He smiled. “I’m sure it will all come back to you when you go back to finish your master’s degree. Familiarity is the missing link here. We spend time somewhere when we feel comfortable there, because the location isn’t foreign or unknown to us.”
She stared at him a long moment. “I’m trying to follow, but all that tells me is that the Ripper likely lived in Kentucky, close to the crime scenes. That was part of the original geographical profiling. That’s why Finney was such a good fit.”
“And Lowe. Don’t forget him, the second potential Ripper on the original suspect list. He was from Kentucky too, born and raised in the same general area as Finney.”
“Okay. Yes, I remember that. It’s part of the reason that I thought Lowe might have been the one who abducted me.”
He swiveled his wheelchair to face her. “Think about the other things we know about those crime scenes. In the first list of victims, the bodies were left where they’d be easily found, potentially indicating the killer had some religious background, that he wanted them to get a Christian burial, or whatever religion he followed.”
“The bodies weren’t hidden in the rest of the killings either. They’re the same.”
“I’m going to disagree on that,” he said. “In the overkill list, the victims were, well, slaughtered for lack of a better description. Discarded. There was no caring emotion behind that action. The bodies were easily found only because the killer couldn’t be bothered to try to hide them. Not so with the organized killer list. Those bodies were treated, after death anyway, with a modicum of respect. Left clothed or covered, lying down, almost as if they were sleeping as opposed to being tossed out like garbage. It’s subtle, but it’s a difference. If you look at every kind of comparison that can be made, those two lists of victims each present evidence of a very different kind of killer. In fact, it’s my opinion that it proves there wasn’t one Kentucky Ripper. There were two.”
She sucked in a breath. But it really shouldn’t have been a surprise after everything he’d just shown her. She glanced from list to list, read the headings on the middle screen, the bullets beneath them. “But, if you’re right, then your original profile was wrong.”
He surprised her by smiling. “Don’t look so worried. You’re not dashing my newly found confidence. There’s more to the original profile than appeared in any police reports.”
“Okay. Now you’ve lost me.”
He shifted in his chair, a quickly hidden grimace telling her how much his night of research had cost him physically. His hip was aching. He needed a hot soak in a tub and a long nap. But she didn’t want to embarrass him by pointing out the obvious, so she remained silent.
“When I profiled the murders allegedly attributed to the Kentucky Ripper,” he continued, “I presented the police withtwoprofiles. Two different killers. When Finney was arrested, it was the profile I gave them that most closely matched his characteristics that they used. The other profile I gave them was ignored. That’s why you never saw it in any of the official case files that you researched.”
“I still have to wrap my head around this. You’ve turned the investigation I did upside down.”
“No. I haven’t. I’ve proved that your original conclusions were right all along.”
She threw her hands up in the air. “Now I’m beyond lost.”
“Sorry. I’m not explaining this very well. To try to put it succinctly, if I look at Larsen and everything we now know about him, including that he used to live in Kentucky, he fits that first list of victims to a T.”
“Larsen is the Ripper.”
He sat forward in his chair. “He’s one of them. That’s where your research comes into play. Everything about that second victim list—if we consider that Bishop is right and Finney was a mentally ill fall guy who didn’t kill anyone—that second list fits the man you believed all along was the Kentucky Ripper.”
She pressed a hand to her throat. “Avarice Lowe.”
He nodded. “All I’m waiting on for confirmation is a list of dates and alibis for Larsen. Mason’s working on that to see if Larsen was on vacation or sick or whatever on the dates when the first set of victims was abducted. I’ve already cross-referenced everything I had on Lowe.”
She glanced up at the dates he’d mentioned, the ones beside the disorganized list. They all had check marks beside them. “Lowe doesn’t have alibis for the second set?”
“No. He doesn’t.”
She sat back. “Two Kentucky Rippers, and a third guy in prison who had nothing to do with the murders.”
“It’s worse than that,” he told her. “There’s one more puzzle piece that you haven’t seen.” He typed on his computer tablet again.
“What could be worse than two killers?” she asked.
He hesitated with his finger poised over one of the function keys. “How about this?”
A picture displayed on the screen. She stared at it a moment, trying to figure out what was supposed to be significant about what she was seeing. There was a small crowd of people standing behind yellow crime scene tape. Behind them were homes and police cars parked up and down the street.
“One of the Ripper’s crime scenes? A crowd shot?”
“That’s exactly what it is. Standard operating procedure in a case like this. The police photographer hides out of sight and takes pictures of any people watching the activity, just in case the killer ends up being in the crowd.”
“Because killers often come back to the scene of the crime,” she said. “They get a thrill from watching the police.”
