“Let’s see if they have records too.”
Still frowning, I read her the first name. “What are you thinking?”
“That I spend too much time with my detective boyfriend,” she muttered.
“No, you don’t,” Luke said. “Because I think we’re thinking the same thing.”
I waved a hand. “Then can you enlighten me? Because I’m not the true crime enthusiast of the bunch. What are you getting at?”
Claire and Luke shared a look before Luke turned to me, one side of that sculpted mouth tilted up.
“Serial killer.”
CHAPTER 8
Luke
It wasn’t hard to read the disbelief on Mina’s pretty face. She went from a curious and slightly exasperated frown to rounded eyes and a gaping mouth in a split second.
“What? That’s insane. We’re talking a sixty-year span. Even if the guy was, like, twenty, when he started killing, he’d be eighty now.”
“So maybe only some of them are attributable to a serial killer.” Claire shrugged.
Mina pressed her lips together and cocked an eyebrow. “Then the rest with no criminal record are just what? Coincidence?”
She nodded. “Yes.”
When Mina rolled her eyes, I held up a hand. “It’s plausible.”
“But not very likely.”
“It’s still worth thinking about.”
“Mina, give me another name,” Claire interrupted. “That new one has a drug conviction.”
“I still think you two are chasing ghosts, but whatever.” She read off another name.
One after the other, all but two of the new names revealed a criminal past.
“Now, that’s weird.” Mina turned suspicious eyes on me. “How did you know where to cut it off?”
It was my turn to give her the incredulous look. “Are you suggesting I’m the killer? You remember how old I am, right?”
“Maybe you’re a killer reincarnate.”
“Then that would mean the killings would have stopped when I was born, and they clearly didn’t.” I pointed to her list, which contained several names of women who’d gone missing after I was born.
Claire waved a quick hand. “We’re getting off track here. The serial killer angle is just one theory. For some of the older disappearances, we’ll need to check records. Stuff like that may not have been reported in the news way back then. It’s still worth turning the list over to Ozzie. He can get much more detail about these women and their lives than we can.”
“So, what did we really learn, then?” Mina uncrossed her arms long enough to gesture at the list.
A soft frown flitted over Claire’s face as she thought about that.
I had an answer, however. “We learned that if the missing woman is from this area, she’s on that list.” I jabbed a finger into the notepad.
“We also have a list we can cross-check against news articles and police records,” Claire argued. “We can take that to the library and look for information in old newspapers stored on microfiche.”
“I can look in Juneau as well,” I added. “The bigger papers might have more info.”
