Page 30 of Just Right

"I wonder if we search online, whether we can find anything related to this," Cami said thoughtfully.

"Linked cases?"

"Yes, or even a traumatic event. Maybe—I don't know—maybe his blonde girlfriend drowned and that triggered him to start killing."

"Search." Connor spread his arms. "The more information we can find now, the better."

Cami turned to her phone.

Could she find some connection to the killer, some hint of why he was doing what he did, if she searched using the parameters she had in mind? Perhaps something would come up.

"I'll use apostrophe searches to narrow the parameters,” she said thoughtfully.

Connor stared at her blankly for a moment. "Yes," he then said. "I'm sure you will."

There was a note of dark humor in his tone. It was a hundred times better than the angry criticism that had characterized so much of their first days together.

Using the key words “blonde,” “drowning,” “Chicago,” and “Milwaukee,” Cami began to search.

When the results came up, she narrowed them by news. She looked again, scanning the fields quickly. She didn't know exactly what she was looking for, but she guessed that it would check a few of the boxes, and that she would know more if she found it.

There had to be a reason why he was doing this,she told herself. Keep searching, keep searching. And then, her heart sped up as she found a result.

It wasn't just a result. This was significant. It was not a recent news report. It was about five years old, but it had very clear parallels to what they were dealing with.

"Connor!" she called, now feeling excited. "I've got something here."

CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

Cami and Connor crowded together in the car and Cami opened her laptop, calling up the news article on the bigger screen so that it would be easier to read. They needed details here because she was sure this article was gold.

"It's a family who died, driving off a bridge in winter," she said. "'Tragic Crash Claims the Becker Family,' it's headlined. The car slipped on ice when they were close to Chicago. The car went into a lake and all six occupants drowned."

She closed her eyes for a moment. That was a terrible tragedy, and there was something about it that chilled her blood. She could imagine what it must have been like to be in that car. To feel it start to slide on the ice. To have that terrible lurch of the stomach as the car lost control and went spinning off the road to land in the deep lake that looked icy and inhospitable.

"It must have been the scariest thing," she said. "Traumatic for everyone. And they all died? That's just terrible. I mean, it always seems that in these accidents, one person at least manages to survive."

"And I see that there was a big family in the car," Connor said, peering intently at the article.

Cami nodded. "The Becker family. There was a mother, two daughters, a son, a grandmother, and an aunt. The daughters were in their late teens. The son was twenty. And they're all blonde. Very blonde."

She called up a photo of the family, looking at their smiling faces, their platinum hair, so innocent of the fate that awaited them in the icy lake.

"They do look similar to the victims. The ones that I've seen anyway, so far. Is this man trying to kill this family all over again?"

"Who wrote the article? It could be that there were some other details," Connor said. "Perhaps there was another family member involved, perhaps a jealous boyfriend, a husband who suffered guilt because he wasn't in the car? That has clear parallels to what we're seeing here. Now we need to take it further and look for the links."

Those were all good suggestions. Cami read the article again, looking for details that might be relevant. But the article was very basic. It said that they had been on their way home from a shopping trip, and that their community was left devastated. There were several quotes from people who were bemoaning that the bridge was too dangerous and that this should never have happened. That was it.

Finding nothing that raised red flags, she looked up the writer. They'd need to contact him next. Hopefully, he'd have a lot of background research that hadn’t made it into this brief article, but which could provide them with a starting point.

"James McCallum, here's his name," she said. "I'm going to call him right now."

Quickly, Cami looked up James's details. But immediately, she saw there was a problem.

"Connor, look here," she said.

"What is it? Can't you find information on him?" Connor asked.

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