It all added up. But they couldn’t prove one damn bit of it. They had yet to see Mike Morales’s face, not once. Not in this video recording or the one he’d made when he’d murdered Bethany in his crappy Baltimore apartment the summer he’d finished medical school at Johns Hopkins in 2003, and not in the recording he made months later when he murdered Rodrick and dumped his graceful young boy’s body near the Bugatti dealership in Greenwich, where Rodrick probably found his way onto Morales’s radar because of the vet’s office where Morales had worked part-time. It was probably where he’d met Bethany, only a different vet’s office, that one in Baltimore.

In both those cases he’d done the same thing he’d done to Terri. He bound the victims’ wrists. He was wearing surgical gloves when he penetrated them digitally, using the same type of lubricant. Back then, five years ago, he was about to start the NYPD police academy, and his part-time work was with veterinarians, not dermatologists. But veterinarians use cauterizing applicators and lubricants like Aqualine. Morales’s pilfering a partially used jar of lubricant from his workplace was part of his MO, perhaps going back to his first murder.

Berger had no idea how many people he’d killed, but she wondered if the reason he used the lubricant was to confound police with a mixture of different DNA profiles.

“He would think that was funny,” she said to Lucy. “He must have been thrilled when one of the profiles actually got a hit in CODIS and turned out to be the paraplegic from Palm Beach. What a big ha-ha that must have been.”

“He won’t get away with it,” Lucy said.

“I don’t know.”

The police not only hadn’t found Morales yet, but at the moment there was no warrant for his arrest. The overwhelming problem, which would continue to be a problem, was proof. The scientific evidence did not prove Morales had killed anyone, and recovering his DNA at Terri’s crime scene and even from her body meant nothing, since he was inside the apartment and had actually touched her when he’d checked her vitals. He was the lead investigator in her case and had touched everything and everyone connected to it.

And his face wasn’t on the video recordings. And he wasn’t on video coming into or leaving Terri’s apartment building because he probably had used the roof access night before last, pulling the ladder up after him. Then returning it to its closet later. Prior to that, when he’d been with her, probably it was somewhere else. Not Terri’s apartment. That was too risky. Someone might have remembered seeing him in the area. Morales was too smart to take a chance like that.