Emma doesn’t seem to hear him. It’s like she’s listening to some internal music, her gaze abstracted as she stares at herself in the mirror.

“I need to write it down. Some of the things he said… the phrasing wasn’t an accident. Nothing he ever says is by accident. And I think he does have insight into Pennsylvania.” Light bounces off her face and eyes, the skin over her cheekbones stretched and translucent. The fine hair on her head seems darker by contrast. “He said something about blood type—could the victims be blood donors? Is there a registry of some kind? Is that how they’re targeted? I think we’ve been going about this ass-backward. We’ve been looking for the killer. Maybe we should be looking more closely at the victims themselves, so we can see how he’s choosing them.”

Bell wants to tell her to ease down, but it would come out wrong. “If you need to write it all down, I’ll get a notepad and pencil from the lady at the front desk.”

“That would be good. Yeah, I need to write it.”

“Okay, do you wanna come out to the foyer? Cooper’s due to arrive in fifteen.”

The lady at the reception desk wears a beige skirt suit and frosted eye shadow, and she is very accommodating with writing materials. Bell gives Emma a pen, paper, a cup of water, and a place to sit, then leaves her alone to write.

The gray Diplomat isn’t in the parking lot. It finally shows up at about quarter past four.

“Don’t drive west,” Emma says when she slides into the back seat. “We need to see the bodies.”

“What?” Cooper looks at her in the rearview, but Emma is already head-down again, scribbling furiously. He glares at Bell instead. “What happened?”

“Nothing happened.” Bell buckles up in the back, reminds Lewis with short gestures to do the same. “I mean, Gutmunsson happened. And Lewis thinks we might have something—”

“The blood.” Emma glances at Cooper as she writes. “He kept going on about the blood. We need to check if the victims were blood donors, if there’s a registry—”

“No registry I’m aware of.” Cooper squints. “We can check it back at Quantico—”

“No. We need to examine the bodies for needle marks.” Emma finishes a line, looks up to make her point. “The killer is using the blood, okay? He’s using it as part of his ritual, for whatever reason—but he needs to know he’s got the right type of donor. He’s drawing blood before he kills them and using it for something. Taking a sample, like he’s taste-testing somehow. The medical examiner who did the original autopsies… What’s his name?”

“It’s complicated.” Cooper’s turned back over the seat now, watching her as the car idles. “We’ve got four bodies from three counties.”

“Ah, crap.” Bell realizes what this means. “They all went to their county medical examiner.”

“Correct.”

Emma looks mystified. “I don’t get it.”

“The bodies went to different district health departments,” Bell explains.