He shook his head. “Nothing but a sick fuck.”

Jeffrey had expected the news, but he was still frustrated. “How many autobody and mechanic shops do you think we’ve got in town?”

“Between Avondale and Madison?” Matt asked. “I can think of twelve off the top of my head.”

Since he was the first to volunteer the information, Jeffrey told him, “I need you to go to each shop and discreetly figure out if anyone is missing a Brawleigh cross-peen hammer.”

“Brawleigh,” Frank said. “That’s my brand.”

Matt volunteered, “I’m a Milwaukee man myself.”

They’d stumbled onto a good point. Men tended to stick with the same tool brand. Jeffrey’s own workbench was marked by a distinctive DeWalt yellow.

He told Matt, “Mechanics usually have their own tools. Pay attention to who buys Brawleigh.”

“Yessir.” Matt gave him a salute as he walked toward the door.

Jeffrey asked Frank, “Any luck tracking down the Daryl from Caterino’s phone?”

“I checked all of our incident reports, FIs, traffic stops. The only Daryl that came up was Farley Daryl Zowaski, age eighty-four.”

“Another sick fuck.” They all knew the notorious flasher. One of the first arrests Jeffrey had made in Grant County was scooping up Zowaski outside the elementary school.

He asked Frank, “What about the sex offender registry?”

“We got three official predators registered in the county.”

Jeffrey knew the number should be ten times that. “Let’s do a briefing at eight. I should have the full Truong autopsy report by then. We need to get a plan.”

“What kind of plan?” Frank seemed genuinely curious. “This killer is a hell of a lot smarter than we are.”

Jeffrey couldn’t counter the statement, but he asked, “What makes you say that?”

“He’s methodical, deliberate. He’s stalking these gals, right? He don’t just snatch ’em in broad daylight without a plan.” Frank shrugged. “Stranger abductions are the hardest to solve. And if we’re dealing with a serial component, well, hell, game over.”

He sounded glib, but Jeffrey knew Frank was at that point in his career where nothing a person did, no matter how horrendous, could shock him.

Jeffrey said, “Okay, he stalks them. Then what?”

“I’m thinking he don’t take ’em anywhere, right? Maybe he parked his van on that fire road, but that was for his getaway. What happened was, he saw Leslie in the woods. He managed to get her off the path. He did his thing, then he left her there.”

“You’re saying that he stayed in the woods after attacking Caterino. Then he saw Leslie Truong.”

“Or maybe she saw him?”

“Lena’s pretty high on my shitlist right now, but even she would’ve mentioned that Leslie Truong saw the man who attacked Beckey Caterino.”

“Yeah, but maybe Truong didn’t realize she saw the bad guy. Remember, for all she knew, it was an accident when she walked back to campus. Could be the bad guy followed her. She recognized his face from before, then he went after her. Or maybe he didn’t give her time to recognize him. Maybe he was mad for interrupting him.”

Jeffrey thought about the internal damage to Tommi Humphrey and Leslie Truong. Rebecca Caterino had been spared that one horror. Frank only knew about the two recent victims, so he had to ask, “What did Truong interrupt?”

“Fucking her?” Frank dragged up another shrug. “Bundy went back to the bodies. I heard this FBI jag-off this one time up in Atlanta. He had this whole presentation. Told us that Bundy would go back days, weeks, sometimes months later. He’d put make-up on ’em, fix their hair, jack off, screw them. He was a twisted individual, that guy. Sometimes, he even cut off their heads and took them back to his place for some alone time.”

Jeffrey didn’t want to hear about Ted Bundy in relation to their case. The serial killer had been captured three times, twice after escaping from custody, though not through any Sherlockian feat of policing. All three times, he’d been pulled over for motor vehicle violations. That kind of luck was not going to happen in Grant County.

Frank said, “Bundy targeted students. He had a type—middle class, long dark hair, slim build, young. Same as my type, come to think about it.”

Jeffrey’s BlackBerry started ringing back in his office. He jogged over to catch it before it went to voicemail. The number belonged to Bonita Truong. Three hours ago, he had left her at the Kudzu Arms outside of Avondale. Jeffrey had told her to get some rest, but they had both known that was not going to happen.

He answered, “Chief Tolliver.”

He heard a gasp for breath on the other end of the line. Jeffrey closed his office door. He sat on the edge of his desk and listened to the woman cry.

She tried, “I-I’m s-so—”

“It’s okay,” he told her. “I’m here.”

“Sh-she—” Her words broke into an unintelligible wail.

Jeffrey thought about the childless mother sitting alone in her room at the Kudzu Arms. The brown carpet that always felt damp. The sagging ceiling and cigarette-scarred bathroom sink. After Sara had kicked him out, Jeffrey had spent many drunken nights at the sleazy roadside inn. Sometimes he’d been alone, most times he’d been with a woman who’d left a phone number the morning after that they both knew he was never going to call.

“I’m s-sorry,” Bonita said.

“Ma’am, you have no reason to apologize.”

The validation brought another wave of tears. Jeffrey silently listened, because that was all he could do. He glanced into the squad room. Frank was at his desk. Marla Simms was helping herself to some coffee. He was mildly irritated that Lena wasn’t there, but then he remembered he’d told her to go to the construction site and gather names.

“I—” Bonita tried. “I just—I can’t believe she’s gone.”

Jeffrey gritted his teeth so he wouldn’t blurt out something stupid, like promise her that he was going to find and punish the man who had taken away her baby. “Mrs. Truong, I will do everything in my power to make sure you have justice.”

“Justice,” she said, a useless word to someone drowning in grief. “I found—found the picture. The one with the headband. You asked me to see if I had it.”

The woman had left San Francisco yesterday thinking that she would need photographs for missing posters. Now, she would more than likely cull through them to display at her daughter’s funeral.

“I talked—” Bonita’s voice caught again. “Her roommates told me that they had borrowed some things without asking permission. Clothing. Some make-up.”

“I’d still like copies of the photos you brought from home,” Jeffrey requested. He needed to think about this case in terms of working it with Nick. He found a piece of paper and jotted down some notes about Frank’s theory. The attacker returning to the bodies would be dangerous, not least of all because each new contact with the body could leave trace evidence. The killer had either lucked up with the rain or planned it that way.

“I need—” Bonita’s voice caught again. “I need to figure out how this works. How can I—when can I—I need to take her home. She should be at home.”

“I can have the coroner call you. She’ll explain the details.” Jeffrey knew Brock was technically in that position, but he wanted Sara to help this woman. “Are you going to be at the hotel?”

“I—I guess?” She gave a strained laugh. “Where else do I have to go? There’s nothing I can do, is there? Nothing at all.”

Jeffrey waited for her to say more, but the line went dead.

He punched Sara’s number into his BlackBerry. His thumb hovered over the green button to make the call. Instead, he clicked the red button, erasing the number.

The Kudzu Arms had stirred up some unflattering memories. He kept thinking about Sara walking in on him in their bedroom. Watching her roll her car into the lake. She had walked to her parents’ house. He had wanted to follow her, but the farther away she got, the more he felt a slack in the rope that tied them together. Since then, he couldn’t tell if she was playing tug-of-war or trying to tie a noose around his neck.

Jeffrey clicked the scroll wheel to Sara’s email address, taking the coward’s option. She was good with parents. She couldn’t have kids of her own—an appendectomy had gone wrong when she was in college—but Sara knew how to handle grief in a way that Brock did not. He forwarded Bonita Truong’s details and asked Sara to reach out to the mother about arranging transportation of her daughter’s body.