“Huh? Girlfriend of … son of … victim of … senior … freshman …? Who the hell are we talking about?”

“A Dartmouth senior, who happened to be a girlfriend of Larry Sterne, was killed by the strangler while Jimi Brewster was at Dartmouth as a freshman.”

There was another silence. Gurney could almost picture little lights flashing in Hardwick’s mental calculator. Eventually the man cleared his throat. “Am I supposed to find some significance in that? I mean, so fucking what? We’ve got two northeastern families who each lose a family member to a serial shooter in the year 2000. And it so happens that ten years earlier, in 1990, the son of one of those eventual victims was attending a large Ivy League institution when a friend of the son of another eventual victim was murdered by a serial strangler. I’ll admit it has a bizarre ring to it, but I think a lot of simple coincidences can be made to sound bizarre. I just don’t see what it could mean. Are you imagining that Jimi Brewster was the White Mountain Strangler?”

“I have no reason to. But just to get the question out of my mind, can you poke around in your databases—maybe the old CJIS reports, if they can still be accessed—and get the basic facts?”

“Like what?”

“To begin with—more details of the MO, victim profile, open leads, anything that might suggest a connection to Brewster.”

“To begin with?”

“Well, eventually we might want to track down the CIO who ran the case and get into it a little deeper, find out if Brewster’s name ever came up during the investigation.”

This produced the longest silence of all.

“You there, Jack?”

“I’m here. Contemplating what a fucking incredible pain in the ass these little requests of yours are getting to be.”

“I know.”

“Is there any end in sight?”

“Like I said before, it’s obvious that I’m running out of time. So yes, the end is in sight. One way or the other. I have maybe one more day.”

“To do what?”

“To figure it all out. Or get buried under it for good.”

Another silence, not quite as long.

Hardwick sneezed, then blew his nose. “The Good Shepherd case has been around for ten years. You plan to solve it in the next twenty-four hours?”

“I don’t think I have any other options left. By the way, Jimi Brewster told Kim that he had an alibi for the Good Shepherd murders. You happen to know what it was?”

“Hard to forget that one. The Brewster murder was the last next-of-kin notification BCI made in the case. The doctor was shot in Massachusetts, but his son resided here, so we got the notification job—before the FBI took control of what then became an interstate investigation.”

“What made it hard to forget?”