was a local issue. Although Allan Peterson was on the task force, he had not been assigned as Danni’s partner until recently. He was a tall, handsome blond, not bad to look at, but they were still feeling each other out as partners.
“Anything on the Volkswagen?” she asked.
“Yeah, it’s registered to a female student,” Peterson replied. “She parked it at the spot where the victim was attacked but didn’t lock the doors. Said she had no reason to. Nobody would steal a broken-down old Bug. And get this: It had been there for three or four days—she couldn’t remember exactly.”
“What are these kids thinking?” Danni said. “Leave your car in the same spot unlocked for days and expect nothing to happen. I don’t get it.”
“She probably figured nobody would want it—at least, not to stage a murder in. I’ll bet if he knocked her out he was going to hot-wire it and take her somewhere to do the killing. Those old Bugs are easy to steal.”
“You’re probably right,” Danni replied. “So he had to set that whole scenario up. He knew where the car was. He knew the door was open. He put his weapons in there. Then he got some books, put on a fake cast, and waited for Stacey to walk out the front door of Fogarty Hall. He even pretended to open the car door as she watched. Now that’s what I call calculating.”
“Like he was writer, director, and star of his own play,” Peterson observed. “He’s an organized killer all right. No doubt about it.”
Danni knew exactly what Allan was talking about. There were three types of serial killers: organized, disorganized, and mixed. Organized killers were usually very bright and plotted their murders, sometimes very intricately. They were usually male and, in this case, considering the victims, the killer was almost definitely a man. Murders like this didn’t happen in small-town America every day, but they did happen on college campuses from time to time.
“Did you read that information we received last Friday on serial murders that have occurred in the last ten years?” she asked.
“I’ve seen it before.”
“So you know there was someone killing coeds on the campus of the University of Utah two years ago?”
“And two years before that at Florida State, and before that the University of Texas,” Allan replied.
“Any discernible patterns?” she asked.
“They were all organized killers. The killings in Utah and at Florida State, like here, had no pattern or ritual to the murders themselves. And the killer was never caught. He apparently just moved on.”
“Any people we know of who were in Utah and are now here?”
“There was a first-year law student who did undergraduate work at Utah. Somebody already talked to him though.”
“Law student? That doesn’t necessarily mean he’s intelligent, but it could.”
Peterson had a law degree and Danni knew it.
“Simply because somebody is a law student and goes to a different graduate school for their studies is not grounds to put them under suspicion,” he said.
Danni had made the remark as a joke, but they obviously did not have the same sense of humor. She let it go.
“Maybe not, but he’s here, so let’s go talk to him again and see for ourselves if he fits our profile in any way.”
“It can’t hurt,” Peterson replied.
Chapter Five
The young man’s name was Thomas Felton and he lived in an apartment on Arthur Road. Luckily, he happened to be home when they came to visit.
“I talked to a police officer the other day,” he told them after inviting them in. “What’s this about?”
Although he was pushing back a little, he didn’t appear angry or defensive. Anybody would ask that question, Danni told herself as she studied the details of his face and compared them to the sketch that Stacey had helped them come up with. He was slim, his nose was straight, and his lips were thin, but that’s where the resemblance ended. His eyes were green, his brown hair was short and straight, and he was clean-shaven. It could have been a disguise, Danni surmised, not ready to let him go on appearances alone. After all, the perp was wearing a fake cast.
“What do you think it’s about?” Peterson asked.
“I don’t know. The other two guys who were here asked me questions about Utah, so I assume it has something to do with Utah and here.”
“Anything else?” Danni persisted.
“Well, the only thing I can think of was that there were some female students murdered in Utah when I was there,