Page 34 of Go Alone

It wasn't just the case she was denying. Her throat still felt tight and from time to time, she could feel fingers sliding around it and pinching closed. She'd gotten very little sleep the night before, and what sleep she'd had was filled with images of Cox's piercing blue eyes and manic smile, accompanied by the sound of his voice begging Kate to die.

Marcus nodded, unaware of the thoughts plaguing her. “We’re not close, Kate. We’ve exhausted this thread in every way possible. It’s a dead end. Every member of Homes for Columbus and the Ohio Property Owners Association has been cleared. No other housing advocacy organization in the area has ever interacted with either the Garfields, Boyd Sutter, or Carla and Barbara Finch. The three individuals we found who appeared to be within screaming distance of our suspect’s description all have iron-clad alibis. We need a new place to focus.”

Kate took a deep breath and sighed heavily.

“Drink your coffee,” Marcus said. “It’s warm, and you need to snap out of this funk before you stay in it all day.”

Kate gave him a reproachful look, but he was right, the asshole. She sipped the coffee and said, “We wasted the entire weekend and Monday too.”

“We didn’t waste anything,” Marcus replied. “We followed a lead and determined that it’s not valid. That’s called investigating. We literally did our jobs.”

“We didn’t learn anything that will help us find our killer, though.”

“Yep,” Marcus nodded. “Life is full of moments where we don’t find anything that will help us find our killer. That’s almost all of life.”

Kate rolled her eyes. “I’m not in the mood right now, Marcus.”

“Sip your coffee.”

She rolled her eyes again, but she sipped the coffee.

“Kate, you know where you are right now. You just spent three hyperactive days turning over every stone related to this lead. Now you’re tired and disappointed, and you’re about to get moody and depressive. You work better when you’re not moody and depressive. The only way I can pull you out of that is to make you angry, but that causes more problems, so you have to pull yourself out of this.”

She glared at him, and he added, “Do you see why I tried to use humor instead of talking to you directly?”

“Fuck you.”

“How about now?”

She sighed, sipped enough of her coffee to scald her tongue, and said, “I just don’t see what we’re missing. I mean, I see a lot of what we're missing, but I don't see how we're not on the right path. We've got two victims, both of whom used crappy, underhanded tactics to take other people's homes, in one case, actually colluding with each other. We've got a killer who knows at least the technical details of how both of those things happened. We have a description of the asshole in close proximity to both victims within days of their death. We have the land covenant that the killer’s referencing at each scene. We have a multitude, or had a multitude, of people who fit the profile of someone who might think the world is a better place without Howard Greer and Deborah Holt. So why don’t we have our killer or at least an idea of where to look for him?”

“You tell me.”

Kate snapped her eyes to Marcus, ready to chew him out for making fun of her, but he didn’t look like he was making fun of her. He looked like he was patiently waiting to hear her thoughts.

And maybe because of the coffee or maybe because of Marcus’s cajoling, the wheels in her head began turning. She got to her feet and paced the room. “Okay, we’ve eliminated the two advocacy groups who worked with the victims’ victims. We’ve eliminated all active advocacy groups, but we don’t know which advocacy groups might have disappeared besides the two directly named by Carla Finch and Oliver Holt.

“So that leaves two possibilities: one, Linus Varne was indeed a real person who lost a real property to Howard Greer, and he or a loved one of his is carrying out a mission of revenge, or two, we’re looking for someone who was a member of a housing advocacy group that no longer exists.”

“What motive would an advocate have, though?”

“The same motive Emily Warren had in Chicago when she murdered people who broke the sixth commandment. These people hurt others and escaped justice. If this is the sort of person Cox would proselytize, then that would be enough for them to justify their actions. They’d have access to information about housing disputes too, especially ones brought to their attention.”

She slumped. “The third possibility is that Cox gave the killer a list, and the angry and/or grieving tone we’re getting from the cipher is a product of our own imaginations.”

“If the answer’s three, then Cox would still have needed to get the information from somewhere,” Marcus reminded her.

Kate nodded, straightening again. “Okay. We can work with that. You managed to find records of Deborah Holt acting screwy during the housing crisis. Can you find other possible victims who bullied people into losing their homes in similar ways to Deborah and Howard?”

“Well… I can, but that’s going to be a lot of people. Probably high two-figures at least, maybe even three figures.”

“Have Columbus PD help with the legwork. Or desk work, in this case. Special priority to anyone with a connection to our previous two victims. If we figure out who the likely victims are, then we might be able to find out directly from them who our killer could be.”

Marcus nodded. “All right. I can get behind that.”

“In the meantime, I’m going to find as many defunct housing advocacy groups as I can,” Kate said. “There can’t be very many. This is a single metropolitan area. If the killer came from one of those groups, then it shouldn’t be hard to find him.”

“Fingers crossed.”