Part of Ruby always wished they could see crime scenes the same way the victims saw them. In the light of day, the streets and the hedges were innocuous, normal. Alannah Danes hadn't been killed in the unfiltered sunlight of midday. She had been targeted at night, when the shadows crept around corners and witnesses were already asleep behind their apartment windows.

Even at night, the location wasn't the most private. It wouldn't have allowed for an extended period of time with the victim. A bit further down the block was a bus stop, making it even riskier.

Alannah’s body may have been absent from the scene, but the evidence of her remained. The grass and ground darkened around the spot she had died, flakes of blood dried on the leaves of the shrubs and the wall of the nearest building.

“She could have been followed,” Gabe said, hands on his hips as he looked down the length of the street.

Ruby wasn't so sure she agreed with that assessment. Again, she cursed the time of day. It was almost impossible to determine if all the streetlights functioned or if there was a glow from apartment building lobbies. Without knowing all that, Ruby couldn't confidently say that it would have been difficult for a man to follow the victim unnoticed.

“Maybe,” Ruby compromised, “but that's the easy assumption.”

“It's the easy assumption because it's the most common one,” Gabe argued. “Killers target people they know, especially killers who decide to stab a person thirteen times.”

Ruby nodded idly. That was true, most of the time. She had another idea of what could motivate a killer to stab their victim precisely thirteen times.

“Sure. Crime of passion logic,” Ruby said, “but nearly identical crimes of passion with the same number of stab wounds?”

Gabe shrugged. “Maybe he's got a fixation.”

Ruby agreed, but she had another idea of what the killer might be fixated on. She got the feeling the killer was into more than just pretty young women in sequins, but Ruby couldn’t get ahead of herself without looking deeper into the first victim.

She stood, scanning over the faces of the local police force in the area, their faces pale with their stunned inexperience with this kind of crime.

Ruby flagged down one of the local police officers, pointing out the bus stop sign. Most of the officers kept to their own ranks. By all appearances, there was little reason to believe a stabbing in an alleyway deserved the attention of the FBI. They didn’t have the scope to see the emerging pattern that Ruby did.

“Do you know the bus schedule?” Ruby asked.

The fact that the victim was on the phone with her sister during the attack gave them an exact timeline. It may have been horrific for the sister, but it was more than Ruby could have hoped for in terms of detailing the attack.