“Got a call while you were out,” Phil told her, the moment the super was out of sight. “A guy came forward about thirty minutes ago, said he picked Shana up on the highway. It appeared to him that her car had broken down. Given the high-end vehicle, the fancy clothes, it never occurred to him she might be an escaped convict. Not to mention, at that point, there’d been nothing in the news.”

“A guy? A random guy?”

“Salesman. On his way to a conference in Boston. Said he let her out at Fanueil Hall. She told him she could walk to her place from there.”

D.D. frowned. It was full dark outside, casting shadows all around Charlie’s empty unit. It was past dinnertime. Long after she should’ve been home from this morning’s adventure. Her shoulder throbbed again, as well as her sense of foreboding. They were close. At that pivotal moment right before a case finally snapped together or irrevocably fell apart. So which was it? Because they didn’t have much time left.

“The Rose Killer didn’t help Shana escape?” she reiterated, still studying the apartment, willing it to show them what they needed to know.

“Apparently not.”

“Then who set the firecrackers that created the initial diversion?”

“Investigative team is still working on it.”

“I can’t believe Shana’s escape is not connected to the Rose Killer,” D.D. said flatly. “Those two things have to be related.”

“I’m not disagreeing.” Phil swept his hand around the living room. “Meaning there’s something here we’re not seeing, and we’d better figure it out. Quick.”

He snapped on the overhead light, and they got to it. D.D. started with the double row of bookshelves behind the sofa. Phil, being the computer guru, took a seat in front of the TV tray bearing Sgarzi’s laptop. D.D. found four rows of true-crime novels, including nearly the entire Ann Rule library.

“He was definitely researching the genre,” she commented, flipping through titles such as The Stranger Beside Me and Green River, Running Red. Next she came across half a dozen books on writing. Then, more disturbingly, three hardcover homicide textbooks, all of which promised genuine crime scene photos.

D.D. flipped open one of the textbooks to a yellow-flagged page. “Postmortem Mutilation,” read the chapter head. All righty then.

“D.D.”

She put the book down, crossed over to where Phil was currently glued to Sgarzi’s computer screen.

“Video files,” he informed her. “Looks like from some kind of low-rent surveillance cameras, over-the-counter crap. There’s dozens of digital images, going back four to five months. All unlabeled.”

“Open the most recent.”

He shot her a look. “You think?”

She smiled at her computer-whiz partner, who was now working the mouse. She picked up the yellow legal pad sitting next to the computer.