“Not really, no,” Hale said. “Is it so shocking that Samantha got tired of waiting for you to ask her and decided to take things into her own hands? This is the twenty-first century, you know. Women are completely comfortable going after what they want.”
“Maybe,” Trey admitted. “But you weren’t the one sitting across from her as she asked me question after question.”
Trevor laughed. “I may not be the greatest at the whole social thing, but isn’t asking each other personal questions what people normally do on a date?”
“Yeah, personal questions I get,” Trey answered. “But almost all Samantha’s questions were about how I got into SWAT, what kind of work we do, how tight I am with you guys, and how well I know all of you. And every time I tried to steer the conversation in her direction, she turned it right back around on me. After a while, it was like she was grilling me for information.”
His friends were quiet for a while, considering that.
“So what are you going to do?” Connor asked.
“What can I do?” Trey ran his hand through his hair exasperated. “If I’m right, and the only reason Samantha is going out with me is to dig up dirt, then every minute I spend with her puts the Pack at risk. If I walk away now, and it turns out I was wrong about her, then I’d be giving up my chance at a soul mate.”
“You can’t do that,” Hale said firmly. “Walking away from a shot at finding The One would be insane. Nobody in the Pack would expect you to do that.”
“I know,” Trey murmured. “That’s why we’re going out again tonight. It feels like I’m playing with fire, but the thought of walking away makes me sick to my stomach.”
As they sat around, the files in front of them untouched, they talked about how much Samantha might already know, in between his buddies giving him suggestions on where he should take her on their second date. Connor was of the opinion that if things went well enough, maybe Samantha would give up her snooping and realize she was his soul mate. Trey thought that might be a little optimistic, but he couldn’t stop himself from hoping his pack mate was right.
It was Trevor who finally pointed out they’d been talking about Trey’s love life for the past hour, instead of finding clues on who was murdering men and leaving mummified remains at the city dumps.
“Never let it be said that I’m the adult in the room,” he added. “But maybe we should actually get back to looking at these files, especially if STAT is right about the MO and there’s a good chance the killer is going to strike again this weekend.”
Trey couldn’t argue with that logic. Pulling his pad full of notes a little closer, he flipped through the pages of scribbles he’d written. “I don’t know about you guys, but I haven’t found anything earth-shattering yet. Maybe we’ll get lucky and find something STAT missed.”
“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 ID’d 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 in 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 good 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.