Page 40 of Just Right

"You know, I was wondering if he'd gotten help for his amnesia. Assuming he was concussed in the crash and suffered memory loss. And that when the memories returned, they caused psychosis, and he went looking for his family."

"That's an idea. Or rather, it would be if he existed," Connor said.

"I've been looking. I haven't found anything either. And that made me think."

Cami hesitated.

"Think what?" Connor asked.

"Think that maybe, his amnesia was so bad he didn't even remember his name. Maybe he was rushed to hospital, and he took on a different name. Maybe that's why we can't find him. Because he's been living the whole of his life, since the accident, under a different identity."

She saw the excitement in Connor's eyes as she continued. "And if that's so, we just have to fit the pieces together, and see if we can find it."

CHAPTER TWENTY THREE

Cami felt as if she'd been presented with an unsolvable puzzle. Somewhere out there was a killer, but since the accident and his serious injury, they had no way of knowing who he was, or the new identity he'd taken on. And if they didn't find out, then without a doubt, he would kill again.

After all, there had been five occupants of the car beside himself. He'd killed four people so far. If he was trying to hunt down every single person that he perceived to have been in that crash, then there was one still to go.

"He might not even stop at five," Cami said, seeing the worry she felt reflected in Connor's face. "He might just carry on, looking for people who resemble his family. He's not finding them, so he might not stop."

"Let's go over what we know about him," Connor said firmly.

"He's blond. That we know."

"We know his age. Twenty-five. And that he's tall and strong."

"He lives in this area, and he must have a car."

"And he's been able to track down all the victims."

Cami did yet another keyword search. "Amnesia." "Unidentified blond male." "Unidentified twenty-year-old." “Injured blond male.” “Mystery hospital patient.”

But she couldn't find anything in the news.

"If he was injured, he surely had to go to the hospital?" Connor said.

"I know, but I'm not finding anything that refers to that," Cami said. "Maybe he didn't go there. Maybe he crawled away from that crash and slowly recovered without medical attention. Or maybe someone picked him up and took him home and cared for him on their own. That might have happened, especially if he couldn't remember who he was, and he said he had no medical insurance."

Cami thought about that. It was definitely within the bounds of possibility that someone could have done such a thing. Whether they knew who he was or not.

"Maybe they read the news article that his whole family had died and didn't want to traumatize him with it," she suggested. "Maybe they thought it was best that he went forward with a new identity and new memories."

Connor nodded. "I'm finding here that things were not well with the family."

"Their house was foreclosed. Was there more that went wrong?"

"The Becker family was in dire financial straits. Now, my office has sent me through some information. It seems like the mother and the sister both had big outstanding medical bills from an earlier car crash. The father's business looks to have a ton of bad debt against it. It's on three different blacklists. He died of a heart attack a few months before this crash, it seemed, and left his affairs in a mess."

"Okay," Cami said. "So actually, if anyone realized who he was, there were very good reasons why they wouldn't have told him. Because he could even have ended up being liable for the family's bad debt."

“Yes, that’s a possibility.”

"Maybe his memory worked well enough for him to seek out distant family and friends, someone who knew him before the crash? And they kept it quiet intentionally, to protect him? "

Cami felt as if they were stabbing in the dark here. She knew there had to be a way of finding this out. There had to.

But there were too many possible scenarios.

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