Travis feels heavy in the head, but reading the xeroxed report brings him around fast. “Mark Spiegel. White male, sixteen years old. He was taken from Strasburg on Tuesday afternoon.”

“And Kimberley Berger was abducted on Tuesday night.” Emma’s sitting sideways with her knees up, feet on the chair. She looks worn down, but it was a bad night and cheap tequila is potent.

“Same location?”

“No.” Her face is stony. “From Winchester.”

“What is it?”

She pushes the pages toward him across the desk. “She was fourteen.”

Bell checks the notes to make sure he heard her right. “Fuck. They’re getting younger.”

“Yes.” Emma chews on a fingernail.

He’s getting to know her tells now: Sometimes she shows anger when she’s scared. Last night they were both too shocked for anything to register, and after that, her responses were blurred by alcohol and exhaustion. But he thinks she’s starting to feel afraid of this guy they’re tracking. It makes him angry in turn, because he knows she already lives with a debilitating amount of fear.

How can you keep doing this? He understands why he’s following this through, but Emma has no personal obligation at all. She’s walked back into her own personal nightmare, and it’s clear she hates every part of it. What’s keeping her going? He doesn’t know. All he knows is they’re in it now, probably too far to back out, and the only way through is to catch the killer fast.

“Okay, d’you wanna go over the scene report?”

Emma sighs, puts her feet down. “Sure.”

The entire case file is open on the desk, ID photos of the identified victims lined up in a row. Images of the victims in death floated through Bell’s dreams last night—seeing them arrayed like this, as they were in life, is like hearing the percussive toll of a great gong inside his head. He pulls the pages closer, trying to shake it off. “We won’t get the postmortem protocols back for a while—lab results take time. But they’re on the lookout now for needle marks, or abrasions hiding needle marks. Otherwise it seems like the process, the ritual he’s playing out, they think it’s largely the same.”

“The quantity and spatter pattern of the blood at the scene suggest that this was the scene of death. That means we can see exactly what he was doing with them.”

“He made clean jugular cuts. He hosed them down before he cut them, and maybe himself after—Glenn Neilsen is following up on some unidentified hairs they found. There was no hose, though, so the killer must’ve taken that with him.”

Emma rubs the pads of her fingers over her head. “He must always use a place with a faucet.”

“The shaved hair is new.”

“Yep.” She drops her hand.

“Talk to me, Emma.”

“I still don’t know why he’s doing it.” She shrugs. “Gutmunsson predicted it. I tried to ask him about it and he deflected.”

There’s more to dig there. Bell decides to save it.