A frightening thought occurred to me. “It means . . . that the murderer kills a few victims in each city, then moves on to the next. Now he’s here in New Fiddleham . . . and he’s only just begun!” I had been to the theater, and knew very well that a revelation like that one merited a dramatic chord from the pipe organ and a collective gasp from the audience, but in the real world, the words were left to stand on their own.

“Clever,” responded Jackaby, “but also wrong.” He pulled a ball of twine from the top drawer and glanced up at the board, where our list of dates still sat in neat, chalky rows.

“October twenty-third,” he read, and tied the end of the string to the corresponding pin in Gadston. “And next was here, on the thirtieth.” He drew the twine to the opposite side of the map, looping it around a pin in Crowley. “Then November fifth, down here.” The line cut across the map again, down to Glanville, then up to Brahannasburg. He brought the string back and forth. The murders were never in the same town twice in a row, rarely even in an adjacent town, but always bouncing around to alternating corners of the map. The end result resembled a sloppy starburst, with lines zigzagging across New Fiddleham. Finally, Jackaby snipped the end and tied it to the lonely pin in the middle of the mess.

“He planned his marks to delay detection for as long as possible,” Jackaby said. “Weeks, even months would pass before he returned to the same location, allowing time for attention to die down. Because he jumped jurisdictions, we might have seen even further months of this before police forces finally began to work out that they were even tracking the same culprit. Thanks to Bragg’s stumbling onto the plot, the killer was forced to break his own rule in a rather significant way.”

“How’s that?” I asked.

“He killed where he lived. By the pattern of deaths before now, he had avoided New Fiddleham, but he clearly gravitated around it. Police tend to look with suspicion at a man in the center of a pile of dead bodies, and so our killer carefully perpetrated his crimes just beyond their vision. His home is here, though. I’m quite certain of that.”

“What—here in town?” I asked, my eyes darting inadvertently to the window and the dimming light of the early evening. The moon was low in the sky but already clearly visible in the waning daylight, an almost perfect orb of white framed by the sinister, dark fingers of barren branches. “Wouldn’t it be easier for a monster to hide out in the forest? Lurk about in the shadows and come out at night, or something?”