Page 148 of One Last Chance

“Since when does love have a time qualification? Listen, I knew I loved Rembrandt almost before we met. I’d read his first book, seen the man he was, and the feelings were already there. Meeting him in real life only ignited everything. I kissed him even before we had a real date.” Eve grinned, winked. “He was the one with the brakes back then. But he knew it too, almost immediately.” Her gaze cast out to her husband, now hauling the tube up the dock to the grass. A handsome man even in his early fifties, he wore a pair of black swim trunks and a T-shirt. “I couldn’t wait to marry him.”

“Yeah, well, you lived in the same city.”

“Not always. I went to Miami for a while there. He came after me and brought me home. But he always said he would have stayed. He said home was where I was.”

“Yes, well, Minneapolis and Miami have a plethora of homicides. Copper Mountain . . . not so much. And I think probably Dillon Bowie was the perpetrator of nearly all of them over the past fifteen years.”

Rembrandt had walked up and now put his arm around his wife’s waist, pulled her against him, her back to his chest, and kissed the top of her head. Looked up at Flynn. “So, you solved the crimes and found your sister. All done with Alaska?”

“All done.”

Eve rolled her eyes.

“Did you take down the crime board in your extra room?”

Right. “Not yet.”

He raised an eyebrow.

“I don’t know why. Something . . . it’s probably just a hard habit to break. I keep going in there and staring at it. I feel like I’m missing something.”

Rembrandt nodded. Let his wife go. “I get that. Believe me, I get that. I was haunted for years over a serial killer that just kept eluding me. And then when I found him, I realized I’d been hunting the wrong person the entire time. The real killer was right next to him. And me.” He looked at Eve. “The key was the first kill. But we got him.”

But Eve was staring at Flynn. “Right next to him.”

Flynn stared back. “That’s the thing that keeps bothering me?—”

“The copycat had to know the 1039 Killer. We never made the details public,” Eve said.

Except Flynn had been thinking about Dillon. And the fact that—“The key is the first kill.”

“Exactly,” Eve said. “The first was the waitress in the river—she worked at the 1039 sometimes. But she was last seen at the Drift, a local bar with a slew of regulars and a worn-out dance floor. No cameras on the place—but I talked with one of the bouncers who said she was a regular on Tuesday nights.”

“The 1039 is closed on Tuesdays.” Flynn said. “Are all the victims from the Drift?”

“No.”

“But all disappeared on a Tuesday?”

Eve’s eyes widened. “I’ll have to check, but maybe. I should have seen that pattern.”

“The answers are in the details, in the mistakes they make.”

“I’d ask the lead detective to look at the first victim—see if she made any enemies over at the 1039,” Rembrandt said. “And the original 1039 Killer. Who did he hang out with there? Maybe he had a fan.”

“Or an accomplice,” said Eve.

“Besides his sister?”

“Another go-round with her might be beneficial,” Rembrandt said and squeezed his wife’s shoulder. “Ask the lead to check her statement, see if anything is questionable.” He went up to the deck to join Ashley.

As Eve joined him, Flynn stood there, Rembrandt’s words in her head. Her brain on her board in her office. On the trails of yarn, on the victims’ faces, on the dates and the map and?—

The first kill.

Not the first on the books, but therealfirst kill.

Aven Mulligan.

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