not necessarily something they’re trying to recreate, specifically. Often, the first victim wasn’t planned, the way the rest were. The first happened, and he started following the pattern after that. Either way, a serial killer’s first victim can give important information about him.”
Ugh. “Who was this guy’s first?”
“The first in this series was Laura Lee Matlock. Thirty-three. Born in Damascus. Wound up dead beside the road near Bowling Green, Kentucky.”
“Damascus?” I repeated. “The town a few miles from here? Where Yvonne lives? And Elspeth Caulfield grew up?”
She nodded. “Mrs. Matlock hit hard times around thirty. Her husband went to prison for a while. They had two kids, and it was hard for her to keep things together alone, so she started picking up extra money working the night shift at the truck stop down by the interstate.”
“The same place where the most recent victim was dumped?”
“Yes,” Grimaldi said. “She was waiting tables, but sometimes she’d go off with a trucker for an hour for some extra cash, too. The assumption was that that’s what happened, although nobody knows for sure.”
“But she disappeared from the truck stop?”
“She finished her shift,” Grimaldi said, “but never made it home. Her mother, who babysat the kids overnight, reported her missing halfway through the day. By then, Kentucky State Police had already found her, and it was just a matter of putting the two together.”
The missing woman and the dead one, I assumed. The same victim.
“So she got into a truck with somebody, and he drove north from here and pushed her out of the truck an hour and a half to two hours later, in Kentucky.”
“Longer than that,” Grimaldi said. “It would have taken some time to do what he did to her, too.”
Right. So maybe three to four hours later.
“And she was Number One. Numeral I.”
“Yes,” Grimaldi said. “Although at the time, she was just a dead women with a slash on the inside of her arm.”
Right. “How long did it take to figure out that they weren’t just slashes?”
“By Victim Three there was a pattern,” Grimaldi said evenly, not betraying by so much as an eyelash flicker that Victim Three was her mother. “By Victim Four, they became numerals. IV instead of IIII. When Number Five was a capital V instead of four vertical lines with a diagonal line across them, it became a certainty.”
I nodded. “I wasn’t thinking about the straight lines with the diagonal lines across them. That’s the simplest way to keep track of numbers, isn’t it? All straight lines. I was thinking he might have gone with the numerals because they would be easier to carve than the curves in numbers like 2 and 3.”
“But straight lines with diagonal lines would have been easier still,” Grimaldi said.
I nodded. “So the numerals must mean something. Beyond just keeping a tally of victims.”
“They might,” Grimaldi nodded. “It’s too soon to say that they must.”
Maybe. “Who would chose to keep track of things with Roman numerals? What kind of person, I mean? Most of us would either think in normal numbers, 1 and 2 and so forth, or the single line tally marks with the diagonal line. Score marks, or whatever they’re called. What kind of person goes to Roman numerals first?”
“Not necessarily first,” Grimaldi admonished. And continued, before I could argue with her, “Someone who studied Latin? Someone with a parochial school education?”
“Catholic, you mean? Did you go to Catholic school?” She was Italian; it seemed a logical question.
“No,” Grimaldi said. “We couldn’t afford private school. Tony and Francesca and I all went to the local public school.”
“So did I.” And sometimes I wondered why, since Mother and Dad had certainly had the money to send Dix, Catherine, and me to private, or even boarding school. But instead they’d kept us home and let us duke it out with the unwashed masses in general education. “It’s been a few years, but I think Latin was an elective at Columbia High.”
“You didn’t take it?”
I shook my head. “French. The Martins come from France originally. Besides, Paris.”
Grimaldi nodded. “But the local high school offered it. Maybe our unsub went to Columbia High.”
Maybe. Although— “I’m sure it isn’t the only school along the I-65 corridor that offers Latin.”
“No,” Grimaldi said, “but it’s where Victim One went, most likely.”
“Did she grow up in Damascus?”
Grimaldi nodded.
“Then yes,” I said. “Unless her family paid for private school—” And that wasn’t likely, if she’d fallen on hard enough times later to have to sell her body to