Chapter 32
They’d missed other cases. Pierce stared at the notes on the whiteboard and tried to make it make sense. This…this was all new. He shouldn’t have missed this. “I called other jurisdictions, I called the FBI, I did everything I could think of.”
“Stop beating yourself up. Sometimes, these assholes are out there for years. The guy who shot me targeted a man in the damned FBI for years. It wasn’t a failure.
We just have more resources,” Knight said.
Pierce wasn’t sure what he thought about the other man.
Knight was all business—except when looking at Miranda.
That was hard to miss. “And someone who can search databases quickly.”
“Dani’s working on making a list of possible overlapping connections between the cases.” Miranda put her phone down for once and looked at Pierce. “At the least, it’s a new angle we can consider.”
“So…the guy is a serial killer. How in the hell did I miss that?”
“Statistically, a single cop may run into one serial killer case in the entirety of their career,” Knight said. “The smaller the location, the even less likely that is. That’s a twenty-to-thirty year spread.”
“Assuming the killer was personally motivated and knew the victims makes sense realistically.” Miranda added. “And we aren’t completely convinced he didn’t know the victims personally. He very well could have known all of them in some way. Dani is checking for any obvious possibilities now.”
“So how do we find him? How many serial killer cases go unsolved?”
“Fifty to one hundred fifty per decade,” Knight said.
“An equal number are solved in that same time. At any one time, forty to sixty percent, either way. The odds of you solving this on your own was very slim. You did everything right. It just unfortunately wasn’t enough.
But…we’re not closing this case until we give it everything we have, too. ”
“Even if you leave before we do. We’ll keep going, Pierce. I promise.”
“Then…tell me about the guy who did this. From a serial killer’s perspective.”