Eden sat at her desk with Mahler’s stack of homicide binders. An arm’s length away on either side, Coyle worked on a laptop and Frames talked on his phone. Years of studying in dormitories had taught Eden to block out noise. She’d been awake more than twenty-four hours, and the experience of working around the clock reminded her of finals week at Mount Holyoke College, except in this case she had spent the night in a park and pointed a gun at a crazy homeless man.

The stack included seven cases: the chief suspect (Irwin Partridge), the latest Jane Doe victim, the two girls killed earlier in Santa Rosa’s Spring Lake Park (Michelle Foss and Susan Hart), a victim killed in a different Santa Rosa location (MaryEllen Reese), and two victims killed in Vallejo during the time Partridge lived there (Beth Hunter and Amanda Smith).

Eden looked at the victim photos. In the back of her mind, she heard the voice of her thesis advisor, Professor Hiatt: Never forget the victims were real people with families, favorite foods, career plans, boyfriends. The remembered admonition brought back another memory—Hiatt’s glare across the podium whenever she suspected her lecture hall audience of inattention, her old teacher’s manner always a blend of the endearing and the threatening.

The victims were girls just a few years younger than Eden. They could have been her college friends. Beth Hunter had freckles like her first-year roommate, Chrissie. Amanda Smith wore glasses like her best friend, Marie. Eden imagined herself shopping with the girls. Eden Somers and six homicide victims go to the mall.

Eden took a deep breath. She decided to read the binders in order: crime-scene report, medical examiner’s report, lead investigator’s notes, and transcripts of interviews with relatives, friends, and “interested parties”—those who found the body or who provided the police with information.

The cases involved three different lead investigators and two medical examiners, so the write-ups varied in level of detail, organization, and style. The effort required to track parallel information was frustrating. It wasn’t like a spreadsheet, which lined everything up and highlighted variables in red. This time, the voice playing in Eden’s mind was that of her FBI supervisor, Aaron Kinsella: Focus on the data patterns. Find the common thread.

Eden opened a spreadsheet program on her laptop and listed the victims.