Trevor was on the floor on a play mat that was festooned with boinging, buzzing, and clicking gadgets that had probably been scientifically engineered by a team in a lab to stimulate a child’s senses. The boy was ignoring most of that, however, and was instead engaged in what looked like a wrestling sit-out drill. From time to time Behr would glance over to see one of Trevor’s limbs give out and plant him on his face upon the padded cotton mat. It didn’t seem to faze his son though.
Behr surveyed his place, which had turned into a command post for his task force of one. The idea that his missing woman had gotten into the car of someone hunting women was a long shot, but Behr woke up thinking about the reward most days now. The idea of the money played in his head, while the actuality of his bills piled up and his savings dropped, and it was causing him to work long and hard. After he’d gotten the flash drive from Sasso, he’d run his laser printer like a coal engine for two days straight, stopping only to go to Staples for another box of paper and a new printer cartridge. He’d then set about reading and organizing what he’d printed. He’d put up a large city map so he could pushpin the locations of bodies and murders, as well as a bulletin board for other important facts. The case files themselves went into stacks by year. An index card timeline of all the cases stretched around the walls at eye level. There was another box for witness statements from the other cases. Breslau hadn’t been particularly judicious but had been generous with what he’d sent. Behr had fifty-seven unsolved cases going back roughly eighteen years to sift through.
So he concentrated his focus on the cases resembling his. Young women, known prostitutes, those who may have been prostitutes, and those who were at-risk types and could’ve been in similar situations to the prostitutes. Those most like Kendra Gibbons. Over the first few days of reading, he tossed a dozen of the cases—the drug-related killings, women who were older than fifty, women killed in office settings. He booted the domestic violence cases that hadn’t been successfully prosecuted. Then there were the shooting victims, the African American, Asian, and Latina victims, blunt trauma cases, vehicular homicide, and an apparent poisoning. That pared the number down to thirty-seven dead Caucasian women, between the ages of eighteen and forty-six, who’d been killed by stabbing or strangulation by currently unknown assailants and had been found either intact or partially or fully dismembered over the past sixteen and a half years.
It was a lot to contend with, a formless sea of information. But out of that formlessness, a shape had begun to emerge. Behr couldn’t recognize it with his conscious mind, but he felt it floating at the edges of his perception like a ghostly figure. There was a term for what he was looking at, but not one he was yet prepared to utter …
That’s when he realized the sun had gone down. And that he hadn’t fed Trevor for a while and Susan would be home from work soon, so he put the pages he was reading back into a file folder and got Trevor’s jacket. The boy was his little mascot these past few weeks, staying with him during the day while he worked instead of going off to day care. It could be distracting once in a while, but it was money saved and good time spent.
“All right, buddy, time to go home,” Behr said, rubbing his face in an attempt to wipe off what he’d been reading. “Let’s go see Mommy.”
Susan was just taking off her coat when Behr walked in, Trevor in one arm, a bag of takeout food in the other.
“Hey, babe,” he said.
“My men,” she said, smiling and taking Trevor for hugs and kisses.
“I got Boston Market,” he said.
“Who’s better than you?” she asked.
“Hell if I know.”
Later, they lay in bed, the sheets bunched up between their feet, she in her pajamas, and he in his clothes. They had begun fooling around, but she’d pulled away.
“There’s something about the routine of this that’s starting to make me feel cheap, Frank,” she said.
“That’s not the intention,” he told her.
“Yeah, but it’s getting to be the result.”
“You know that’s not the way I see you. Not the way I feel about us,” he said.
“Okay.”
He was moments away from that inner alarm binging and causing him to get up and return to his endless cases of gore and pain when she spoke.
“What are we doing, Frank?”
“You mean why do you two live here and I don’t?”
“Yeah.”
The silence between them was his only answer. Then she spoke.
“I don’t know much, beyond the obvious, about why your marriage failed. But from what you’ve told me, your ex said it was because you just couldn’t get out from under the sadness. The grief. The misery.”
Behr had too much to say about all that she’d just brought up, so he simply nodded in the dark.
“And has that changed yet?”
“Hold on. You don’t think my life is different? With you? And him?”
“Your life is different, but you still haven’t gotten out from under.”
She was right. He wasn’t out from under. Somehow solving this case and claiming the reward represented a new start. But for now he was still caught in a riptide of crap, and like an experienced ocean swimmer he was swimming parallel to shore until it let go. But he didn’t say any of that to her. He couldn’t. Instead he swung his feet to the floor and started getting dressed.