Unsolved (Invisible #2) - James Patterson Page 0,56

for our offender, don’t you think?”

Okay, fine—that’s as good a name as any. Darwin it is.

“Why does he pick people living in single-story homes?” she asks.

“I don’t know.”

“Why near public transit? Oh.” She remembers. “You think he subdues them away from home and drives them back in their own car.”

“I definitely think that’s what happened in New Orleans,” I say. “The seat of the car was pushed much farther back than the victim, Nora Connolley, would have had it. Someone else drove it.”

“Okay. So you think he subdued her, drove her back to her house, killed her, then took a bus or train back to his car?” Bonita chews on her lip, eyes narrowed, thinking this over.

“I know, I know—he went to an awful lot of trouble, right?” I say, reading her thoughts. “That’s what Detective Crescenzo in New Orleans said. But that’s why nobody suspects foul play, Rabbit. There’s no sign of forced entry because he has the keys; no sign of struggle at the house because he subdued the victim, probably by injecting something, away from the house. Everything points to an accident or death by natural causes. It’s a lot easier to believe that a woman slipped in her shower than that a killer subdued her somewhere else, transported her home, then concocted some elaborate scheme to kill her and make it look like an accident.”

“It’s why you can’t get the police to investigate,” says Rabbit.

“And the one cop I did persuade to investigate, Detective Halsted in Vienna, Virginia, ended up dead in his home. A forty-eight-year-old man supposedly dead of a heart attack. Stranger things have happened, but it’s getting pretty coincidental.”

As open-minded as Bonita is, especially to my opinions, even she seems to think it’s a stretch. “What does the timing tell us?” she asks.

I look at the chart, though I have all the details committed to memory. “Well, most of them were killed on a Monday or very late on Sunday night,” I say. “Not the first one, Laura Berg. She was a Tuesday. And the cop who was investigating her death, Detective Halsted, was on a Wednesday.”

“But the rest of them were Monday.”

“Yeah.” I look at her. “What are you thinking?”

She gets out of her chair with a moan. Tired, weary bones. If Bonita Sexton has slept in the past forty-eight hours, I sure can’t tell.

She starts to pace, but that’s impossible to do in my cubicle, so we move into the hallway.

“Darwin picks them from a distance, right?” she asks.

I nod. “I think so. It’s not hard to identify people who are activists; they tend to make themselves noticed online. And he finds videos of their houses online or he can use Google Earth to see if they have the right kind of house.”

“So why a Monday?”

“Laura Berg wasn’t a Monday.”

“Forget Laura Berg.” Rabbit waves me off. “And forget the cop who was investigating Laura Berg’s death. The rest of them—why Monday?”

I breathe in, think it over. “Mondays are workdays. You have your routine, built around your work schedule. Weekends? Much less of a routine. You travel. You go out at night. But Mondays are predictable. He could anticipate their movements.”

“That’s right,” she says in a tone suggesting I’m only halfway there.

“But Mondays, in that sense, are no different than Tuesdays, Wednesdays, Thurs—”

“Right, so why are most of the murders on Mondays?”

I deflate. “Just tell me.”

She wags a finger at me. “Darwin travels on the weekends, he attacks late Sunday or early Monday, and he returns home Monday night or Tuesday morning.”

That makes sense. “He probably has a job.”

“Sure. A job with flexible hours.”

“Or fixed hours, but those hours are fixed in the middle of the week. He works Tuesday through Friday, or maybe just Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday.”

“Which means,” says Rabbit, “that he wouldn’t kill on Tuesdays or Wednesdays.”

I look back at my chart. Laura Berg—Tuesday. Detective Halsted—Wednesday.

“And yet he did,” I say as it slowly dawns on me. “And what do Laura Berg and Detective Joe Halsted have in common?” I ask.

“Vienna, Virginia,” we say in unison.

“He’s local,” I say. “He didn’t need to build in travel time to Virginia because he’s already here.”

55

MICHELLE FONTAINE pulls into the parking lot of A New Day, now into her second week at the rehab facility in Fairfax, Virginia. Forever worried about being late, she arrives nearly half an hour early—9:30 a.m.—not relishing her first assignment of the day.

She walks into the staff room and sees a TV in the corner, a couple of