“—Anya Davenport.”
“Someone is cleaning up,” Moretti, who’d been quiet this whole time, concluded slowly. “We still have an enemy.”
Peter nodded. “Viktor’s accomplice. I’ll continue digging.”
We cut the feed. De Lucci, Kolya, and I just stood there, lost in contemplation. It had to be someone with money.
“Does Maksim care to control the bratva?” De Lucci asked.
“My brother?” I shook my head. “No. I’ve been trying to get him more involved.”
“Ivan? You don’t see eye to eye.”
“Ivan is many things, but weakening our bratva is not one of them.”
“Jeremiah King?”
“All he’s after are the shares,” I said grimly. “He doesn’t want to rock the boat by messing it up with Aralina.”
“His brother, then?”
“He’s someone we could look into?—”
“Fuck,” Trevor muttered.
All three of us swung our gazes toward him. He had his laptop set on a low barrier wall, and his fingers were flying furiously over the keyboard.
“What?”
“Lucy had been interested in the relationship between the Kings and the Zahkarovs.”
“We already know that...Chloe?—”
“Yes. But now that I’ve removed Peter from Anya’s list of suspects and entered the Kings, my probability outcomes yielded a theory.”
He prefaced what he was about to say by relaying to us the FBI’s profile of the Mistress Strangler.
“We hacked into King Industries’ servers and were able to trace Jeremiah King’s Mercedes that night. His car was parked in an underground garage close to Davenport’s mansion.”
Chills crawled up my spine.
“I’ve also compared the autopsy reports of Anya Davenport's murder to previous Mistress Strangler killings.” He brought up a split screen of strangle marks.
“Prior to the ones last year, nine Mistress Strangler killings occurred in the tri-State area of New York, New Jersey, and Connecticut, with the last one occurring five years ago. Yes, right around the time Duncan and Esther King died in a car accident. The stranglings bore similar ligature marks attributed to asphyxiation by rope. The one last year. The one blamed on Kolya…” Trevor pointed to the screen on the right. “Has more bruising and marks that point to asphyxial death where the perpetrator used his hands. But what’s more telling is how the wordwhorewas carved into the victim’s skin. The ones five years prior were delivered while the victim was alive.”
He flipped the screen to the wordwhorecarved on the stomach. The ones from the original cases were neatly carved with the same strokes.
“So the victims were carved first before strangulation?” De Lucci asked. By this time, the three of us were riveted on Trevor’s screen. “Did I get that right?”
“Correct. The autopsies of the victims revealed clotting and a chemical that confirmed it. Also, how the characters were formed was deliberate. The perpetrator considered it an art. Now, in the killings last year, there was an absence of clotting,which suggested it was done postmortem. The word was in all caps, and the way it was carved suggested an afterthought with no skill whatsoever. That was why the authorities were leaning more toward a copycat than the real Mistress Strangler and why the FBI is especially interested in Anya’s case.”
“So are you saying that the original Mistress Strangler might have been the one who killed Anya?”
“That’s exactly what I’m saying,” Trevor said. “Or…we have a more meticulous copycat.”
A sickening sensation sank heavily in my gut. I turned to Kolya. “Find out where Aralina is and have her on lockdown in the house. And do not, under any circumstances, allow Jeremiah King near her.”
I switched my other phone on and found frantic messages from Sato.
