Page 53 of So Lethal

Faith returned her smile even though she didn’t feel it. “He’s a good dog.”

Thankfully, a younger woman sat next to the Spaniel's owner and engaged her in conversation. Her daughter, apparently. Whoever she was, it meant Faith didn't have to talk to her.

Instead, she talked to Michael, keeping her voice low so they weren’t overheard. “Where do we go from here? We have nothing. We don’t even have a list of people to look for.”

Michael sipped his coffee. “I don’t know. He lifted the hand not holding his coffee cup and let it drop. “I just… don’t know.” He sighed. “I hate to say it, but unless more evidence surfaces, there might not be anything we can do.”

Her lips thinned. “Meaning we’re waiting for another dead body before we can look for a better lead.”

He didn’t reply. Which was a reply in itself.

“We don’t have anything from the police report?” Faith asked. “No evidence? No fingerprints, footprints, DNA, nothing?”

“We have footprints that match the marks from Monica Smith’s scene, but it’s to a brand and size of work boot that’s ubiquitous. The size is small for the height of the suspect, but not so small that Ferris has been able to narrow it down that way.” He sighed. “It’s funny. Everyone’s different until you need to rely on those differences. Then everyone’s the damned same.”

Turk barked happily and grinned over at the two of them. A bloodhound had joined their trio, and the three dogs were playing some sort of jumping game. Faith waved at him, then said, “This doesn’t feel like it should be the case that stumps us. After everything we’ve done, every case we’ve solved on the back of thin evidence or leaps of intellect, this really seems like it should be open and shut.”

“Does it really seem that way, or is it just that it’s not as weird as some of the other cases?”

She sighed. “I guess that’s it,” she admitted. “The last crime scene got weird with the angel wings, but that was the first one. And it was really crude too, like the killer didn’t really know what he was doing. The others were just simple strangulations. The bodies weren’t even moved. Well, I guess Sarah was placed in her car, but that’s it. I guess it just seems so… mundane.”

Michael smiled without humor. “Would this be a bad time to point out how many ‘mundane’ cases go cold?”

“It would be a shitty time to point that out, yes.” She sipped her coffee. “Is this what ordinary detectives go through? Are we just spoiled because we get hand-delivered only the most spectacular cases?”

“If all of the detectives I talk to are to be believed, yes.”

She looked at him. “How many detectives do you talk to?”

“A few at Philadelphia PD. So not a lot, I guess, but all of them tell me I’m lucky to only work one case at a time, and that all of my cases are ‘shiny.’”

“Shiny?”

“That’s the term they used. I guess it means they all have very distinct characteristics that make it easy to follow a lead.”

“It sure doesn’t seem easy,” Faith grumbled.

He shrugged. “I mean, if you figure that most murder investigations take weeks to solve, we really do have it easy.”

“Most murder investigations don’t drop multiple victims within days of each other,” Faith countered.

“I’m not saying we have a cushy job,” Michael said. “I’m just trying to find a way to accept that this might be the first time we have to slog it out instead of just leaping across steppingstones to the answer.”

Faith set her jaw. “Well, I don’t accept that.”

“Life goes on whether you accept it or not.”

Faith felt her irritation growing. She didn’t want to fight with Michael, so she let the argument drop. “Well, it sucks.”

He lifted his coffee cup. “I’ll drink to that.”

She touched her cup to his and they sipped together. The dogs were resting now, sitting comfortably together and panting joyfully. The thought crossed Faith’s mind that maybe it would be all right for Turk to spend the last few years of his life like this, playing and making new friends. She wasn’t ready to retire, but maybe it was selfish of her to expect that Turk had to work just because she wasn’t ready to stop.

That was another train of thought she didn’t want to take, so she turned back to the case, focusing on the profile of their killer.

There were really only two possibilities for motive, assuming this wasn’t a personal vendetta against people he knew. It was looking less and less likely that was the case, so it had to be either a disdain for the hearing impaired or a twisted sympathy for them.

But why these victims? That was the question they couldn’t answer yet, the most important question to answer. The killer might not have a personal vendetta, but he had to at least have known the victims somehow.

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