Had the killer moved to another territory for a while, then returned to kill the Springer twins? If so, there were no records of Donovan Caldwell moving between the two double homicides, a fact his lawyer hammered home during the trial.

Jase poured over the data.

What, if any, was the link between the two sets of twins?

Leaning back on the couch, one heel propped on the coffee table, he stared at the television mounted over the grate, but he didn’t pay attention to the highlights of a recent baseball game. His thoughts were turned inward. The time gap between the murders bothered him. Could the second set of murders have been at the hands of a copycat? If so, had that killer traveled to New Orleans from LA?

The LAPD hadn’t prosecuted Donovan Caldwell for the Springer twins’ murders. The prosecutors obviously hadn’t found enough evidence to link Caldwell to the second set of homicides and had to settle for prosecuting him for the ritualistic killings of his sisters.

Caldwell had admitted to disliking his siblings, even resenting them, and he’d been an odd duck, a person who could make others uncomfortable or wary. But had he been capable of this macabre murder of his sisters, stripping them and hog-tieing them and killing them as they turned of age?

The jury had said yes, and he was now serving time for the murders. He’d screamed in the courtroom that he was innocent and he’d been insisting ever since that he didn’t kill his sisters. But that was par for the course for convicts. Many claimed their innocence.

Jase raked his fingers through his hair.

He stared at a picture of Donovan Caldwell, a man who blended in with the crowd. While his sisters had been gorgeous and outgoing, popular and, by all accounts, well-rounded, fun individuals, Caldwell had been a loner, a plain-looking man who had trouble holding down a job or forming any relationship. He’d taken the stand and to his attorney’s dismay referred to Delta and Diana as “the twins,” hooking air quotes. During his testimony he’d been unable to hide his disdain for them.

Probably sealed his fate.

Then there was the question of the murder case that occurred twelve years later. Was Caldwell also responsible for that? Lucy and Laney Springer’s murders had brought the unsolved Caldwell twins’ homicides to the fore, and somehow the new evidence or technology had been enough to convict Donovan for the older killings of his sisters. Not so for the Springer girls.

Did Donovan Caldwell actually wait twelve years to repeat his crimes, to relive taking his sisters’ lives? Or were there other victims scattered around the country, dual corpses of twins who’d disappeared and had never been located?

Far-fetched.