“Okay. But you always say there’s formal law, and there’s the way things actually work. If you think this detective is holding out on you, how do you get to the heart of that?”

He already knew the answer. So did she. She stepped outside and called her father.

11
Sunday, June 20, 10:12 a.m.

Lindsay eyed her Nespresso machine impatiently as her father filled her in on what he had been able to learn from Detective Decker.

“He seems like a decent guy,” he said, speaking up over the whine coming from her kitchen counter. “For what it’s worth, I got the impression the neighbor called him over there to play matchmaker.”

“Maybe, but trust me, Dad, even without Scott in the picture, neither of us was interested. He basically threw me off his property yesterday, and he’s ghosted me ever since.”

“He wasn’t exactly a sieve with me, either, but I did get the basics. They ran the blood sample through CODIS. As you suspected, they did get a hit. A big one, at least at first glance. The sample is connected to a string of killings committed in Wichita, Kansas, by a serial killer called the College Hill Strangler.”

She nearly dropped the cup she’d been lifting toward her lips. She knew Decker was hiding something, but a serial killer? She pulled her laptop from her briefcase, opened it on the kitchen island, and typed in “College Hill Strangler.”

At the other end of the line, her father was employing what she called his cop voice. She was used to her father speaking quickly but casually. But now his words came slowly, in crisp, authoritative sentences.

As her father spoke, she scrolled through her screen of search results. Booking photographs of a defendant named William Summer. To her eye he looked more like a high school vice principal than a mass murderer. Photos of him as a younger man, around the time he would have killed his first victims. Black hair, and small, close-set eyes. Oddly handsome, but also menacing.

“The blood belongs to a serial killer, and he told me it was a dead end?” Lindsay said incredulously. “If the guy’s free by now, he could have left the Midwest and come up here.” A quick skim of a true crime website included the words hogtie, strangle, and torture. She tasted last night’s Barbaresco at the back of her throat.

“Like I said, it looks bad at first glance. But the actual killer, William Summer, is still in prison. The DNA hit wasn’t to him; it was to unidentified blood found at one of the crime scenes. The victim’s name was Janice Beale.”

Another Google search. Janice Beale was the killer’s sixth and final victim. Long blond hair parted in the middle. Pretty.