“For a while longer,” Murph said. “They weren’t awful theories. And it was pretty entertaining.”

Jessie slumped back in her chair, too deflated to chew him out. Once again she’d let her instincts take over before even checking to see if the evidence bore it out. Despite Dolan’s embrace of the “gut method,” it didn’t seem to be serving her very well lately.

She resolved to spend the next few hours focused only on leads based on credible facts, even if that meant going through dozens of mind-numbing texts from sexually rapacious old guys and the young women who were playing them.

And that’s exactly what she did. Over the remainder of the afternoon, she reviewed hundreds of texts, looking for anything even mildly relevant. Nothing she read was out of the ordinary. Actually, that wasn’t quite true. Some of the messages in other threads were sexually graphic. Some were depraved. Some were cruel. But none of the messages to or from Claire was threatening or even especially titillating. The word that best described them was “businesslike.”

As she studied them, she couldn’t stop her thoughts from drifting to the message Ryan had passed along from her father: You’re wrong. Look again.

What does that mean? And why is he saying it?

She knew that she should be more focused on the second question. After all, the first one was bait intended to draw her in. And yet, that first question was what intrigued her more.

Did he mean she was wrong about this case? If so, how could he even know that she was investigating it? Was he somehow following her? Had he, despite the best efforts of the marshals, managed to keep tabs on her movements, just as Crutchfield had?

An idea occurred to her. She clicked through the LAPD’s intranet site until she got to the page for the media tracking unit, which kept logs of every reference to an LAPD case in local media. She typed out a quick request before returning to her thoughts.

Assuming Xander did somehow know about the case, how could he know she was wrong about her assumptions without access to the evidence? The answer to that didn’t take long. Xander Thurman, she reminded herself, wasn’t an evidence guy. Like Agent Dolan, he was a gut guy. He used his instincts and knowledge of human nature to make his moves.

Unfortunately those moves usually involve killing people. But they also involved knowing how people might put themselves in vulnerable positions that would make killing them easier. It was a sick, bastardized variation of what a profiler did, but used the same basic skill set.

Setting aside the discomfort of recognizing once again that she and her father weren’t that different in how they approached their “work,” she tried to home in on what about the people involved in this case would make Xander think she was wrong to pursue them as she had.

He didn’t know any of the details of Claire’s life so that wasn’t the source of his comment. All he knew was what was publicly available—that an attractive young party girl had been stabbed to death and that, based on interviews with some friends and social media photos, she was known to have dated several older, wealthy men.