Chase tapped her pen on her desk, filling her office with a tinny drumroll. Every few minutes her eyes flicked over to the other desk, before frowning when it remained empty. She remembered Drake sitting there, across from her, swearing as he tried to figure out how to get the department computer system to work.
After Drake had resigned, Rhodes had promoted her, but while he had promised to get her a new partner, there didn’t seem to be any movement on that front.
It got lonely inside her own head; she missed someone with the grace of a bull to occupy her thoughts.
She missed Drake.
It hadn’t occurred to her before, but now that they were working together again, albeit on an informal basis, it was something that she couldn’t ignore.
And she saw it in his eyes, too; he missed her—if not her, then at least the job.
Tap, tap, tap, tap, went her pen.
Focus, Chase.
But she couldn’t focus. This wasn’t like any other case that she had been a part of during her career—in Seattle or in NYC. She was working to find a killer whom no one but her party of misfits thought existed.
But maybe… maybe that’s our edge, she thought suddenly. Nobody knows that we’re looking for him, not even the killer.
Chase made a hmph sound as she considered this.
Nobody knows that we’re looking for a killer…
Except that wasn’t quite true. Dr. Edison knew that something was up. And he had ended up dead.
Everyone else was a drifter, a nobody.
It was clear that their killer preferred to take out the lower rungs of society, but wasn’t afraid to climb up that ladder if someone threatened to put them in the limelight. If someone got close, he wouldn’t hesitate to make them part of his macabre re-enactments, no matter who it was.
Chase tried to put the puzzle pieces together in her head, but this got her nowhere.
She picked up her phone and hit redial.
“Dunbar? It’s Chase? You got anything yet?”
“Hold on a sec,” Dunbar whispered. She heard him shuffling and then the sound of a door closing. “Chase? Geez, you have to stop calling me every ten minutes. People are going to get suspicious.”
Chase grimaced.
“Yeah, sorry. You got anything for me?”
“No, nothing. I have to… well, I told you. I have to be careful where I look. If Rhodes does a simple back search, he’s gonna figure out what I’ve been doing.”
“’Kay. Just let me know as soon as you find something—anything. Anything in Dr. Edison Larringer’s background that is interesting, okay? Shit, you know what? If you find anything about Eddie, let me know.”
“Will do,” Dunbar said before signing off.
Chase hung up the phone and raised her eyes to the other desk, ready to say something to Drake, before remembering that it was still empty.
Tap, tap, tap.
Eddie got close, and that’s why he ended up dead, Chase thought. And if he got close, then so can I. It’s just a matter of retracing his steps, starting with where he had found the photographs, starting with Beckett’s office.
Chase stood and started to put on her trench coat, when her phone buzzed on her desk. She grabbed it and answered with one arm still hanging out of her jacket.
“Dunbar? You find anything?”
“Uh, Detective Adams? It’s Detective Yasiv.”
“Oh, shit, sorry. What’s up?”
“Well, we’ve got a strange situation here. There’s been an accident; a tow truck driver’s dead.”
Chase’s eyes immediately narrowed and she sat at her desk, instinctively opening the folder of photographs from the forensic pathology course.
Please, not another one.
“Yeah? And why is it strange? How’d he die?”
Chase heard Henry Yasiv swallow hard.
“It looks like… it looks like he was electrocuted. I mean, the cables are still hooked up to his tow truck battery, but the strange thing is, there’s no other car on the scene. I mean, there’s nothing out here but weeds and allergies. Nothing—Chase? You still there?”
Chase knew that Detective Yasiv was speaking to her, but she wasn’t hearing any of his words.
Instead her eyes were locked on the sixth photograph from the exam.
The one that showed a man with a silver-dollar-sized burn mark on his neck, and another on his shoulder.
There was a single word printed on the top of the image: ELECTROCUTION.
Their killer had struck again. Only this time, it looked like he got sloppy.