“You think she wouldn’t have told him?”

Hollis sighed, her breath misting the air. “That after all those years of being with him, she’d had sex at least once with a blood relation—just before she was supposed to marry Paul? She was very young. So I’m guessing probably not. Maybe the sort of thing that would come out in one of those passionate arguments a very young couple tends to have. But not something she’d have done deliberately, I think, confessing something like that. Plus, from what Finn said, everybody in the town blamed him for the breakup, not her. If she had been the one to cheat first, I doubt he would have taken the blame for the breakup. Sounds more like she was dumped and turned to someone else, someone she already knew. Maybe for comfort. Or revenge. Either way, he caught her on the rebound. At least once.”

“Do you think it could have been rape?”

“I dunno. Possible, at least. She might have been too afraid or ashamed to tell Paul—or anybody else—if she’d been raped, but I doubt she could have hidden it, not with all the trauma and other aftereffects of rape.”

DeMarco accepted that with a nod. “If she even knew she was pregnant, she might not have known which one was the father.”

It was Hollis’s turn to nod, but she was still frowning. “Since he was the one to run off with someone else, it just seems more likely that Megan would have turned to another man after she was dumped practically at the altar. Because wouldn’t it be a bit of a coincidence if Paul realized he loved his cousin too much to marry someone else right after Megan cheated on him?”

“I would think. And I know neither of us has much faith in coincidence. But it does happen.”

“Yeah.”

He glanced at her, but Hollis remained silent until they were in their black SUV and the engine was running.

Then, slowly, she said, “If this is our unsub, if he was the father, he couldn’t have known. About the baby, I mean. That it was . . . wrong. Birth defects. And even if he did, if he thought there was something in his bloodline or hers, that they were too closely related and it could cause problems maybe because there was already a stronger history of inbreeding in the Hales family—we need to check with Finn about that.” She blinked. “Where was I?”

“Even if he knew or suspected birth defects were possible.”

“Thank you. Even then, even if he expected such a tragedy, what about that would have made him decide to go on a killing spree, beginning with Megan? He strangled her, Reese. That’s about as up close and personal as you can get. And nearly always done in rage.”

“One way or another, she had to be his trigger,” he said. “Whether it was because he found out about the baby or because she was leaving Salem, leaving him, something happened between them, something that caused him to totally lose it and strangle her.”