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I hit my key fob, unlocking my car. As it happened, Vic Jaffe and Shawn Cummings were just a few feet away. Vic cut his conversation with his client short when he saw me.

“Nice wheels,” Shawn Cummings said to me, licking his lips. “Who’d you sleep with?”

“Get gone, Shawn,” Vic shouted to his client. Shawn climbed into his rusty pickup truck and drove away.

“Sorry about that,” Vic said. I had a good working relationship with him. But he tended to represent some of the more unscrupulous criminals in town. “He’s right about the nice wheels part. Birthday present?”

I felt self-conscious about my Aston Martin. Lock bought it for me on my last birthday. He had the thing wrapped with a big blue bow to match its Concours Blue paint. Not red. My fingers went to my watch and touched the hidden red silk ribbon beneath it.

“Yes,” I said.

“Those things run higher than my annual salary.”

I had the urge to apologize. I’d told Lock it was too much. I just wanted to drive a reliable Ford, the kind my father would have picked out and used his A-Plan discount. Lock wouldn’t hear of it.

“I’m not sure how you want me to respond to that,” I said.

“Sorry,” Vic said. “That was rude. I just meant it’s a nice car. See ya around, Mina.”

I got in my car. Elena Clarke’s red Lexus was parked beside mine. Oddly, Elena almost always wore red. Even if it was just her shoes poking out beneath her robe. I no longer had a single piece of clothing in that color.

I left the parking lot, grabbed a bagel at the nearby deli, and then drove back to Roy’s office just as he pulled in. He was on his cell phone when he exited his unmarked sedan. We made the short walk to his office. Roy finished his call and pulled a tablet out of the leather backpack he carried.

“That was the detective on scene,” he said. He pulled up the camera roll on his tablet and showed me a series of crime scene photographs. Gretchen Small drove a navy-blue Honda Accord. It lay on its side against a muddy hill. Roy scrolled to a wider shot. The ravine was next to a country road.

“She drove off the road?” I asked.

“Doesn’t seem like it. From what the analysis says, the car’s been there a couple of months at least. It wasn’t there six months ago, around the time Gretchen went missing. They’ll be able to give us a better estimated timeline once they’ve run some labs on the vegetation.”

“But no body?” I said.

“No, but it’s a whole lot of blood. If it all turns out to be Gretchen’s…”

“Then you’re looking at murder, no matter what,” I said.

“Right. The coroner will be able to say whether it’s enough blood loss to be survivable.”

“But you’ve been to enough crime scenes to know what you’re looking at,” I said.

“Pretty much. After six months with no leads until now, there wasn’t much hope she’d be found alive.”

“Our WhisprMatch bad guy killed her,” I said.

“We need to find him,” Roy said. “Fast.”

“He’ll kill again. If this is a pattern.”

“Without a doubt. It’s gonna take a week or two before we get the major testing back. DNA in particular. But they’ll be able to tell us whether the blood found was Gretchen’s type. I’ve given their analysts a heads-up on some specific things to look for. This just turned into something else, Mina. It makes our job that much more important.”

“But we can’t jump to the conclusion that Corrine Egan’s case had anything to do with this. She’s alive.”

“Turn to the next photo,” he said.

I did. It was a close-up of the car’s interior. Roy touched the screen and zoomed in on the steering wheel. The air went out of me.

“Unless he escalated after her,” Roy said. “And I’m starting to feel like that’s not a coincidence. The rest of the task force feels it too. Corrine might have been this close to becoming victim one. We’re looking for a murderer now. There will be DNA, by the grace of God. And that’s starting to look like a calling card.”

Roy pointed to an object lying in the cup holder of the center console. A smartwatch. But there was something caught in its clasp and stained dark. Maybe with blood. By itself, it probably wouldn’t have meant anything. But there was no mistaking what I saw.