Mahler stood beside Rivas and Eden in the conference room. On the table in front of them lay a pile of homicide binders, the top one open to a close-up of a young woman’s face. Her eyes and lips were closed. A pool of white light, meant to locate bruises or marks, burned out the woman’s features. An irony of a homicide investigation, Mahler thought, is that it unmasks the victims, already exposed by murder, and lays them bare to strangers without the mercy of shadows.

“She looks young.” Eden broke the silence.

Mahler nodded. “She was young. Twenty-one. The other girl, Susan Hart, was twenty.” He waved at the binders. “Two years ago, Daniel and I worked these with a senior investigator, Tom Woodhouse. I’m hoping you’ll see something we didn’t.”

Mahler replayed the words. Had it really been two years? He saw the victim’s face, eyes closed, lying still as the minutes ticked past.

“What happened to Woodhouse?” Eden asked.

“Got old. Retired.”

Rivas picked up the top binder and held it toward Eden. “Michelle Foss. First one killed in the park. Riding her bike on the trail near the water tanks. We believe she reached the steepest part of the trail and stopped to catch her breath. The killer came from behind, pulled her into the brush, and strangled her. She took the same trail three times a week and rested at the same place. Our theory is the killer saw her and noticed the pattern.”

“How was she killed?” Eden wrote notes in a steno pad. “Was there a weapon?”

“None was ever found. ME thought it was a thick, smooth cord. No fibers or cuts.”

“And you never got anything when you looked at Partridge?”

“No marks on his hands. He might have worn gloves.”

Mahler only half-listened to the other two. Rivas’s voice ran in slow motion, as if his well-known memory of local homicides was filled to capacity, burdening his speech under the weight of too much history. Mahler remembered he had meant to talk to Rivas about Peña’s pulling a gun. Had something spooked the man?

Rivas pointed to the next binder. The woman in this photo had a thin face and long, brown hair pulled into a ponytail. “Susan Hart. She was a runner. Set some county records in the high school quarter-mile. Had just joined the junior college team. She was running on Fisherman’s Trail on the west side of the lake. Same method of strangulation. Body found in a heavily wooded section of the trail over by the boat launch.”

Eden wrote in her notebook. “You think she stopped like the first victim, and the killer was watching her, too?”

“Could be. Or maybe he just got lucky. That trail isn’t used much.”

Mahler grew impatient with these questions. Would they identify a killer? What he needed were new questions.