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Bailey nodded. “More or less.”
“How many of those have women been the victims?”
She failed to see where he was going. “All of them.”
He flipped a pen, silently working through his thoughts. “Why?”
She shrugged. “I pick what interests me. What are you getting at?”
“Obviously, your sister interests you.”
Bailey nodded. “She’s why I started doing this.”
“How’d you decide to investigate Natalie O’Malley when we worked together before? I don’t remember you telling me why you picked her.”
Natalie, the college girl strangled with her stockings. “She lived about twenty minutes from me. Maybe less.”
“Did she remind you of Caitie?”
“Yes and no. Their personalities were nothing alike—”
“You couldn’t have known that when the case caught your attention.”
“She was a girl strangled during college. No leads. Cold and forgotten within a year.”
“What percentage of your seasons have to do with strangulation?”
“If you’re trying to suggest that I’m subconsciously searching out cases like Caitie’s, you’re wrong.”
“That’s not my point at all,” Wes pressed. “What percentage?”
“Uh, I don’t know. Small. Natalie was the only one until I jumped into Caitie’s.”
“And now we have…” Wes walked over to a whiteboard and picked up the marker. “Caitie, Sorority Girl, Bio Major, and Natalie.”
They stared at the four names.
“Doesn’t that seem strange to you?” He flipped the marker. “Then there are the two other murder victims that Dean found who were also missing watches.”
“Also strangled,” she said to herself. “Are you suggesting a serial killer almost two decades ago jumped from New York City to Northern Virginia?”
“I don’t know what I’m suggesting. Just pointing out that this is strange.”
“Three straight women. One gay man. One murdered on a college campus. Two left in an alley. One in a hotel room. Three missing watches out of seven.”
“How many victims were robbed?” she wondered.
“Strangled and robbed? Those don’t seem to go together.” Wes picked up his cell phone and typed. “New York City sees ten to fifteen strangulations a year and…about fifteen thousand reported robberies a year. Robberies are a thousand times more likely to occur than a strangling.”
Bailey perched on their table. “What do you know about the two other watch murders? Who were they?”
Wes scrolled on his phone and tapped the screen. “One was a recent college graduate. Her Apple Watch was never found. The other was in grad school. A pricier watch. A Tag Heuer valued at two grand. Both strangled with a rope or sturdy string. Neither was anywhere close to or educated at Columbia or Barnard.”
They stared at the whiteboard.
“Do you think there’s something there?” she asked.
He shrugged. “Or there’s not, and I’m making something out of nothing.”
