“Maybe he wasn’t the partner she was looking for. Maybe it was his father.”

++++

DeYoung was still speaking with Senator Murray, so I decided to work in my office until they were done.

Though I wanted to ask the senator about the gambling debts and the Internet encryption legislation, perhaps the biggest question I needed answered was also the most obvious and the most potentially offensive: if he was the one who’d stood by and watched his son commit suicide.

It was probably out of the question that the senator was in some way involved, but I couldn’t afford to discount any possibilities. As Calvin had noted earlier, if we assume nothing and test everything, eventually the truth will rear its head.

The suicides occurred in three different states, and it shouldn’t be too difficult to compare the senator’s travel schedule with the times and locations of the deaths to see if he could’ve possibly been present when those other people took their own lives.

It seemed self-evident to note this, but the observer would’ve had to travel to those locations and then leave by some means.

The man’s face wasn’t fully visible in any of the videos, but his frame matched and, based on the analysis that Angela was able to do regarding the left-handed mannerisms I’d noted, there was a seventy-two percent probability that it was the same person.

However, back at my desk, it didn’t take long to verify that the senator couldn’t have been present at two of the suicides because of a public function that he was attending on the night of the first and a Senate vote that he made on the night of the second.

So, if it truly was the same observer at each site, the senator was in the clear.

Years ago, when I was tracking a serial killer in the Midwest, I’d studied flight records to see if we could pinpoint who’d traveled to and from the regions where the murders were occurring. In the end, the process had led me to a man named Richard Basque, a killer I eventually captured and who was still in prison.

Now, I wondered if I could apply the same strategy to this case.

Since one of the deaths was in Seattle and another was just outside of Miami, it was implausible that the observer could have driven from the first site to the second—the timing just didn’t work.

That left flights.

Angela’s computer, which she’d congenially named Lacey and treated like a coworker rather than simply a machine, could tackle a meta-analysis of the names of passengers who flew into and out of nearby airports on the days preceding and following the suicides. If we found a name appearing more than once, it might be a good indication that we were on the right track.