He professed a great love for his mother, which Vince had sometimes found in men with such backgrounds to be a veil to cover a deep hatred. Boys growing up in that situation with no positive male role model in their lives often felt vulnerable and unprotected by their only parent, their mother. They grew up watching their mother degrade herself, and watching other men degrade and objectify her. This generally led to the boys having a disdain and lack of respect for women and to harboring a seething anger, which could erupt into violence with the right trigger.

Steve Morgan was intelligent, had done well in school, had graduated at the top of his class from the University of California at Berkeley, where he had met Sara. Then came law school at the University of Southern California. Top honors. Next: a couple of good jobs in the greater Los Angeles area. Marriage, a baby, a move to Oak Knoll for a better quality of life and a job with Don Quinn, whom he had met on his first job out of law school.

And during all of this, he had been an active advocate for the rights of underprivileged women. Admirable.

But the wheels had started coming off the tracks for Steve Morgan, and the question was, why?

Inasmuch as he had shot down Tony’s theory of Steve Morgan being involved with Peter Crane in the See-No-Evil murders, it wasn’t a stretch to take a man with Morgan’s psychopathology and put him in the role of killer.

And that type of killer’s victimology? Prostitutes, disadvantaged women ... free-spirit single moms with lots of boyfriends.

What were the odds of having two highly intelligent, organized, sexually sadistic serial killers in a town the size of Oak Knoll—at the same time, no less? Astronomical. And that the two would have been friends? Vince would have to have the mathematical mind of Zander Zahn to calculate those numbers.

That was something that would only happen in Hollywood on a movie screen, like Jack the Ripper and the Marquis de Sade teaming up to take on one town.

Not that Vince didn’t know of teams of killers. He had interviewed both Larry Bittaker and Roy Norris, notorious for the incredibly brutal torture killings of five young women in Los Angeles in 1979. And Kenneth Bianchi and his cousin Angelo Buono, who had also gone down in LA in 1979 for killing ten young women in the infamous Hillside Strangler cases.

But a team took the exact right two people with the exact right mix of bad chemistry. One partner was always dominant, the other a follower. And when the chips were down in a police interview room, invariably one would turn on the other one in a heartbeat in order to secure a more lenient prison sentence. Because psychopaths care only about themselves and their own well-being, they possess no loyalty to a partner.