Page 41 of Already Lost

Red hair that reached almost down to thefloor

Kentucky, though, didn’t fit with JennaJanes. And while Laura had been over it and over it, deciding that the connectionshe was making were visual… still. What if the killer heard someone with aKentucky accent and decided to take them, too? But then again, if the killerwas in custody, what did it matter? He couldn’t hurt anyone from the medicalbay.

It was late at night when I saw them both

Leaving that bar with his jacket on her

I couldn't believe it, yes I was loath

To think that coat was a gift from my sir

And that one, it had to be their lastvictim, Tessa Patinson. She’d come out of the party with her men’s jacket on,looking like she’d just come from a date maybe. Sad as it was, that had beenenough.

The lyrics fit. The perpetrator fit.

Didn’t he?

The thing she kept going back to was thatapartment. The way it had been so messy, littered with drug paraphernalia andold takeout packaging and all the rest of it. It was filthy. It looked likeMaverford was no stranger to falling asleep on the couch and not bothering toclean up the next morning. Getting high or drunk and then repeating it againthe next day.

That kind of environment… it didn’t pointto the organized and tightly methodical mind of their killer. That killer wascalculating and had a steady hand, an ability to repeat the same patternexactly, again and again.

Laura wasn’t a forensic psychologist, butshe would have expected something different from the profile. A tidy home,probably a neat and well-preserved shrine to the past. Somewhere that wasfrozen in time. The killer would have a place for everything, a neat order toboth his life and his home. That was what she had been expecting.

Laura scanned over the song again. Therewas no other description of a woman in the lyrics. Just the thing aboutKentucky, which she was fairly sure had nothing new to bring – the killer hadtaken it stanza by stanza, and that one was all about Jenna Janes. There wasnothing left but the opening stanza, which was about the singer herself, andthe closing two, which were only about how the man and woman grew closer.

Except…

They were on the bridge, their breath wasmisting

When I looked up and saw them both upthere

My watch, it stopped when I saw themkissing

My man and the girl with the rose in herhair

That was different, wasn’t it? At firstglance, Laura had taken it differently – that it was about the girl with therose in her hair again, and Dakota Henson was already dead, so it couldn’t meananything. But what if…

What if there was one more character leftto be drawn out of the song?

The important part of this lyric was thebridge. Two people kissing on a bridge. It had to mean something. Had theyreally caught him before he was able to use one more gramophone on the lastvictim?

Or…

“Thought you might like to see this.”

Laura looked up to see Captain Kinnockholding a printout in his hand. He was grinning.

“What is it?” she asked, while Natefrowned from beside her.

“The final pieces of the puzzle,” Kinnocksaid, handing them over. “You can use these tomorrow to get him to confess, Ibet. They just came through from our evidence photographer.”

Laura stared at the pictures. A copy ofthe record – and a gramophone.

But it wasn’t the same type of gramophonethat had been used in the first three murders at all.

Now, she knew.

They had the wrong man.

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