Page 42 of Just Right

“Good,” Connor said.

She went back, checking over the information again. She started with looking at those location pins for each victim.

Undoubtedly, Patti's information had been set to public. So had Leanne's. But what about Sally-Anne Brewster’s? That was the one that intrigued Cami, because at the time, she'd wondered why this woman would set everything to public when there was no reason for it.

She checked back carefully. Thoroughly. Second-guessing herself along the way.

Now, she was looking with a different idea in mind. And that idea was that this man, Hayden Becker, was not an IT expert. Nothing pointed to it. All he was doing was following location pins. He was a troubled man with a difficult past. There was no evidence to show that he was a hacker.

So, if he wasn’t a hacker, he would have had to trace the women’s locations through conventional and obvious means.

And there she saw it. The mistake she'd made. The small detail that she hadn't taken into account.

"Connor, look here," Cami said excitedly. "When I was checking up on Sally-Anne Brewster, I didn't look properly at the parameters, because there was a way for me to override them. But her location pin here was set to friends and contacts. It wasn't public."

"What does that mean?" Connor asked, a note of hope in his voice to replace the earlier antagonism.

"It means that whoever traced her must have been a friend or a contact. There's no other way they could have seen her whereabouts from outside that circle, without some serious hacking skills. So, he's far more likely to have been a friend or a contact of Sally-Anne, especially if he does live nearby here."

"So, if we look through her friends and contacts?"

"We should find him there," Cami said.

CHAPTER TWENTY FOUR

It was their only hope. This was the break in the case, the detail that Cami was pinning everything on now. Sally-Anne’s recent locations had been set to friends and contacts only. So, for the killer to have seen them, he had to be connected to her.

And out of all of them, Sally-Anne had the smallest group of contacts. She wasn’t famous, or high profile, or a relentless self-promoter, like Leanne and Patti had been.

Now, they needed to see who her friends and contacts were. And for this, Cami had a very useful piece of code that she'd gotten a while ago off open source and had stashed away, thinking it would be something that might come in handy one day. It was called Connection Crawler.

It automated the process of finding lists of mutual friends and contacts. It changed it from a tedious, time-consuming process, to one that took a couple of minutes. This software would scan the friends in common and compile a full list of Sally-Anne’s connections, even though Cami was not direct friends with Sally-Anne herself.

"I've got a program here that's going to be able to search all her friends and connections. I'll send you a list as soon as I have it."

"How many people will it be?"

"It looks like only a few hundred. So within those, we need to search for the one we want. The age, the looks, the hair color. That should narrow it down."

Cami took a look at the list as the program obediently worked, the names flipping down, one after the other. Each one was a prospect that could help them solve this case. Carefully, she searched through, looking for the right parameters. Looking for the killer.

There were only a few men of the right age who were Sally-Anne’s friends.

Then the name leaped out at her.

"Becker Evans,” she said aloud.

"What? So, he used his family's last name as his first name?" Connor asked.

"Maybe he remembered it, or he wanted the connection, even if it wasn't obvious. But it's him, I think. Becker Evans is the right age, and he lives locally. I’m going to see what he looks like now and compare him to the old photos of the family."

Cami searched online, looking for a photo.

"He doesn’t have many photos of himself online at all. But there is one shot that matches up. The features look the same, except now, he has a scar on his head." She could see the red, raised mark clearly on one of his blond temples. "I think he had a severe injury, and it might have affected him from then on," she said.

"Let's get his address," Connor said. "Car number plate details. I'm connecting with the office. They can research those things. But that's not all we need." He stared at Cami. "An address might not be helpful to us at this time. We need to know where he's headed. Because this man is clearly not staying home. He's on a mission. He's literally moving from kill to kill with barely a break. And by now, it's likely he's going to be on the move again."

Cami nodded. Worry twisted inside her. It wasn’t enough to find Becker Evans. They had to find the last link, the final piece to this puzzle, the killer's next target. And she knew that if they didn't hurry, then based on the frequency of his kills so far, he would take another victim.

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