WHEN I ARRIVED at the Market Street Deli, I saw Maria standing outside, fidgeting nervously and puffing on a cigarette. As soon as she saw me, she snubbed out the cigarette with her shoe and walked inside the shop. She didn’t want to be seen walking in with me, which was smart given whom she spent time with.

I gestured to a corner that was away from the windows, and she strutted over to sit down. I ordered two turkey sandwiches with sodas and sat at the table behind her, so our backs were to each other and we could talk over our shoulders. I handed her a sandwich, and she wasted no time before digging into it. I think she spent more money on booze and cigarettes than she ever did food.

She leaned back and whispered, “So, I found out something about your girl. The day she was walking to the park, Carlos Garcia was riding around the neighborhood, looking to start trouble.”

I knew the hoodlum she was talking about. He was a member of the Bloods, and he always pulled an alibi out of his ass when it was on the line. He was too high up on their food chain not to have someone always covering for him and taking the fall. I would love to be the person who finally got the charges to stick.

In between bites of my sandwich, I asked, “Was he alone or with his crew?”

She shook her head and mumbled with a full mouth, “Alone.”

“Any witnesses?” I wondered and jotted down some notes. “I mean, how did you find out about this?”

She took a drink of her soda and nervously glanced toward the windows. “Because I overheard Fernando bragging to his old lady about it. He said he and Demarcus rolled up on Carlos, and he threatened to pop them like he”—she lowered her voice and made air quotes—“‘had just done some black bitch.’”

“That’s good, but I’m going to need more than hearsay to make charges stick,” I told her solemnly.

“Well, I figured you would want to hear it for yourself, so I recorded the conversation with my phone”—she handed her cell phone over with the voice recording app opened—“Get it off there if you don’t mind.”

I emailed the recording to myself and deleted it from her phone. “Okay, I deleted it after sending it to myself.”

“Is that enough to put him away?” she wondered.

I bit my bottom lip. “While recordings aren’t admissible in a court of law, it should be enough to get a warrant to search his car and home for the gun. Then we just have to match the ballistics up.”

“So I did good, right?”

I slipped her a twenty-dollar bill. “You did very well, Maria. Now if you can help with this current case, that’d be remarkable.”

She turned around to face me this time. “Do you mean the one in the news about the bodies that were just found?”

I nodded with a frown. I felt the tension mounting in my neck from just thinking about it.

“Well, I’ll see if I can find anything out for you,” she offered. “But I don’t think the Crips or Bloods are involved. It ain’t their style, you know?”

“Yes, I know. There might be more than one doer, but it’s not gang-related. I’d bet good money on it,” I stated. I wasn’t aware of any gangs that were as vicious or organized as this killer. “Anyway, I need to return to the station, so you stay out of trouble and get in touch with me if you hear or see anything.”

She held her fist up for a bump. “I will. Keep it real, five-o.”

“You too, Maria,” I replied and left with the rest of my sandwich, consuming it on the way back to the station.

I felt some relief. At least I could get somewhere with this case, but I had to do it before the weekend, which was coming up. Even judges would be off, making it hard to get a search warrant.

When I got back to the station, I explained to the others, who were still waiting on the M.E. and crime lab reports, what had happened and opened the email I had sent to myself. We all listened to it, including Lieutenant Madden, and they all agreed it was enough to request the search warrant.

“Judge Holkem is normally good about getting warrants to us quickly, so call his office first,” the lieutenant commanded. “But if he’s not available, try Judge Shapiro.”

I got right on it and was able to get the warrant from Judge Holkem. The reports came in on the current case, though, so we had to tend to that first.

Chris brought all the reports up to us from the autopsy and crime lab. The man’s prints weren’t in AFIS, but his DNA was in CODIS because he was reported missing on March 12th by his parents. He was twenty-year-old Tucker Brown from Webster Groves. He was working as a car mechanic for Ray Unnerstall at Ray’s Garage and Used Cars in Webster Groves and had failed to show up or call into work. After a couple days, Mr. Unnerstall called his home and notified his parents, who’d just assumed he was gallivanting around with his girlfriend, Janine Barber, but she’d not heard from him either, so they filed the missing person’s report and used his toothbrush to collect the DNA sample.

“I’ll go downstairs and send uniforms to Webster Groves to notify the family and assure them that we are going to be working on this,” Marisol offered and took the parents’ address information with her.

While she did that, the rest of us began going over the autopsy results with Chris. “He died from internal bleeding, but he suffered major organ damage, sustaining stab wounds to his kidneys and liver. I’m surprised his heart didn’t give out from shock—it would’ve been the better way to die. He wasn’t sodomized, but he was tortured. He has burns on his soles, and as you saw at the body dump, he has broken wrists and legs too. Just like with the first victim, the slashes were made over a period of time, and he was starved. He suffered a world of pain”—he rubbed his temples—“I just can’t imagine someone being this sadistic.”

“Could he have been in cold storage for very long?” I asked. “He’s been missing for over two months.”

He nodded. “He could have been in storage for several weeks.”

“I’m going to see where large coolers or meat lockers can be bought around here and if any had been sold in the last two months,” Eric offered.

I paced the area between our clusters of desks and thought aloud. “Larissa Ray wasn’t in storage, so he must have taken the full two weeks with her and then dumped her when he took Tamara Boyd, assuming he did. But where and how is he getting them, why dump them so far apart, and of course, what is his motive?”

“That’s where our job comes in,” Liam stated. “We need to find the connection. We know he has no gender, race, or economic preference, so what is his end game?”

But where do we even look?