Eve got a deputy to give her a ride back to her condo. She ran inside, grabbed the keys to her Subaru Outback, and drove to Barnes & Noble at the Commons in Calabasas, where she bought a large map of the San Fernando Valley. From there, she went to the Office Depot on Topanga to buy a box of colored pushpins and then went two blocks south to Yang Chow, a Chinese restaurant across from the Topanga Mall, and bought fried rice, Slippery Shrimp, and chow mein to go. She took her purchases home, devoured her dinner, and got to work.

Back when she was a detective in burglary, she got a lot of results using geographic profiling. The basic idea behind it is that people commit crimes close to where they live, work, and play because it’s easier to find prey, and make a quick escape, in areas they know well.

She knew that geographic profiling worked best as a technique to pinpoint the home or workplace of criminals committing serial crimes. She’d nailed several serial burglars by marking the location of each burglary on a map, drawing a radius of three miles around each scene, and focusing her attention on where the circles overlapped. It inevitably led her to where the crook lived or worked or to where he’d strike next.

Now she figured it would work in reverse, helping her determine where Coyle had most likely dumped the bodies. Eve only had three confirmed locations where Coyle committed crimes, but she knew he used his service calls as scouting trips for burglaries. So she decided to treat each service call as a possible crime scene and plot them all on a map of the San Fernando Valley. There was a crucial flaw in her approach—since Coyle was assigned his calls, he didn’t choose them. But she decided to see if a pattern emerged that might suggest there were some areas he spent more time in than others and would feel more comfortable going back to for his burglaries . . . or to dump bags of body parts.

It would be easier for the Crime Analysis Unit to pinpoint the hot zones for her, utilizing a profiling algorithm specifically designed for geographic profiling, but she liked the tactile effort of doing it herself and she believed that might give her a better intuitive understanding of Coyle’s movements. Besides, what else did she have to do tonight?

So Eve put the map of the valley up on her living room wall and marked the locations of the Mr. Plunger office, Coyle’s home, Tanya’s home, Vickie Denhoff’s house, and Esther Sondel’s house on it with a Sharpie.

She then used colored pushpins to start marking the location of every service call Coyle had made. There were hundreds, but she hoped a cluster or pattern would emerge before she had nine hundred pins in the map.