“STAT has an army of intelligence analysts on this, not to mention criminal profilers, data-mining and predictive analytic software tools, and loads of experts with experience dealing with supernatural killers,” Hale pointed out. “You honestly think we’re going to find something they missed?”
“We don’t need a miracle here,” Trey said. “Just something that will give us a place to start looking.”
With that, Trey and his teammates spread out the papers from the three folders. Well, actually, two of the folders. Trevor was still sitting there holding one in his hand, his expression thoughtful.
“There’s not much on the body found in the McCommas Bluff landfill. We know from his bone structure that the guy was approximately thirty years old. STAT says he was likely killed last Saturday or Sunday,” Trevor said, holding up a piece of paper. “But they haven’t IDed the body yet.”
“All right,” Trey said. “With so little on that one, let’s set him aside for the time being and focus on the other two.”
Grabbing photos of the other two victims, Trey stood and walked over to the whiteboard at the front of the room. After hanging them up with some magnets, he picked up a marker and turned back to look at his pack mates.
“Let’s start laying out everything we know about these two guys,” he said, motioning at the “before” pictures. “Give me everything you got. No detail is too small.”
“The first body, found in the truck at the Fair Oaks Transfer Station, was a man named Demario Harris,” Connor said, skimming through the file. “He was twenty-seven years old and worked as a commercial plumber.”
“Alden Cox was the one found at the DFW Landfill. He was a supervisor at a UPS distribution warehouse,” Hale added. “Twenty-nine years old.”
His teammates kept going like that, calling out information on first Demario and then Alden, helping Trey by focusing on equivalent data points. Trey didn’t pay much attention to what he wrote, instead listing everything the files had on the two victims—home addresses, education, work history, bank accounts and credit cards balances, police records, nearby relatives and close friends, how often they went out at night, where they went when they did, sexual preferences, even the type of women they hung out with.
As they quickly filled the whiteboard, Trey decided it was more than a little creepy how much personal information STAT had been able to dig up about the two men, most of it probably coming straight from social media and other open sources.
After he finished writing, Trey stepped back to regard the whiteboard. While there were still no obvious slam-dunk connections, seeing everything laid out this way allowed him to realize the two men were surprisingly similar in many ways.
“We might only have these two victims, but I think we’re already seeing a pattern,” Hale said. “Both of these guys were physically fit, around the same age, attractive, and, if their social media accounts are any indication, extremely active on the club and party scene, which means our killer has a type.”
Looking at what he’d written about Demario and Alden, Trey had to agree with Hale’s assessment. According to the date and time stamps on their social media posts, both had gone out to a club almost every night in the weeks prior to their deaths, including the weekends when they’d been killed. But as he continued to compare the two men, he realized they had more in common than their social lives.
“These two were perfect victims,” Trey said. “Neither seemed to be close with their families or have any close friends. Their interactions seem limited to casual acquaintances and a series of one-night stands.”
“Yeah, and I’m willing to bet the killer picked them specifically because no one would notice them leaving a club or bar with a complete stranger,” Trevor said.
“So we’re all leaning toward the killer being a woman, right?” Connor asked.
“Or a man and a woman,” Hale said. “The woman might be the bait. Her partner could be someone waiting for her to lure their victims outside.”
“The guy we found yesterday did have his pants down around his knees,” Trevor remarked. “That definitely supports the theory a woman enticed them to leave the clubs with the offer of sex, then whoever she’s working with took them down while they were distracted. It’s cold-blooded but effective.”
Trey sighed. “While we’re probably right about all of this, it doesn’t help us much. STAT had their analysts go through both men’s social media accounts. There were no women—or men—in common between them. There also weren’t any bars, clubs, or restaurants in common, either. Whoever the killer or killers are, they’re smart enough to stay away from any cameras. That’s going to make it damn hard to find them.”
“We could ask STAT to use their fancy computers to create a list of all the places the two victims spent time in the weeks before their deaths, then start hitting all of them with photos of Demario and Alden. Maybe we’ll get lucky and someone will remember seeing something suspicious.”
Trevor and Connor both groaned at that idea.
Trey didn’t blame them. “With only the four of us and the number of places those two guys frequented, that might take a while,” he pointed out.
He left out the part about there being a good chance someone out there could get murdered this weekend, if they hadn’t already. Unfortunately, they had nothing really to go on when it came to stopping it from happening.
“You’re right,” Hale said. “We need a way to cut down the list of potential locations. If not, we could be canvassing clubs and bars for the next month and still never find anything.”
They studied the board again, running through every detail they’d listed, wondering if there was something they’d missed. It wasn’t until Trey went through the files again that he caught sight of a picture of the garbage truck where Demario’s body had been found.
“Maybe we can use the fact that the killer appears to use dumpsters to dispose of the victims to our advantage.” He dug through the photos until he found some from the DFW and McCommas Bluff sites. “I doubt the killer would have lugged those bodies very far after the murders. If we’re right and the men were killed close to the bar, restaurant, or club where the killer picked them up, maybe it’s as simple as looking for dumpsters positioned close to those kinds of places.”
Trey could practically see the light bulbs going on as his pack mates picked up on his reasoning.
“We could have STAT dig into the landfill records,” Connor suggested. “See if they can figure out where the trash came from that the bodies had been found in. It should be easy for the truck that unloaded at Fair Oaks Transfer Station. Probably a little harder for the body at the DFW site. Once they have an ID on the body from yesterday, they could do the same for him. If they can figure out where the trash came from, they could compare that to the list of places the men went. That should give us a list of clubs, bars, and restaurants that have dumpsters nearby. It should cut way down on the number of places we have to check out.”