As a distraction. Hazard hesitated. He hadn’t considered this before, not in this way. With the first set of killings, the murders had been an end in themselves. Hadn’t they? Hazard had assumed the answer to that question was yes; it had seemed the only possible answer. That type of elaborate killing, which was performed to sate some kind of need or provide some kind of release, was an end in itself.

Except with Susan, it hadn’t been. Susan’s murder had been a distraction to lure the police away while the Keeper abducted Mitchell. Hazard went back to the first murders; had it been a distraction too? He couldn’t see how. The Keeper’s killings had paralleled another series of murders, and for a while, Hazard had thought they were related. But at the time, the Keeper’s actions had looked like an abduction, perhaps an attempt to use a hostage to stop the investigation. The victims had been hidden in the college sub-basement and discovered only by following clues the Keeper had left behind. There had been an element of spectacle, yes, but not in the same way as with Susan’s death.

And now that Hazard considered the possibility, he had to admit that there were other differences. Serious, substantive differences. For one thing, Susan had been killed in her home; Rory, Phil, and Mitchell had been drugged and abducted while in public, probably at the Pretty Pretty. For another, Susan’s death and . . . presentation, for lack of a better word, had occurred within hours of each other. Phil, Rory, and Mitchell had been held and tortured for days; Rory had died after Hazard found them, and Mitchell had survived because they were able to rush him into surgery. Another difference was that Susan was a woman. A woman dating a trans man, yes, but a straight, cis woman. Phil, Rory, and Mitchell were all gay men, which Hazard had initially thought the Keeper might be mission oriented, the kind of serial killer who felt a mandate to eliminate a class of undesirables—in this case, homosexuals. Susan’s death threw out that possibility.

Hazard parted the page with a line and jotted possibilities: a copycat, an accomplice, external factors, internal factors. After another moment, he crossed out the copycat. Too many details between the first and second killing had aligned; for all their faults, the Wahredua PD had made an effort to keep those details out of the press. That meant a copycat killer would have to be someone with access to those records, and Hazard thought the odds were unlikely.

That left three possibilities to explain the differences. The first was that the Keeper had an accomplice, an acolyte, something along those lines. Most serial killers were loners. Even the ones with families and social lives, even the charming ones, had a degree of isolation and separation. To some extent, that was purely logistical; a serial killer had to have a certain amount of unmonitored time in which to commit murder. But it wasn’t impossible that the Keeper might have been working with someone. There could have been an internal shift in power; perhaps the accomplice had murdered or disabled the Keeper and had carried out Susan’s killing independently. Or perhaps this was the accomplice’s fledgling attempt, carried out under the Keeper’s tutelage.