to the low wall of her small cubicle, and she removed them one by one. They were all crime scene photos from Glover’s previous murders, and Zoe wanted her improvised office to be free from Glover’s influence. O’Donnell had been right when she’d said they had to avoid any preconceived notions about the case. The evidence suggested that two men were involved in Catherine Lamb’s murder. Nothing conclusive had been found about their identities yet.
After taking down all the photos, she collected the papers that were strewn on the desk. Most were transcripts—they’d spent a lot of time interviewing people who’d known Glover, most of them coworkers. There were also various documents that pinpointed his whereabouts—three apartment rental contracts, a speeding ticket for Daniel Moore, bank account records under Daniel Moore’s name. Zoe kept wondering how Glover had managed to stitch up such a solid fake identity. Someone must have helped him.
But now was not the time to think about it. Fresh case, no assumptions.
Her phone blipped, a notification from her Instagram app. Aside from a brief two-week foray into Facebook and a barely maintained LinkedIn profile, Zoe never bothered with social media before. She did now. Andrea had an Instagram account, and since she’d moved away, Zoe had created her own account just to follow her sister. She never posted anything, had no profile picture, and her profile name was _____ZBentley. And she followed only Andrea.
Her sister told her it was creepy, though Zoe didn’t really understand why.
She tapped the notification, and the app opened, showing Andrea’s new post. She’d taken a selfie and captioned it remembering the old days of sleeping in big-sis room. Zoe blinked, recognizing the poster in the background, a close-up of Winona Ryder’s face from one of her favorite movies, Girl, Interrupted. She’d bought the poster a day after watching the movie, hanging it above her bed. Now the rest of the furniture in the room fell into focus—the familiar desk, the old bed light, the small night table. Andrea smiled in the picture, but her eyes were sad, and she seemed younger, almost a child again. Zoe felt a sudden tug of homesickness.
She almost responded with a bitter comment, mentioning that Andrea could have been sleeping in “big-sis’s” apartment right now. But she didn’t. Instead, she wrote, Missing you, and added a heart emoji for good measure.
They had hardly talked in the past two weeks. Zoe wasn’t sure why. Their few phone calls were stunted and slow, with Andrea trying to find topics for conversation and Zoe struggling not to drop the ball of the conversation completely. Was this because of Glover’s attack on Andrea? Did talking to Zoe remind her sister of that night? Or did those conversations actually remind Zoe of how Andrea had almost been raped and murdered because of her?
Maybe a bit of both.
She put down her phone and opened her case folder.
O’Donnell had sent them a digital copy of the current case file, and Zoe had printed the initial report and eight of the crime scene photos. She set them next to each other, two rows of four pictures each. Pictures of Catherine Lamb, covered and uncovered with the blanket. A picture of the bloody footprints. One picture of the bedroom, one of the bathroom, bloodstains on the sink.
It was a savage act, two men breaking into a woman’s apartment, raping and murdering her. At first glance, that was all it was, a torrent of violence. Surely that was how Catherine had experienced it.
But looking carefully, she saw it wasn’t one act; it was a series of smaller acts. And each of them had been initiated by one of the men.
Who chose the victim? Who planned the assault? Who jabbed her with a needle? Each of the acts said something about the attacker. Usually the details of the crime interlocked to create an image of one man. But here, she first had to painstakingly separate the acts into two different groups.
As a child, she’d had a jigsaw puzzle box she loved. The box contained two different puzzles of Mickey Mouse, each a hundred pieces. Golfing Mickey and Skiing Mickey. But the pieces inevitably mixed together in the box. When she began assembling the jigsaw, she always had to sort them into two separate piles before she could really get to work. The pieces had marks on the back so she could tell them apart. Xs for Skiing Mickey, circles for Golfing Mickey.