Page 4 of Pure Killers

"When it’s darkest," I conclude. That would make sense. There's no lighting in Crennick.

"Which, following the pattern of one every three months say, puts the next kill on…" She clicks once more. "The 12th of May."

"We've got a date," Dirk says, lips curving into a smile. “If he sticks to schedule.”

Progress, finally. I grin back. "Yes, we do." I clap my hands. "And I’ve got a date in the lab. Dirk, I told Howie and Dean that we'd take a look at the Cocooner case with them…"

"Oh! Can I come?" Chloe asks with an excited gasp.

"…Sure, why not? Okay, let’s think about potential next vics back in here tomorrow. We've got about two months to figure out who and where."

I slip out of the room and down the hall. Just a bit closer. Finally.

Rosie is our lab lady, and as I look through the glass walls that cube the lab off from the corridor, I see her in her usual reliable spot, at the desk with her glasses tilted up on her head and her eye pressed to a microscope's eyepiece. She looks like a young but quirky grandmother, with faded pink hair and a collection of necklaces always clattering away under her lab coat, the tails of some patterned dress sticking out from underneath it.

She looks up at the sound of the door as I step in, and rolls back on her pedestal chair, a move that is both precarious and somewhat impressive.

"Anything from the scene so far?" I ask.

Rosie changes out her glasses before answering and then stares at me through thick lenses. Even with them, I get thesense that her eyesight is bad enough that I might still be blurry. "A couple of things," she says, reaching for a print-out. "We ID'd the Strangler."

I'm looking at a profile on the man, and his license photo. "Name’s Don Zavala. Clean criminal record but he has a string of past employers who either fired or reported him for attempted sexual assault. And a former prostitute who filed a report saying that he choked her almost to the point of passing out nearly five years ago. Her charge was dropped due to a lack of evidence."

Perfect, that’s going to make the people happy. The rapist with potential prior convictions that were ignored. Hell, it even makes me angry.

"Right," I sigh.

"Also, we found some hair on his clothes. Long, probably a woman’s."

Now that’s interesting. "One of his prior victims?" I ask.

"Doesn't match."

“Could have been a friend…” I look at his picture again. “Doesn’t seem like the type to have close female friends. Maybe a future victim," I muse. "Run it for me?"

"Already did! Or rather, Seb did." Rosie nods towards the other side of the room, where her current intern is hunched over his own desk, so quiet that I didn't even realise he was in here. The guy talks so little that it’s taken me three months to even learn his name.

Since Rosie doesn't go in the field much anymore, she usually sends out whoever happens to be her intern. And they're normally only too happy to go since field work is the thing that most get into this career for. Seb looks like he's been back for some time, so focussed on his work. His lab coat is too big on him, even though he's not a small guy.

Seeming to realise he's being talked about, Seb lifts his head. His glasses, like Rosie’s, are thick enough to distort his eyes,making it unclear whether he's making eye contact or not. Given the awkwardness of the rest of his demeanour, I'd guess not.

"Oh! Detective Bis- Bis-hop…"

Rather than letting him struggle over the nameBishop, I put in, "El is fine, please."

Seb's stutter pulls his mouth askew, a tic that seems to come out most when he's being spoken to. Stepping over to another machine, he continues "I got a m-match."

Following Seb, I stand behind him, and when he turns around to look down at me, he hunches a little lower, seeming to want to back away before he tells me, "The hair belongs to a woman. N-named Lee-Anne." Brown hair sticks out from under a matching brown beanie, and he favours one leg as we stand there. Somehow, despite all this, he's kind of cute, in that awkward nerdy kind of way.

Sensing that my perusal is making him even more self-conscious, I look down at the file, and the face of an Asian woman about my age, and therefore in the right range for the Strangler.

"She's alive," Seb adds. "In the s-system for prior driving under the influence."

I flip the page. "That was five years ago."

"Could be clean now," Rosie puts in, her face pressed back to her microscope.

"Maybe…" Catching Seb's eye as he stands awkwardly waiting, I ask, “Can I grab her address?”

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