She opened a folder, fanning out the contents across the boardroom table in front of her. A sharp pang of surprise ran through her as her fingertips ran over Asher’s familiar handwriting.

So much of him was left behind in those case files. So many of his theories had coalesced into Ruby’s abilities to finally track Vallejo down.

A leftover sticky note curled at the edges of one report.

He always has something to say, it read T and H crisply crossed. Asher was always trying to get down his thoughts too quickly, his hand fighting to keep up with his brain.

He wants us to realize how smart he is.

Ruby considered these old adages carefully. They had helped Ruby catch Vallejo once, they could help her understand him again.

If Ruby’s current partner wouldn’t help her navigate to the right direction, she would have to rely on her long dead partner instead. Even from the grave, Asher was still her most reliable ally. He’d always had such a flair, something almost poetic about him.

It was Asher’s coping mechanism to be hopeful. In their line of work, optimism was an uphill battle. It was one of the things that made Asher stand out in the FBI, when Ruby had met so many grizzled, cynical agents who had seen too much evil in the world and no longer knew how to be regular people.

Ruby could imagine a future with Asher because he always remembered to see the humanity in people, not just the atrocities committed by mankind. She never worried that they might lose each other psychologically to their work.

Then Asher died and Ruby lost faith in all that.

There were still other things that Asher had instilled in Ruby that she did hold onto. What Ruby knew about Vallejo was that he hated randomness.

The case in front of her had been specific: Julie Hicks. The woman drove a 2013 model car with another 13 in the license plate. It was the first sign that Vallejo wanted them to know there was a pattern. That was the case that made Ruby think to look back at the previous cases for correlation. Vallejo had doubled down on his tell exactly when he wanted them to see it.

Most serial killers did have patterns, but they were usually things like selecting only blondes or targeting at risk individuals. That was not Vallejo.

Ruby sighed, skimming past the official documents and reports to find Julie Hicks’s face among them.

The memory was still as vivid as the day it happened.

Ruby stood over the body, not the first and not the last she would see. Julie lay bloodied 100 or so yards from her car, the door left wide open. She had run. She had tried to escape but hadn’t made it out alive.