Page 39 of Just Right

"It's clear that James McCallum couldn't have known that," he said.

"I doubt anyone knew at the time. Maybe he was concussed and had amnesia, and he left the scene, and all this was only pieced together months later," Cami said. "Maybe he was still so traumatized by this that he didn't want it publicized."

"All possibilities," Connor said. “I’m guessing that with a fall that hard, he would have been concussed. He doesn’t seem to move afterward.” He peered at the video again. “And yet, if he had been deceased, he would have been found at the scene. I’m guessing whoever took this video also didn’t notice and rushed straight down to the lake instead of up to the bridge. That’s what anyone would do if you saw a car go over.”

He was silent for a long, thoughtful minute.

"I'm going to call the office and update the team. I know Ethan might not be there, because he’s out on the trafficking raid. But this is vital. We need to start researching immediately. I’m going to ask them to go back over the postmortem results. Perhaps there was some evidence of a blue bracelet on one of the victims. That could give us a link."

"Can I research it too?" Cami asked.

"Absolutely," Connor said. "I'm going to go back in and interrogate James again. I want to find out if he knows this, and if he has any idea what happened to the son. But while I speak to him—yes, you can look the son up. Scour every corner of the online world," Connor directed her. "And see if you can make any sense of the pattern he's been following with these kills, knowing what we do now."

Connor got on the phone, barking out commands to whoever was in the office. And Cami got onto her laptop. She wanted to try and trace this man—starting with his name and if she could possibly do so, ending with his address and whereabouts.

They were so close to solving this case.

She just needed to keep going.

She looked back, checking the family's name. They had been the Becker family, and the son's name was Hayden. Hayden Becker. What had happened to him after the crash? Details would be sketchy because he'd clearly wanted to keep things private. He had been traumatized, injured, and must have had memory gaps that put James's to shame. But at some stage, his memory had returned, and that was when Cami wondered if he'd been triggered to kill.

But as she looked, she found that unlike his victims, the killer had remained mysteriously invisible online. She guessed that Connor's office might find address details for him. In the public domain, she couldn't find anything. It was obvious that he'd kept an exceptionally low profile after the crash. She couldn't even find a picture of him. The family's house had been foreclosed a few months after the crash. There was no mention of Hayden Becker at all.

It was as if he was invisible. As if he really had died in the accident instead of being flung to safety.

That gave her an idea.

Perhaps Hayden Becker had lived with the results of the accident for a long time, not knowing what had happened to him. And perhaps the memory gaps had started bothering him. In which case, he might have looked for help or support.

Cami's mind raced as she put together the tentative chain of logic. She didn't think that the Becker family had been wealthy. The car that had spun out over the bridge was an old, battered Honda. If Hayden had looked for help, he wouldn't have had the funds to do so easily. And since there was zero evidence of his employment, Cami was wondering if he had a job at all. Perhaps he just did part-time work. Perhaps his mental state wouldn't allow him to hold down a proper full-time job.

But even so, he might have been haunted by his demons and seeking to explore why he was the way he was. And to do that, he might have looked for help.

How did people access affordable mental healthcare if they didn't have insurance? Maybe there were records, or applications that were done. He must have done it in the state of Illinois, surely, because that's where his family had lived.

It was worth a try, anyway.

She searched through the databases that she could access. There seemed to be only a few options for affordable mental healthcare in the state. One by one, she looked through them, seeing if it was possible to access their lists. Some of them were pretty tightly locked up.

She got into one but couldn't find Hayden Becker. There was no evidence of him on the list.

She ran her programs, hoping to unlock a couple of the other lists. While the software was running, Connor strode back into the side office where she'd holed up.

"James is apparently shocked that there was a survivor of the crash. He knew nothing about it," he told Cami.

"He didn't mention it in the article," she agreed.

"He said that he never heard anyone refer to a survivor. He even asked to watch the video again.”

“He did?” Cami frowned.

“Yes. He said he feels better about it this time, and that knowing someone walked away has given him renewed hope. That he's not feeling so despairing anymore, that he might be able to come back from rock bottom."

"That's good?" Cami asked tentatively.

"It's good if he's not the killer. Which I'm still not sure about. But giving him the benefit of the doubt, if he did report incorrectly on the crash, without knowing the son survived, it doesn't help us. Because there's nothing whatsoever to be found on Hayden Becker. My office has checked. No address details. No employment. No record. Nothing."

Something that Connor said gave Cami the flash of an idea.

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