Page 29 of Just Hide

"I was working around the back. I did notice out of the corner of my eye that she had a garden services person working today. I think I saw the hedge being clipped, and they wear those green canvas jackets."

"Was that normal? Any sign of a vehicle? What usually happens when they arrive?"

She frowned. "Now, I think they usually do come in a truck, and it parks outside the house for a few hours. And it's normally on a Monday and Friday that they're here, a team of two or three. It is unusual for anyone to be here today, now that I'm thinking about it. You think that was the killer?" She sounded horrified.

"Did you notice anything about this person?"

She shook her head, now looking distressed all over again. "I so wish I had. How could I not have noticed? If I had, I could have stopped this from happening! But it seemed such a normal sight."

"You can't blame yourself," Connor said. "This was thoroughly preplanned. If it hadn't been today, it would have been some other time. What matters now is that we figure out when, and where, this person was here."

But as Connor spoke, Cami had a bad feeling that this would not be the easiest trail to follow because this killer was smart. Smart enough to have observed the routine and gone in for the kill at a day and time when the victim, but nobody else, was there. Perhaps even observant enough to see that this victim hadn't really taken note of the service providers working in her yard and that if they posed as one, they would be invisible.

Cami was sure that he, or she, would have been clever enough to park far away, figure out where the neighborhood cameras were, and bypass them to arrive on foot.

The killer had bought a green canvas jacket to look exactly like the garden services worker. Most probably, even Sammi had been fooled, at any rate, for long enough to allow the killer to get close.

And she’d checked into the gym. She went there every weekday, according to the glance at her social media that Cami had done in the car. It would not have been difficult to find out when she was due to get back.

"I didn't notice any other cars around. And I do notice those," Hazel said, confirming Cami's thoughts. "I mean, it's a safe and peaceful neighborhood—or so I thought—but my late husband always used to say if you want a safe neighborhood, keep an eye out for strange cars. And honestly, I didn't see any."

But as Cami glanced around, she saw lots of walkers. People out for a stroll, people with shopping bags, people with their dogs. There was a park opposite the neighborhood. It wouldn't have been too difficult at all for this killer to have watched, and waited, until the time was right. With so many people on foot, another one would have blended in.

They were dealing with someone patient. Someone who'd taken the time to get a full picture of Sammi’s situation and how they could blend in and had then struck again.

Cami shook her head, feeling angry and ineffectual that this was happening, and that they still had no leads, no evidence. All they knew was that this killer was determined and fueled with a desire to destroy.

The victims' bodies, at least, not the faces. Their faces hadn't been touched. Cami had seen, in that unwanted glimpse, that the destruction was all from the neck down, and she remembered it had been the same in the other crime scene photos.

Faces, face recognition. It was coming back to that. And she couldn't get the thought of that software out of her mind.

Moving away from the scene, while Connor walked over to speak to the passersby, Cami got out her phone.

She went and looked on Wave Management's website, looked at what they offered, and who their clients were. It was surely their next step, this company that had engineered the best available facial recognition software so far.

Standing near the car, she pored over the website, getting a better picture of this bright, successful tech startup, and what they’d done so far, and who their clients were.

"What are you looking up?" Connor asked, walking back toward her. She guessed none of the passersby had seen anything of value.

"I'm finding out more about this company that owns the facial recognition software that Gatherings used. It's based in Boston, and I'm thinking that makes a difference. They already have a lot of clients, they’re new and super successful, and they’re going to have a huge pool of faces on their files because the Ts and Cs state all the captured facial images have to be shared with them."

"What about someone from the company itself? Could someone from there have used the software and accessed this big pool of data?"

"That's what I'm wondering," Cami said thoughtfully, scrolling through the website. "Because now that I'm looking, I'm seeing a lot of functionality here that could be very useful to a killer."

"Such as what?" Connor asked.

"There's this option here that allows you to reverse search any group of images, or even embark on a search for you, with specific features as a setting."

"So, if you need high forehead, blonde hair—or dark hair, oval face, or whatever—you can somehow program this in?"

"That's right. They call it a Likeness Search. I'm experimenting with it now on the free trial that they allow you to have and look at this."

Cami had gone into a few groups of faces online, using social media to create the search pool, and she'd found three people who looked uncannily like her. Same eyes, same face. The software had been intelligent enough to go beyond her hairstyle and look at the underpinnings of the face itself, although it had kept the search confined to people with dark hair.

"It's a very clever program, and it's interactive with other programs and with social media. And it's in Boston, and although they have clients all over, they get access to every single one of those photos because it’s in the testing phases. And this likeness search would be what the killer needed to find these lookalikes. "

"So, you think we should go there now?" Connor asked.

---