book out from under the one about John Wilkes Booth, and catch the pen before he knocked it to the porch, and record the temperature of the smoker. “You can have as much of that as you want.” Except shoot, it was a weird thing to say to a stranger, and the way her eyes narrowed a little told him she’d noticed.
“Okay, well.” At least she looked down at the image and gave him a reprieve, and she laughed a little and shook her head. “I haven’t explained it to anyone before. Okay.” Jo licked her lips and focused on his face again, and he didn’t have to record the temperature for another fifteen minutes, so he was pinned. “That map’s not the same as the one on the website because it has different data points. I took out Sophia and Akira and sent in the other seven.”
“Uh.” It was ironic, really, that he couldn’t entirely remember all of the names in a podcast called Not Forgotten. “The first and second?” And that was a bad move, wasn’t it? It was the sort of anti-feminist way of talking about the murdered women that made Kara and Tess start the podcast in the first place, and the reason they spent time in each and every episode lecturing listeners on the proper language to refer to sex workers and people with addictions and the unhoused.
Jo held up a finger, but she somehow looked pleased. “Okay, so that’s part of my point. I can’t share anything I did specifically for them while I was under contract, but anything they’ve made public is fair game, and anything I’ve done since.”
Jamie nodded, because the way she’d leaned slightly closer to him seemed to demand that he participate in this and not force her to monologue.
“The order of discovery isn’t necessarily the order of the murders,” she continued, now turning in the chair to face him more directly even if the chair itself didn’t move. “Akira Koenig was discovered before Julie Juntunen, but I’ve uncovered video surveillance that shows she was alive after Julie was last seen.”
So she was trying to mess with the order. “Isn’t, uh …” Yeah, he was back to the question of language. “Isn’t part of the problem how they didn’t have fixed schedules so nobody can really pinpoint the last time anyone saw them?” That sidestepped the question of what any of the witnesses had in their bloodstreams at the time, but she probably knew those concerns, since she mentioned video evidence.
“It doesn’t make any sense for the killer to not bite, bite, not bite, and then keep biting,” she told him, possibly ignoring his question.
“It doesn’t,” Jamie agreed, and was that a pang of regret that this conversation was going to be over so soon? “That’s why Sophia and Akira were the first two.”
Jo shook her head once, but firmly. “Sophia was first, but Julie was second. Akira was third.”
They agreed, apparently, that it didn’t make any sense, but the simplest explanation was the one given in Not Forgotten. Jo was twisting it to make the order fit her own explanation, even if he wasn’t entirely sure what her explanation was.
“Davis is a murderer, but he only killed two of them,” she explained with a little shrug. “I took Sophia and Akira off the list, sent the other seven in, and that’s when it centers on your block.”
Jamie opened his mouth to protest that he couldn’t be the Milwaukee Millennium Murderer because he hadn’t moved there until after the first murder, but then he shut it. For one thing, she’d just taken the first murder off the table, and for another, protesting that he wasn’t a killer meant acknowledging she had a reason to argue he was.
“You’re the only one who lived there the entire time from 2000 to 2003, the span of the murders,” she continued with a little shrug.
Great. “So you’re here to get a confession?” How long did it take her to come to that conclusion? And wait, all of that information was public?
But Jo shook her head. “I can’t trace similar murders in Chicago or here.”
He nodded at the smoker before he could ask himself if it was wise. “You sure you don’t want to go all Jack Crawford on me and take some of that for DNA testing?” Wait, maybe she wasn’t old enough to have watched the show.
“Sounds expensive,” she muttered without asking for clarification, and then she pointed at the smoker. “Do you have Silence of the Hams stenciled on the other side?”
“Excuse me,” he shot back, faux offended. “That is the Grillennium Falcon.”
Her eyes dropped to the legs. “Does it list lazily to the left?”
He snorted and lifted his can of root beer in a salute. That wasn’t just a Star Wars reference—it was a Family Guy Star Wars reference. “Okay, so, you’re looking for a serial killer who lived where I lived, except it’s not me, but you tracked me down because …?”
Jo sighed and the smile dropped off her face, which was disappointing. He much preferred her joking about Hannibal and Han Solo. “All I can access is official records, and I know it’s ages ago, but I was hoping … God.” She slumped back into the chair, which meant she was facing forward instead of toward him. “Maybe you remember a neighbor who had a boyfriend hang around, or someone whose adult son needed a place to stay, or just other ideas.”
Other ideas, huh? “Are all researchers this thorough?” He meant it as a tease, but the way her shoulders tensed revealed it wasn’t heard that way, and shoot, he’d botched it. She’d get up and leave and end the most interesting conversation he could ever remember having.
Chapter Three – coming October 3
