At the table, Rivas looked at the binders without speaking. Then he addressed Eden in a quiet voice. “Partridge didn’t move to Santa Rosa until 2006. Lived with his stepmother for a while and then got his own place. He came to the department’s attention once. A domestic dispute with his latest girlfriend. She declined to testify.”

Eden instinctively looked at her notepad and remembered her pen was somewhere on the floor. “Martin said you had evidence connecting Partridge to the Foss and Hart cases?” Her voice was hesitant. Behind her, she was aware of Mahler moving away from them and standing by the door.

“Yeah. A female cyclist saw a man matching Partridge’s description on the trail to the water tanks thirty minutes before Foss was strangled. In the Hart case, we had two things. A dark Nissan like Partridge’s was seen parked on Newanga Avenue at the time of the murder. And we had a muddy shoe print, matching his shoes, on the back calf of the victim.”

“Any evidence of him coming into or leaving the park on the days of the murders?”

Rivas shook his head. “No. We looked at that. The gate guards didn’t remember him, and the surveillance camera had nothing. But the park borders are fairly porous.”

“And you questioned him?”

“Yeah. Eddie and Tom mostly. Tom’s one of the best interrogators I’ve ever known. Went at him for two days.”

“So in the end he was never charged? The shoe print wasn’t enough?”

Rivas looked behind him at Mahler until their eyes met. “No.”

“And after that, no more killings happened?”

“No. We worked both cases as long as we could. Tom especially. DA encouraged us to look beyond Partridge—to boyfriends of the two girls, family members, park regulars, locals with previous assault records. In the end we looked at two guys in particular. Both had priors and lived in town. One looked promising, and then he didn’t. Tom spent months on them. I think it’s what burned him out in the end.”

“So what now?”

Across the room, Mahler felt his breath return and gritted his teeth against the headache. He walked slowly back to the table. “One idea is, the guy had some experience before this. The killings were quick and neat. In daylight. No witnesses. No evidence left behind.”

“Which brings us to these three victims.” Rivas picked up the last binders. “The first one is a local case. MaryEllen Reese, killed a year before the park killings. Her body was found along Santa Rosa Creek near Highway 12. The other two are similar unsolved cases from Vallejo, during the time Partridge lived there: Beth Hunter and Amanda Smith. I just pulled them off ViCAP. As far as I know, Tom didn’t look at these.”

“But why’d Partridge stop after two? Studies show a serial killer doesn’t stop until he’s caught.”