“Never?” Lewis sat balanced on a high wooden stool. He’d stripped off his starched blue button-down, exposing a white silk undershirt. The articulated muscles in his arms and shoulders bunched and moved under the thin fabric like pinions of a dark machine, restless for work.

June tapped her pen on the pad. “Not fucking ever.”

“Is that a surprise?” Peter flipped the sandwiches. The cheese bubbled on the hot pan.

“Jarhead, you got to work hard to stay low profile,” Lewis said. “How many people you know got absolutely zero electronic footprint? Even an internet primitive like you leaves a trail. These web scrapers know every physical and electronic address you’ve ever been associated with, every phone number you’ve ever had, going all the way back to when you were just a smile on your daddy’s face. June, are you saying there’s absolutely nothing?”

“I do have some education and employment history,” June said, “although it’s not recent. When Wiley was a teenager, he worked at a slaughterhouse in Madison, Nebraska, for eighteen months. During the same span, he got an associate’s degree in Criminal Justice from Northeast Community College in Norfolk. His next job was at the Minneapolis Police Department. He was there for seven years. After that, nothing.”

Lewis chewed his lip. “I’m guessing you can’t get personnel records from the cops.”

June shook her head. “They’re not public. Like most departments, the MPD works pretty hard to protect their rank and file, including the problem cops. The MPD’s contract with the police union’s a big part of that. I know a few journalists who’d crowdsourced the names of officers with complaints against them, then filed a bunch of Freedom of Information lawsuits with the department, trying to get access to the department’s disciplinary records. I reached out to them, hoping to get some dirt on Wiley, but he wasn’t even on their complaint list.”

“ ’Course not,” Lewis said. “Roy’s too slick for that. You get a former phone or address in Minneapolis?”

June shook her head. “Like he lived in a cave,” she said. “Or under a bridge.”

“Probably an informal sublet,” Lewis said. “Nothing in his name that way. For seven years?”

June nodded. “Means he’s smart. And he thinks ahead.”

Lewis frowned. “Like he been working toward this since he was a kid.”

Peter didn’t like the sound of that.

Almost every murder, he knew, was an impulse or accident, often committed under the influence of alcohol or drugs, in a haze of anger or pain, then regretted for a lifetime. Even soldiers sanctioned and trained for combat by their government had trouble getting out from under their war, as Peter knew too well. True premeditated murder was rare. But premeditation for a decade?

Then another thought occurred to Peter.

“What if he wasn’t working toward it? What if he’s been killing this whole time?”