Chapter 8 #2
Webb looked at his screen. Looked again. “All of them,” he said. “Every single site is adjacent to at least one industrial service business.”
“That's nine for nine,” Paulson said.
“That's nine for nine,” Marcus agreed.
He wrote it on the board: ADJACENT TO INDUSTRIAL SERVICE BUSINESSES — ALL SITES.
He underlined it.
Then he put the cap back on the marker and looked at the board and said what needed to be said.
“We don't know what this means yet. We don't know if these businesses are relevant to the offender or incidental to the location. We will not speculate beyond the data.” He looked around the room.
“What we know is three things. He selects sites near major road access. He selects transitional edge land, which we suspect he knows well. And every site happens to be near some form of industrial service operation.” He paused.
“We need to know more about those businesses before we can say anything more about what this means. Webb, I need the full business profiles on every adjacent operation. Who they service, what they supply, what their geographic footprint looks like.”
Webb was already typing. “On it.”
“Good work for today. Tomorrow,” Marcus said. “8 a.m.”
Everyone stood and started to gather their things.
Haven didn't.
The building went quiet around them. The only sounds were the HVAC shifting register, the distant sound of the cleaning crew, and the silence of a space designed for occupation that was now almost empty.
Haven was at the board. Not writing, just looking.
Her arms were crossed, and her head was tilted slightly.
She had the expression Marcus had already learned to recognize in the short time they’d worked together.
She was as good as he was when it came to pattern recognition. She just didn’t know it yet.
He sat at the table with the dump site files and let her look. The dump sites held questions that needed to be asked. He focused on the files, not the beautiful woman looking at the board.
“The businesses,” she said after a while.
He glanced up at her. Her eyes were still on the map.
He stood up and went over to the board. “What about them?”
“They're not random. I know we can't say what they mean yet.
But they're not random.” She pointed at the Boise pin.
“Aggregate supplier. Spokane, utility substation. Missoula, lumber yard.” She moved down the board.
“These aren't retail. They're not consumer-facing.
They're the businesses that supply the businesses. The tier below the visible economy.”
“The infrastructure layer,” Marcus said.
“Yes.” She paused and looked up at him. “All sites.
So that means he understands the profile of the locations.
He's comfortable there. Not just in the land itself, but in that tier of the economy. The places that keep things running without being the thing itself.” She turned around.
“What kind of person is professionally comfortable in that layer?”
“Someone who works in it,” Marcus said.
“Right. But doing what?”
They looked at each other. “We don't know yet,” Marcus said. He wanted to make the leap like everyone else did, but that wasn’t the way you solved crimes. Sure, you could get lucky and make the right jump, but it wasn’t what this case needed. It needed solid investigative work.
“No,” Haven said. “But we're asking the right questions. And that’s a hell of a lot better than what was happening a week ago.”
She glanced up at him. The nearness had an electric energy spanning between them. He glanced down at her and he could tell she felt the same thing. They held the glance for longer than they should have.
“We are closer.” His voice rumbled low between them.
She swallowed hard and let a small smile form at the corner of her mouth.
His eyes tracked to the movement. Her lips were full, and damned if he didn’t want to kiss her.
But … they had a case. He turned to the board and nodded to it. “The case is moving forward.”
That was true; in fact, it hadn’t been true earlier that morning.
That was why they needed a task force. People from different specialties working together with different perspectives and questions.
He looked at the board and thought about what the right question had cost them to find.
A full day of careful work, nine business profiles building toward a pattern that still didn't have a name.
That was how it was supposed to go. Not fast. Not assumed. Earned.
“Tomorrow, Webb brings the business profiles,” Haven said. “We look at what those companies actually do. Who their clients are. What their service territories look like.” She paused. “If the pattern holds, we'll have something to take to the next level.”
“If it holds,” Marcus said.
“It'll hold.”
He looked at her. “That's an assumption.”
She almost smiled. “It's an educated prediction.”
Damn, he loved verbally sparring with her. She kept pace with him in ways few could. So damn sexy. He lifted an eyebrow. “Those are the same thing until they're not.”
She conceded that with a slight nod and a smile that was as close to You're right as he suspected she usually got with people she'd known for less than a week.
* * *
He called his father at 9 p.m. from the parking garage. Not because he needed direction. Because something was sitting wrong in the back of his head, and his father had thirty-plus years of knowing when an investigation was about to make a wrong turn.
His father, Jared, answered on the second ring. “Hey, buddy, heard you tagged a serial killer. That’s hard work.”
Marcus shook his head even though his dad couldn’t see it. “Yeah, but we’re going to catch this bastard. I have one living witness, and she’s a robbery detective who’s phenomenal at pattern recognition.”
“Hopefully, she’s on your task force,” his dad said.
“Damn straight she is. She’s amazing.”
“Ah …” Jared chuckled. “Is she?”
Marcus frowned. “What was that for?”
“Describe her for me.” It was a routine thing they’d done that had sharpened Marcus’s attention to detail as he was growing up.
“Five seven, athletic, brown hair, long to the middle of her back. She wears it in a braid at home and in a tight bun at work. She has four stitches over her right temple, and the bruising is now at the yellow and green stage. She’s damn smart. ”
Jared chuckled a bit. “You can see the smarts, huh?”
Marcus rolled his eyes. “She’s a cop, Dad, and a good one.”
“Noted. So, why are you calling me tonight?”
“I need to bounce some things off you. I’m feeling like I’m looking at the bark of a specific tree instead of the entire forest.”
“Then talk to me.”
Marcus walked him through it. The two solid patterns, the highway access and edge land familiarity.
The third pattern, the industrial service businesses, which they didn’t yet understand.
The direction the investigation was pointing.
His father listened without interrupting the way he always listened, which was how Marcus had learned to do it.
When Marcus finished, his father was quiet for a long moment.
Then he said, “Walk me back. Not to the patterns. Before that. What's the first assumption you made when you looked at those pins?”
Marcus frowned. “I didn't—” He stopped.
His father waited.
Marcus stood in the parking garage and went back to this morning. The red pins. The black pins. The distance between them. He'd looked at the two constellations, and he'd started asking what they had in common and …
“I assumed the dump sites were selected to serve the travel route,” Marcus said slowly. “That he moves through the corridor between cities and selects dump sites along the way.”
“Is that the only reading you could take from that information? Try looking at it from the exact opposite direction.”
Marcus looked at the concrete wall.
“The other reading,” he said, “is that the dump sites aren't along the route. They are the route. He doesn't dump near where he's going. He dumps near where he works. The sites aren't incidental to his geography … They are his geography.”
“So, what does the map look like,” his father said, “if you stop connecting the cities and start connecting the dump sites?”
Marcus was already moving toward the elevator.
“I'll call you back,” he said. “Love you, Dad.”
Haven was still at the board when he walked back in.
She looked at him. Read his face. “What?”
“We may have been mapping the wrong points,” he said. “Pull the dump site coordinates. All of them.”
She had them pulled before he finished the sentence.
He didn't ask how. She handed him the printed list, and he spread it on the table beside the map and started marking a new route.
Not city to city, not the victim corridor, but site to site.
The spaces between things. The edge land. The industrial tier.
It took eleven minutes.
When he stepped back, Haven was beside him.
The dump site route was different. Tighter.
More specific. It didn't follow the interstate network cleanly.
It bent and turned in ways that made no sense for someone moving between cities but made a different kind of sense.
A working sense. The route of someone who drove the same roads repeatedly because those roads connected their clients.
“That's not a travel route,” Haven said.
“No,” Marcus said. He looked at the map and thanked God for his father’s experience.
“That's a service route.”
“Yes. It is.”
They both looked at the map.
“He doesn't move between cities,” Haven said. “He moves between jobs. The dump sites are what he passes on the way from one job to the next. He knows this land because he drives it. Over and over.”
“Which means the businesses adjacent to the dump sites aren't coincidental,” Marcus said. “They're landmarks. They're the businesses near his clients or near his routes between clients.”