“No.”
“Shower?”
That finally earned a glance, but not an answer.
Most investigators gathered information. Callan consumed it.
He’d find a discrepancy no one else noticed, a timeline that felt wrong, a pattern buried beneath thousands of seemingly unrelated data points and disappear into it until it all clicked.
For hours. Days. Whatever it took. Fortunately, only twenty-four hours had passed this time.
“Tell me you’ve got good news.”
Callan finally sat back. “I’ve got something.”
Alec moved farther into his office and stopped behind his chair. “Show me.”
Callan pulled up four images and aligned them on the main screen. Four young women, all attractive, all roughly the same age.
A prickle of unease snaked down Alec’s spine. Their features weren’t identical, but the similarities were too close to ignore.
“You think they’re connected?”
“They all have the same profile.”
“Miami PD didn’t link them?” Alec asked.
“Not that I could tell,” Callan said, fingers typing rapidly.
“Why?”
“Because nobody bothered to look.” His tone was dry, matter-of-fact, and worse because it was probably true. He isolated the first case and zoomed in. “Faith Salyer, twenty-eight, disappeared three years ago. Still no motive, no body, no resolution.”
He brought up the next one.
“Mara Andrews, thirty-one. Went missing fifteen months later. Similar profile. Her remains turned up near a canal in Fort Lauderdale earlier this year. Also unsolved.”
A third.
“Nine months after that, Isabel Serrano, twenty-nine. Same general demographics. Same dead-end leads. Still missing.”
The fourth was Anna Bellamy.
Alec bent closer, comparing the last-seen dates under each photo. “If this is the same guy, the gap keeps shrinking.”
Callan nodded. “Yeah.”
“Or…” Alec didn’t want to think about it. “There are others out there we don’t know about.”
Callan looked up, expression grim. “I thought of that, too.”
Neither of them liked that possibility.
Alec studied the profile bullets listed under each woman. Lived alone. Jobs with irregular hours. Little support. The overlap was starting to feel more like intent.
“He’s getting more confident,” he said quietly.
“Not surprising, with nobody connecting the dots.”
