Page 20 of The Butterfly Killer

If he hadn’t already done it yet.

As Marcus feared, there was another murder. He didn’t know about it until he was coming back to the precinct and he saw a swarm of people with cameras.

The media. Shit.

He parked and jumped out of his cruiser.

“Excuse me.” He pushed through the people wielding cameras.

“Do you know anything about the Butterfly case? The recent murder of the single mother found dead in her home this morning?”

Multiple people shoved microphones in his face and some guy with a notepad was ready to write down any notes.

Marcus shook his head. “I’m not?—”

The front doors to the building opened and a publicist working with the FBI agents came out. She raised her hand.

“If you have any questions about the on-going case, I’ll take them now.”

The swarm almost trampled over Marcus to get to her. He let out a sigh of relief, but stared at the group as they started throwing out questions.

His feet were cemented to the steps as he watched them, but he really wasn’t paying attention. There had been another murder. All last night he hadn’t been able to sleep because he’d had this feeling that there was going to be another killing.

The time was ticking. This copycat had an agenda. They weren’t just killing for a sick thrill. They had a plan that needed to be done and they were trying to get through it quickly.

Marcus dashed through the front doors. He went straight to the room where they kept all the case files. He flashed his badge at the man minding the front desk and he was let through.

As he’d been thinking in his bed last night, it occurred to him that maybe the copycat had deliberately chosen the two victims for a purpose. His idea was further backed up by the recent murder—a single mother. That fit the victims of the original Butterfly Killer.

He went to the stack of unsolved murders in the year of his mother’s killing. The Butterfly Killer had a specific two month period between killings. So if Marcus looked at the month two months prior…

He pulled out multiple cases. He slapped them down on the table in the center of the room. The light dangled above him, casting a yellowish glow on the old paper.

His hands shook as he flipped through the cases. The pictures of death made him nauseated, but he pushed through. He was onto something. He could feel it.

The words started to mush together as a half hour and then an hour passed by. He rubbed his eyes as he blinked the fatigue away. He moved to sitting at the desk rather than craning over it. His motivation waned as he didn’t find anything for some time.

It was depressing to see how many cases in just a month had gone unsolved. But it was a different time years ago. The technology had been different—and the times had changed. He wasn’t sure if it was for better or worse. Sometimes it felt like death and murder was the only constant things in this world.

He let out a sigh and dove back into the files, praying he would find something.

He was calling it quits when someone else walked into the file room.

“Hey, you working on something?” Burns asked as he walked over to Marcus.

Marcus was packing up the files. “I thought maybe there was a cold case no one thought was connected to the Butterfly Killer.”

Burns nodded. “Okay. What makes you think we’ve overlooked it?”

Marcus stacked the files neatly and back in the order he’d found them. “Well, I thought what if the copycat knows the killer better than we do? What if they know the Palmer case wasn’t the first victim?”

Burns rose his brows. “That’d mean the copycat would have to be close to the Butterfly Killer. Why wouldn’t you think it’s just the Butterfly Killer repeating his pattern?”

“Because how clean everything is. The original murderer didn’t care about leaving his DNA behind. The copycat is. I’m betting that if we did find DNA evidence it wouldn’t be a match to the original string of murders.”

“Right. So you haven’t been able to find any correlating murders.”

Marcus’s shoulders slumped. He shook his head in defeat. “Nothing. I even went a year ahead of the Palmer murder.”

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