“You feel helpless.”

“Don’t you?”

She didn’t say anything for a minute. “The cop is going to have a connection to Liberty Lake. Either he lives or works there—now or in the past. Maybe Andy’s fiancée has a right to be concerned.”

“I hated Chief Packard’s idea—logistically—of pairing up every cop and keeping track of their off-duty movements, but honestly, I think it might be the only way to keep these guys safe,” Matt said.

“And we take his prize off the table and he gets reckless. He’ll make a mistake. And he may get reckless sooner if we take his second victim away from him.”

“If we can protect all the cops—not just Spokane PD, but Liberty Lake and all the other communities in the Spokane Valley, plus the Sheriff’s department.” Matt pulled out his phone and made a note to write a memo first thing in the morning. “I’ll alert everyone in the area that a cop connected in some way to Liberty Lake is in danger and to be extra cautious this week.”

“Except Victoria Manners had no connection to Liberty Lake.”

“I’ll prioritize the risk. And we’re still running a background on her—maybe her boyfriend lived there, or she went to school there, or she summered at the lake. Or the killer is just fucking with us—or giving us a clue we’re too stupid to figure out.”

“Hardly stupid.”

“It feels that way.”

“I’ll observe. Talk to Maddox. He knows everyone—he worked out of Liberty Lake for years.” She frowned.

“You’re worried about him?”

She shrugged. “Him and Andy. And all the other cops in Liberty Lake. But Maddox is a friend.”

“He recruited you.”

“In a manner of speaking.”

“What story did you tell Harris?”

She raised her eyebrows. “You really want to know?”

Hell yes. He shrugged and smiled. “If you want to tell me.”

“I was a junior in high school. I didn’t have a lot of friends—didn’t want them. I was in and out of different schools my entire life.”

“Army brat?”

She laughed, a real, honest-to-goodness laugh. “I wish. My parents were con artists. Common thieves. We moved a lot. Then my father got tossed in prison and my mother started hanging out with similar losers. I swear, if my mother and her steady stream of boyfriends had spent their energy actually working for a living rather than thinking up get-rich-quick scams, they would be rich. Half the time I didn’t even go to school. Transcripts? What are those? And pickpocketing? I learned those skills when I was still young and cute.”

Kara was still young and cute, Matt thought, then tried to push the thought out of his head.

“So,” she continued, “my mother and her boyfriend of the month came up with some new scam on tourists in...where were we? Vegas, yeah. Anyway, I started fucking with their plan, and when they realized I wasn’t going to play along anymore, my mother dumped me on Em in Liberty Lake. My mother was a piece of work, and I never trusted that she wouldn’t show up one day and pack me up. Before I turned sixteen, I’d become an expert on emancipation. She did show her face once and said she had a job that I was perfect for, and I told her to go to hell, I was filing for emancipation and would tell the court everything she had me do for her. She pouted and left. Of course, that didn’t stop her from calling me three years later when she needed to be bailed out of jail.”