However, life isn’t that simple and tidy. Although motives are always present, they can never be established with any degree of certainty. Because of that, the search for them is always a search for circumstantial evidence rather than hard facts, and I want my investigations to be built on facts rather than conjecture.

Normally, I’m only called in when we’ve finished a comparative case analysis, or CCA, and established a link between serial offenses. However, this time since the assistant director knew the senator, he’d asked me to look into things.

“You have a knack for seeing the connection beneath the connection,” he’d told me. “I want you on this.”

++++

Tessa and I arrived at our apartment, I threw on some canned vegetable soup for dinner—a meal even I could prepare—and then, after we’d eaten, I made sure she was set for the evening and left for the senator’s mansion.

It wasn’t far outside the city, and I would be arriving at the same time of night that his son died two days ago, drowning in their heated outdoor pool.

Being there at the same time would allow me to evaluate any nearby lighting from the streetlights surrounding the estate and help me determine the most logical entrance and exit routes for the person who I believed stood by and watched that young man drown.

3

The video was troubling.

Two nights ago, Jon Murray had turned on his phone’s camera and started live-streaming through a video app. He placed the phone on a deck table next to his father’s swimming pool, then stepped out of the frame for a few minutes. When he returned, he was rolling the executive chair from his dad’s home office.

Two pair of handcuffs waited on the seat of the chair. We still weren’t certain where he’d obtained them from, but we were checking his credit cards for recent purchases.

It was nighttime, but lights from inside the pool and around the grounds gave enough light to see what was happening.

A hedge bordered one side of the pool. The L-shaped mansion lined two other sides of it. A guest house with no lights on sat beyond the pool’s far end.

Jon returned to the camera and repositioned it so the office chair was centered in the screen. He walked over, picked up the handcuffs, and rolled the chair back another foot so that it was resting near the edge of the pool. Then he cuffed his left wrist to the left arm of the chair. The chair’s arm formed a loop so he wouldn’t be able to slide the cuff off.

If it wasn’t clear before then what he was about to do, it was pretty evident at that point.