Catherine didn’t speak for a long minute.

“Hey, did I lose you?”

“I’ve been going over forensic reports,” she said, “and the timeline from the homeless men in Spokane who were stabbed to death, and the man who was stabbed to death in Bozeman. Do you realize that Glen Hamilton would have been seventeen at the time of the Spokane murders?”

“Your point?”

“His father was foreclosed on fifteen years ago. Glen would have been sixteen. Zach then disappeared, correct?”

“There’s no record of him buying or renting in the Spokane Valley after that. We tracked him to Montana, up until ten years ago.”

“But Glen went to visit his father while he still lived in Liberty Lake, correct? Before he lost the house?”

“Yes, but I don’t have dates.”

“My guess would be shortly after he got his driver’s license. And before his father had lost the house on Vine Street—and lost everything inside. Everything that had been his mother’s. That had been his.”

“Okay, but I don’t see where you’re going with this.”

“His father lost the house because he lost his job because of his drinking. This was all after he lost his son because of his drunk driving arrest, correct?”

“Yes—he went to jail and that was when Glen was sent to Kennewick. He was nearly fifteen.”

“When the father got out of jail, he went back to his job—but couldn’t hold it down. He went back to drinking. That’s when he lost the house. Glen was sixteen. Perhaps he finally got the courage to confront his father, or perhaps he just wanted to retrieve what belonged to him or his mother. But he was too late. It was all gone. The house, the personal items, his father. He had nothing to take out his rage on...except homeless alcoholics who couldn’t fight back.”

“That’s a stretch, and it’s going to be difficult to prove.”

“Consider that this boy was the recipient of his father’s rage for at least two years before he went to live with his aunt. And from what you learned from the aunt, he may not have been a model father and husband even before his wife’s death.”

“Are you saying Zachary abused his son?”

“Maybe, maybe not, but he must have heard his father blame everyone for everything. The ER nurse for his wife dying. The school principal for him losing his job. The cop for arresting him and sending him to jail. Going to jail put him behind in his payments. Maybe the aunt helped, maybe he had savings or a life insurance policy, but not working for six months had to have hurt his finances. Everyone was to blame, except himself, Zach Hamilton.”

This was the old Catherine—she had gotten into the killer’s head. Matt knew she would be able to do it, if she just focused and put aside all the shit that happened last summer.

Brian Maddox wasn’t the cop who put Hamilton in prison for a year; that was Corrigan. But Brian had arrested him when the house was foreclosed on and Hamilton refused to leave. Which cop did Zachary Hamilton blame the most?