“The first victim was twenty-six. Two thirteens,” Ruby said. Even as she said it out loud, it sounded flimsy. That was the way Vallejo worked, though. He laid out miniscule, little hints, but when she noticed them, she was the one that looked out of her mind.

Gabe raised a questioning eyebrow. “So?”

“It’s something,” Ruby said.

“Yeah, it’s the age of pretty young women who like to go out,” Gabe said. “It’s not even a pattern. Alannah wasn’t twenty-six. Even Vallejo’s actual first victim wasn’t 26. It’s not an aspect our killer is copying.”

Ruby gritted her teeth. She wasn’t crazy. She wasn’t searching for proof of Vallejo’s involvement. It just had to be there, right in front of her.

“Consider it,” Ruby said.

“I consider it confirmation bias,” Gabe replied. “I’m thinking about buying a Jeep and now I see them everywhere. That’s you with 13s.”

Ruby gritted her teeth even harder. He couldn’t see it. She had to prove it to him. He was shutting her out, shutting down her leads because he knew as well as she did that Vallejo was already in jail. Why beat a dead horse?

The double-thirteen was a mark left by the new killer, a taunt, a challenge, a way of laughing at them.

Ruby's gaze fixed to the board of their war room. Bouncing ideas off Gabe may have been more like throwing an egg at a wall, but at least she wasn't alone. At least he hadn't already put in his transfer papers to get some other partner, or some other division.

She was sure that Vallejo was behind this. Now, she had to find a way to prove it.

“What was the worst case you ever saw?” Ruby asked.

She could tell from his body language at the crime scene, and the morgue, that it hadn't been anything quite like this, with the threat of the body count climbing through the week.

Gabe frowned. “You mean other than this?”

She nodded.

He shook his head. “A child. A child was the worst case I ever saw.”

Ruby swallowed a lump in her throat. “How old?”

“A toddler. One and a half, maybe two.”

Ruby had expected something different, maybe something from his time with the military.

Gabe looked at her, eyes gentle. “The entire family was slaughtered, his mother and father, too. It looked like the father had shot the boy, then the mother, and then himself.”

She winced. She had been lucky that most of her caseload had not dealt with children. There were a lot of awful things to see in the world, but fate had spared her that one for the most part.

“It's always hard when there are kids,” Ruby said.