Just over three thousand. And that tells me that three women, all in the same city, being a part of it…

She left the comment unfinished, but Jack picked up. If someone was targeting local woman looking into fertility treatments, this was basically a roadmap of how to get to them. I mean…is the group a public or private group?

Public. And right here, Im looking at a post from Hannah Kettleman from eight days ago. Shes asking for prayers and encouragement because her first treatment is right around the corner. There are thirty-seven comments. And just randomly clicking through the people that commented, Ive got one from Texas…one from Hawaii, one from Maine. These people are all spread out.

Except our three victims, Jack said. But the fact that this thing is a public page…theres very little chance it will actually turn out to help us at all.

Thats true, Rachel agreed. But I think its a safe bet that this would be a very likely resource for the killer to hunt down these women. We know how hes finding them, anyway.

So do we just go through this group woman by woman to see if there are any other in the immediate area?

Within twenty-five miles, at least.

She said this with some distance, her thoughts starting to stray slightly away from the conversation. She could picture somehow scrolling through Facebook just like she was, locating their next victim with ease through groups like this. The next question then became: why? There could be countless answers to this, but she was leaning more toward something very similar to the sort of diatribe theyd just heard from Maria Oliver. But no…Rachel was quite sure there were no religious motives here. There wasnt any symbolism, no outright message. It was murder, plain and simple. Sure there were reasons behind it, but she doubted they would be easily explained away by some sort of religious fanaticism.

Rachel found herself trying to slip into the mindset of a criminal profiler. It was a branch of study shed nearly decided to follow shortly before her training in Quantico. She was decent at it but without the appropriate approach or any strong leads or motivations to consider, she just could not understand the mindset of this killer.

But you know who might…

The thought went through her head as quickly as a lightning strike. And with it came a face she had not considered with any real scrutiny for a few weeks….which was progress, as it had once been a face that had haunted her every single day. It was a stretch and probably a very bad idea but there was also something appealing about the idea that was currently taking shape in her head. There was something dark there, something she was not ready to call out, but she thought there might be something inside that darkness worth looking into.