"Maybe," Diaz said. "But your instincts flagged it in real time too, correct? You stayed on the porch."
"Yes."
"Why?"
"It felt wrong to go in." She met Diaz's eyes. "I didn't have a reason. I just didn't go in."
"That decision," Diaz said, "in combination with what happened after, staying in the car, calling for help, keeping the doors locked, made this a very different outcome than we usually see."
The room was quiet.
Emily looked at her hands. Nodded once.
Rampage stayed at the back of the room. His fist clenched at his side. God help the man if Rampage got to him before the feds did.
The interview ran ninety minutes. Diaz took Emily through the Facebook messages a second time with a printed copy she'd brought, cross-referencing timestamps with activity logs she'd pulled.
The two months of prior contact came out in that section.
He watched Emily's face when Diaz laid out the timeline from the first comment in the neighborhood group, the progression, the deliberate low-heat nature of the contact. Designed not to alarm. Designed to build a sense of familiarity so that when the listing appeared, Emily's brain already categorized the name asknownrather thanstranger.
Emily looked at the timeline for a long moment.
"Two months," she said.
"Yes."
"He was watching me for two months before he ever sent the first message."
"At minimum." Diaz kept her voice even. "He would have been monitoring the group longer than that to identify appropriate targets."
Emily put the printed timeline down on the coffee table. Squared it up exactly with the edge. The precision of the gesture, making the corners line up, giving her hands something certain to do, was something Rampage recognized.
She was managing herself and doing it well.
"How many women?" she asked.
"In our confirmed cases, four. We believe the number is higher." Rampage raised an eyebrow.
"He's done this four times and he's still out there."
"Networks like this are structured to survive the loss of individual collectors. Delling going dark is expected. It suggests the network knows we've connected him. It doesn't mean the network stops." Diaz paused. "What it does mean is that your evidence is valuable. The hooks you described, the scuff marks, we believe those correspond to another victim. Your account corroborates physical evidence from a property search we executed last week."
Emily looked up.
"Your observation helped us," Diaz said. "Directly."
Rampage watched the shape of that land on her. The complicated intersection of horror and utility. The knowledge that what she'd seen was proof of something terrible, and that being able to describe it had mattered. Maybe a flicker of hope, that her contribution could help one of the victims.
"Okay," Emily said. Not small this time. Steadier.
When Diaz left, Emily sat on the couch for a moment while Makenzie and Savannah took the coffee cups to the kitchen and gave her a second of quiet. Rampage stayed where he was.
She looked at him across the room.
"I want to do more," she said. "If there's more I can do. I want to know about it."
"Diaz will follow up with anything they need."
