POPS PERCHED ON the edge of the pool table and looked at the whiteboard before him. Deputy Commissioner Woods had commandeered his office and banished the chief from the bullpen where the Robbery, Homicide, and Sex Crimes divisions were based. He had entered paperwork for Pops’s suspension, but the old man hadn’t bothered to hang around to wait for it to be issued to him. His new center of operations had been easy to find. He’d spent many years here on the first floor of the command building in a small, dingy room off the car park. The night patrol’s rec room.
It didn’t have the glamour of his office upstairs. To one side stood a row of wooden bunks, four of the six beds neatly made and unoccupied, two sporting lumps beneath the blankets where tired patrol officers slept between shifts. On the walls, nude Playboy centerfolds that had been ignored by the female officers for years had become faded and cracked, some enhanced with speech bubbles or crude bodily appendages. The pool table, vending machine, and couches were the originals from Pops’s time as a recruit.
No one seemed overly curious about the senior officer using their rec room as a command center. As the shifts changed and the officers came and went, some glanced his way and whispered, or greeted him respectfully, but they otherwise let him be.
On the board before him, Pops had pasted the composite sketch of Regan Banks given by Bonnie Risdale’s neighbor, and the photograph of the man from his time in prison. Stretching out from the photographs, following his lines of inquiry with connecting arrows, were notes about possible means of finding Regan, some of them reaching outward from the center before being abruptly cut off after only a few stages.
One of the short arms of the investigation was the “Resources” route. Most fugitives, Pops knew, went straight to their network of resources for funding or shelter when they were being pursued by police. But Regan had no living relatives, and no one at the apartment building where he had lived after his release had been able to recall seeing a single other person in the man’s company. He had no social-media accounts, no email, no registered phone. No waitresses, bartenders, bus drivers, or shopkeepers near his home recalled him when shown pictures and questioned. He was a shadow man. In the time he had been free from prison, Pops couldn’t account for Regan doing anything other than setting upon his plan to frame Sam Blue, and for that he had scarce evidence.
Regan is alone, Pops thought, looking at the photograph, at the black, empty eyes hardly reflecting the camera’s light. But does he avoid people, or do people avoid him?
A longer arm of the diagram read “Past,” but there were no leads there, either. No foster parents or siblings had seen or heard from Regan since his childhood. There had been no unexpected visits, calls, threats, or pleas, and the parents and families of his victims, like Diane Howes, had heard nothing.
Thinking of Diane led Pops’s attention to the last arm of the diagram, the one that read “First Kill.” Pops’s eyes wandered over the Georges River Killer’s victims. They had all been so like Doctor Howes. Regan had a type. Ambitious, beautiful brunettes. Wide-eyed, happy women, thriving, full of potential.
Was Rachel Howes indeed where it all started for Regan? Would he return to that place, the way it seemed he had with the Georges River, trying to connect to a moment lost or undo a terrible decision made? Killing Rachel Howes had been a pivotal moment for Regan, after all. It seemed that she had been the one to inspire his type.
Pops tapped his lip with a stubby finger, ignoring a group of young officers bashing the vending machine, trying to free a trapped can of Coke.
The “First Kill” arm of the diagram was right next to the “Family” section, which lay empty.
Pops looked at the two lines and took his phone out of his pocket.