Jo
I’m almost asleep over my book—another natural disaster, because apparently I’m on a kick this summer—when two things jangle across my mind: As if you could expect lightning to strike twice and most of those guys kill in their twenties. “Holy shit.”
Jamie tenses. “Jo?”
“No, just …” I put the book aside and get up off the bed so I can pull my laptop out of my backpack. “I just need to …” Quickly I open one of my most-visited websites, but I can’t just search for serial killer. Maybe newspapers really like that term and will use it more than cops will, but if I’m right, I’m actually looking at a time before we all knew that phrase. I have to figure out the right search term—murder? Corpse? Body? Prostitute?—but then …
He comes to sit beside me on the floor, moving carefully like I might explode if he touches me, but yeah, it’s that big. It’s the breakthrough I’ve been searching for.
I finally lean back and gesture to my screen. “We’re looking too young. We’ve been searching for someone Davis’s age”—basically Jamie’s age—“because we assumed it’s someone at the start of his career.”
Jamie leans in to see the newspaper article I’ve left onscreen. It’s from 1973 and it doesn’t call the murders a series, exactly, but there are four women killed in the last three years in that same neighborhood. The conclusion is that a maniac is on the loose, and Jamie takes my laptop to read the details that are eerily familiar.
Bite marks. The murdered women are all connected because of the bite marks.
He shakes his head. “Wait, so.”
I’m not sure I could explain it coherently if I tried. It showed up in my head as some sort of supernova, and I’m still half-blinded.
Jamie’s frown is on full blast, the line between his eyes digging itself deeper. “We’ve been looking for someone who started in 2000,” he says slowly, trying to work through all the steps my brain blew past in an instant. “Started, and then stopped for some reason, but you … you think …”
I wait as he clicks through some of the other open tabs.
“You think this guy started in 1970,” he finally concludes. “And then he left, or got arrested, or what have you, and then … came back, decades later, and started again.”
“I think we need to look into it.” That’s a lie. It just feels so right. The same MO, in the same neighborhood, decades apart? The more likely option is the same killer, back on his home turf and comfortable enough to keep at it. When you hear hoofbeats, think horses.
He shakes his head slowly, still moving between articles. “You’re looking for a guy in his seventies, minimum. Maybe he’s even dead.”
“But he still murdered people, and if he murdered them, then Davis didn’t.” Obviously it’s an uphill battle. I’ve been fighting it for years, and damn it, now I’m sucked back in again.
Jamie hands me my laptop and leans against his bed, shaking his head slowly. “So you mean all the work we’ve done so far is just pointless. Throw it out.”
That makes me grin. “Welcome to the world of research.”
He blinks. “Wait, what?”
“Yeah, sure.” I gesture at my screen. “It happens all the time. You spend so long pursuing one thing, and then you find a more interesting question, or there’s just not enough information, so it’s time to shift your focus.”
“No, you …” He gestures kind of vaguely, probably meaning my laptop and the files he’s got downstairs. “You’ve spent years on this and now you’re just like oh, well, that’s too bad?”
Well. Yeah? Even with Jamie’s help, I wasn’t actually getting anywhere. I haven’t tried this new path yet, so I don’t know if it’s going to work, but it’s worth exploring.
“That’s …” Jamie shakes his head and finally looks at me. “Impressive.”
Uh.
“The fact that you can admit you were wrong and change tracks, just like that?” he persists. “I mean … wow.”
My brain does another click, but I’m not sure if I’m supposed to make this jump. He’s talking about my research, sure, and he’s really not talking about my relationships, because that’s clearly a different story. If it’s taken me this long to even be interested in someone after Jake …
Focus, Jo. Serial killers, not Jamie.
He tilts his head. “You know, I can think of a couple older guys who were hanging around. Well.” Now he grins. “At the time I thought they were older. So we start chasing more names?”
“Yeah.” Seems like he’s not having much trouble switching directions, either. “And it’ll be easier, because if we can’t trace them to Milwaukee in the seventies, they’re off the list.”
Jamie checks his watch. “You want to get started now? We’ve got about an hour.”
I lean over and kiss him. “Yeah. Thank you.”
His lips twitch, like maybe there’s something better we could be doing, but yeah, I’m all hyped up with this new idea. It’s a breakthrough I didn’t think I’d get, and so far the newspapers aren’t telling me it’s ridiculous. Jamie isn’t yet, either. “Come on. Downstairs.”
He’s got his dad’s old office downstairs, with Elias’s big desk and matching bookshelves. It’s a really beautiful setup, but it’s also all really heavy and really dark. The window in here isn’t big enough to counteract it, even if Jamie’s replaced whatever chair—I assume it must’ve been leather and enormous—Elias originally had. He takes that one behind the desk, and I sit in the one in front of it. It was here at the beginning of the summer, but I’m not sure why. I’ve never seen Helen even approach the door. Jamie opens the desk drawer and pulls out the folder that lists all his old neighbors, because by this point he’s added and labeled a bunch of them, along with his own pages. “Okay, so …”
I’ve got my Excel sheets and I find the names he mentions, marking down the tenants and the names Jamie remembers, if it’s more than just his wife’s father. I’ve got the tenant, and I’ve got the wife, so now I just need to make sure I track down the right person with her father’s name. Jamie’s got a desktop computer in here, so he takes one of the names and I start with a second.
“What happens if we find a guy in the right place at the right times?” he wants to know, using my login information to start his search. “We can’t just accuse him of being a murderer because he likes Milwaukee.”
I shake my head. He picked a less common name, but I’m trying to trace a Michael Brown. “If we find arrest records and a violent history, he moves up on the list. Otherwise we track down where he lived between those decades and if there are similar cases.”
“The way you traced me?” he guesses.
I nod slowly, not really listening. Michael doesn’t have a middle name. You’d think that would make things easier, but honestly something like Michael Zebadiah Brown would be the best-case scenario. Classic names mean everyone knows how to pronounce them, and you’re more likely to find them on souvenirs when you travel, but they also make genealogists’ work more difficult. He’s not John Smith, but he’s close.
I catch the way Jamie’s looking at me, this fond smile that basically says ah, that’s my Jo but he just turns back to his screen and the results of his search.
Chapter Forty-Six- coming November 15
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