Things still weren’t in order. It had taken the whole day—Mason looking after his family while Bill did his job on the latest homicide. Night had come and gone, but the next morning left them with the opportune moment to work through the pending hell.
“I’ll leave you boys to it,” Diane said, scooping MJ into her arms. He giggled, and Diane flew him in for a drive-by kiss before heading into the next room. The giggles went with them, slowly simmering into complete silence.
Mason watched them leave, concerned for their safety. Whoever the killer was, he was bound to retrace his own footsteps like he had this morning—mimicking the crime scene of Missy Daniels from eight years ago.
“I brought everything I could get my hands on,” Bill said.
Mason flipped through the folders, seeing his own handwriting from many years ago. Back when he was a cop. The SFPD folder was padded out with reports from other detectives. Bill included. It was far heavier than when he’d last seen it.
They spent two hours combing through it, studying the Lullaby Killer’s every movement in great detail. Mason had already made a mess of his hair, which was getting too long to control. He must have raked his fingers through it while stress took its toll on him.
“Tommy Chance,” Bill finally said, breaking the silence.
“What about him?”
“He was the next one after Missy Daniels.”
Mason knew this. In fact, he’d had countless nightmares about the boy who had been hanged from a tree. Those dead, crow-pecked eyes still watched him in his dreams, but in real life, he was long gone. Another family destroyed by Marvin goddamn Wendell.
“How are we supposed to track this?” Mason asked.
“What do you mean?”
“I mean I’m inclined to get ahead of the killer. We practically have his entire plan in our laps, but yesterday’s victim was only a copy of Missy Daniels. What we need is to find out what he’s going to do and beat him to the scene.”
Bill shifted his legs, listening.
“So let’s say he’s going to recreate the Tommy Chance crime scene next. How can we find his victim before the Lullaby Killer does?”
“We could start looking for people with the same name?”
“Good, but not right.” Mason slumped back, his fingers going through his hair again. He quickly realized he was tugging at it with frustration, then stopped. “There’s not a single link between Missy and yesterday’s girl, right? So why bother trying to find another?”
Bill cleared his throat. “You think she was chosen at random?”
“Maybe.”
“But the victim’s name was Daniels.”
Mason sat up.
“No relation,” Bill said. “Suzanne Daniels was her name. And no, I don’t think that’s a coincidence. If you ask me, we should be going for everybody in the phone book with the surname Chance. But that could take hours.”
But Mason was already on his feet, stomping through the living room to snatch his car keys from the bowl by the door. If someone else was going to die, there was no better time to start looking than right now. He took that thought with him as he raced out to his car, with one daunting fact hanging over him like a cloud.
Somehow, the Lullaby Killer was back.