Although they were unable to prevent her murder, they were extremely lucky that Victoria Manners’s body was discovered so quickly. But it was experience, skill, and a competent local police department—not luck—that landed Matt Costa here just twenty-four hours after the body was found. Because of that, they had a real chance to catch the killer before he took his next victim. But because his victims appeared to be selected randomly and within a small window of time, Matt knew his team was on a very tight clock.

The tracks that the killer had left when he—and they assumed it was a “he” because of Catherine’s profile—drove an ATV from the wide running path to the water’s edge were still partly visible in the slush. There’d been no fresh snow recently, and while the mountaintops were still pristine and white, most of the town was dealing with remnants of the last storm. According to the local authorities, they’d been able to take good impressions of the tire treads. Matt already asked them to ship the impressions to the FBI lab if they didn’t have the capability to process them quickly. Once his mobile crime unit was fully staffed and operational, they wouldn’t have to rely on local labs or the national lab for results. Until then he would use any facility at his disposal.

Matt continued to take his own pictures, starting from where the tracks deviated from the trail. He couldn’t yet see from here the exact place where Manners’s body had been found—it was downslope about fifty feet. What had the witness seen from here that caused her to investigate?

He walked downhill parallel to the tracks until he reached where they’d stopped. Obviously the body was gone. The crime scene investigators had collected samples of soil and other potential trace evidence, but they hadn’t found anything obviously connected to the killer. According to Detective Knolls, Manners was registered with a temp agency that specialized in health care staffing. She was in the middle of the third week of a six-week nursing assignment in the trauma ward of a Spokane hospital. Her shift ended at 8:00 p.m. on Tuesday, March 2. She’d clocked out at 8:09 p.m. No one reported her missing. She was 28, single, no known boyfriend. Her hospital ID was in the pocket of her scrubs, which was how they’d identified her, though Knolls also said they’d confirmed the ID through her prints.

Manners had never made it home that night—at least, her car wasn’t at the small duplex she rented downtown, near Gonzaga University. Her car also wasn’t at the hospital, and Detective Knolls had issued a BOLO for the vehicle.

If they were dealing with the same serial killer, even if they found the car, it would most likely yield no evidence. He was a wily bastard, smart and sick, who had never been seen with any of his previous victims. Four women, three men. Three under thirty-five, four over thirty-five. Caucasian woman, a stay-at-home-mother of three. Caucasian woman, a high school vice principal. A Japanese-American cop. Those three were killed in Portland, Oregon. But the cop was off duty and the killer may not have known he was a cop.