She felt it. “What?”
“Now that you mention it, it could also fit the woman in the boat. She was embroiled in a custody dispute. Faced claims she was an unfit mother. Getting killed by someone protecting her child is twisted but maybe you’ve hit on something.”
Which led me to the case I hadn’t talked about. Couldn’t. The grieving family of a young woman brutalized and left as a shell of herself.
No police report filed not because the Saucedos had been content to be compensated with money? Because they’d decided to take matters into their own hands?
I took Robin’s face in both my hands and kissed her.
She said, “Whew. All that for letting my mind wander?”
“All that for a whole bunch of brilliant.”
—
We sat out there for a while, drifted into the bedroom and made unusually silent, easy love, then showered, streamed a few minutes of a Nordic-noir movie that turned out to be turgid, and switched off the lights just after ten p.m.
Robin slept peacefully. My slumber came to a halt just after four a.m. when I woke wide-eyed in the midst of a dream I couldn’t remember. Something that had set my heart pounding.
Muddled thoughts began coming at me like cards from the trick deck of a sleight-of-hand magician. Vanishing before contact, only to be followed by another bizarre onslaught of what-ifs that finally took shape as I flashed back, lucidly, to where Robin had led me.
People hiring a ruthlessly accurate killer for the sake of their kids.
In the cases of Keisha Boykins and Errol Moffett, gifted kids. Two sets of parents, unknown to each other, putting aside reason and morality in favor of crazily focused protectiveness?
Golden kids. Both high school juniors. I’d treated enough eleventh-graders to know that year was often the peak of anxiety about college acceptance.
Parents of high school juniors had been known to bribe, con, and swindle in order to get their offspring into top universities. If you bought into the fantasy that enrollment at a selective institution guaranteed lifelong ecstasy, why not take it further?
On the other hand, college issues had nothing to do with the death of Whitney Killeen, mother of a toddler. And Vicki Saucedo was a woman in her twenties.
So forget the narrow focus and concentrate on the process.
Children of any age as objects of selfish love.
Jarrod, the prize in a custody battle.
Vicki, the physically beautiful but vulnerable sib. That was harder to fit. So maybe a simple revenge plot.
The more I thought about it, the more consistently it came down to families and offspring. I chewed on that for a while but it didn’t take long for early-morning inspiration to pale.
All I’d created was another theory, useless for moving the case forward.
I got up and began trudging back to bed when it hit me.
Jarrod had two half sibs in college, Vicki Saucedo, a brother in college. Brilliant, on scholarship at an exclusive college, what was his name…?
Chapter
36
Michael Saucedo.
I returned to my keyboard and began typing. It didn’t take long to locate a sophomore named Michael J. Saucedo who’d achieved high distinction in mathematics during his freshman year at Oberlin College.
Oberlin, Ohio.
The state where Moe Reed had unearthed two old, cold .308 shootings.
