She explained, “You know how institutions are—they’re reactive, not preventative. The bulk of the murders at Virginia Tech took place in the engineering building, so all the other schools tightened down security around their classrooms and labs.”
“The first victims were killed in their dorm.”
“It’s hard to police that. Students have to have key cards to get in and out, but it’s not a foolproof system. Look at what they did at Jason’s dorm. How stupid is that to cut a fire alarm?” Her phone started ringing again. Frank. Lena sent it to voice mail.
“Someone’s trying to get in touch with you.”
“You’re right.” Lena realized she was starting to talk like Will Trent. Maybe that wasn’t a bad thing considering he was running circles around her. She slowed the car to fifteen miles per hour as the rain rocked the car. Water flooded across the road, making the asphalt look rippled. The windshield wipers couldn’t keep up. She slowed the car to a stop, saying, “I can’t see in front of me. Do you want to drive?”
“I can’t do any better than you. Let’s wait it out and talk about our murderer.”
Lena put the car in park. She stared at the whiteness ahead. “Do you think we’re looking at a serial killer?”
“You have to have at least three victims on three different occasions for it to qualify as a serial.”
Lena turned in her seat to face him. “So, we’ve got to wait for a third body?”
“I hope it doesn’t come to that.”
“What about your profile?”
“What about it?”
She tried to remember his earlier questions. “What took place? Two kids murdered, both with knives, both while they were alone. Why did it happen? The killer planned it out. He brought the knife. He knew the victims, probably knew Jason better than Allison because he was obviously furious when he killed him.”
Will continued, “He has a car. He knows the town, the topography of the lake and the placement of the cameras in the dorm. So, he’s someone who went to the school or goes to the school now.”
She shook her head, laughing at herself. “This is the problem with profiles. You could be talking about me.”
“It’s possible a woman committed these crimes.”
Lena gave him a tight smile. “I was with my boyfriend Jared last night and with you all day.”
“Thanks for the alibi,” Will told her. “But I’m being serious. Allison was small. A woman could have overpowered her. A woman could have floated her out into the lake, then chained her down with the cinder blocks.”
“You’re right,” she admitted. “Women like knives. It’s more personal.” Lena had carried a knife herself a few years ago.
Will asked, “Who are the women we’ve come up against on this case?”
She listed them out. “Julie Smith, whoever she is. Vanessa Livingston, the woman whose basement was flooded. Alexandra Coulter, one of Allison’s professors. Allison’s aunt Sheila, who hasn’t returned my calls yet. Mrs. Barnes from across the street. Darla the nurse with the long red nails.”
“Mrs. Barnes gives Darla a pretty tight alibi. She says she was up with her all night both nights.”
“Yeah, well, my uncle Hank says he never sleeps, but every time I stay over I hear him snoring like a freakin’ chainsaw.” Lena took out her notebook. Heat rushed through her body, but not from the infection in her hand. She kept her notebook angled away from Will as she thumbed past the 911 transcript, then quickly went to the page where she’d recorded Darla’s details. “The cell number of the 911 caller is a 912 area code. Darla’s is a 706.”
“Did her accent sound unusual to you?”
“Kind of trashy, but she’s obviously pulled herself up.”
“She didn’t sound Appalachian to you, did she?”
Lena stared at him openly. “She sounded like everyone I grew up with in south Georgia. Where are you getting Appalachia?”
“Do you know any women in town who moved down from the mountains in the last few years?”
She guessed this was another bit of information he was going to keep to himself. Two could play at that game. “Now that you mention it, we had some hillbillies a while back but they loaded up their truck and moved to Los Angeles.”
“Beverly Hills?” He chuckled appreciatively before throwing out one of his sudden subject changes. “You should have your hand looked at.”
Lena looked down at her injured palm. Her skin was sweating so badly that the Band-Aids were peeling off. “I’ll be all right.”
He told her, “I talked to Dr. Linton about gunshot wounds today.”
“You two kids know how to have fun.”
“She says the probability of an untreated gunshot wound getting infected is very high.”
No shit, she wanted to say. Instead, she told him, “Let’s go back to the profile.”
He hesitated long enough to let her know he wasn’t happy about letting someone else change the subject. “What’s the sequence of events?”
Lena tried to wrap her brain around the question. “We already went through what happened to Allison. With Jason, I guess the killer came into the dorm, moved the cameras, stabbed him, then left.”
“He covered Jason’s body with a blanket. He knew there would be a lot of blood.”
That was new. “Where was the blanket?”
“I found it in the bathroom at the end of the hallway.”
“You should check the drains, the—” She stopped herself. Will would know to do all of these things. He didn’t need her help. “There were four questions for the profile, right?”
“The last one is, you have to ask yourself who would have done these things in this order for these reasons.”
“Allison was killed before Jason. She could’ve been a warning that Jason didn’t heed.”
“Jason was holed up in his dorm room. We don’t even know if he heard about the murder.”
“So, the killer is antsy, worried that the message hasn’t gotten through.” A thought occurred to her. “The suicide note. The killer left it as a warning. ‘I want it over.’”
“Right,” he agreed, and she assumed he’d figured this out a while ago without telling her.
Still, she said, “It would make sense that the killer would be angry with Jason for not taking Allison’s death as a warning. He was stabbed at least eight or nine times. That speaks to a lot of anger.”
Will looked up at the sky. “Rain’s let up.”
Lena sat up in the seat, sliding the gear into drive. She rolled the car slowly forward. The road was still flooding. Streams of water gushed back toward Main Street. “Both Allison and Jason were students. They could be mixed up in something to do with the school.”
“Like what?”
“I don’t know. A grant. There’s all kinds of government money going in and out of there. Defense spending. The engineering school works on medical devices, nanotechnology. The polymer labs are testing all kinds of adhesives. We’re talking hundreds of millions of dollars.”
“Would a grad student have access to the money?”