Matt raised an eye at Michael Harris’s attire. “You know you’re diving in a lake.” He’d got it out of a colleague that Michael’s nickname in the SEALs had been GQ. Matt hadn’t gotten up the nerve to call him that yet.

“I have my gear,” Michael said. He extended his hand to Jim. “Michael Harris.”

“Jim Esteban.”

Jim wore Dockers and a rumpled polo shirt. They couldn’t be more different.

“You caught up?” Matt asked Michael.

“Read everything you gave me last night. Know what we’re looking for at the lake. Play nice with SSA Torino because she has her nose out of joint. Thank the Sheriff for letting us use their equipment and make sure everything we find goes directly to Jim, who will be at the Spokane crime lab.”

Matt made some notes and said, “Detective Knolls of Liberty Lake is looking for the ATV with a vacationing cop from LA—he’s been solid since I arrived and may show up at the lake.”

“Got it.” Michael grimaced when he sipped the coffee. “This tastes like shit.”

“You were in the military for eight years and you’re complaining about hotel coffee?”

“We had better coffee in the Navy.”

Matt’s phone rang and he glanced at caller ID. “It’s Doc Jones,” he told his people. “I have to take this, but keep me in the loop, okay?”

He didn’t wait for an answer before stepping into his adjoining room and closing the door. It wasn’t that he needed to keep the call private, but he wanted all his attention on Catherine.

“It’s Matt,” he said.

“First, I’m not coming to Spokane—you don’t need me on-site.”

“I already said you didn’t need to be on the ground.” He tried not to gloat that he had been right.

“You’ve given me good forensic information,” Catherine said, “but I need more—specifically about the first murder. Anne Banks, the Portland stay-at-home mother. She’s an outlier—at least with what we know right now. The background check went back five years, but we need to go further back, to her childhood if we have to.”

“I got your email yesterday. Ryder is digging up the contact information for the detective in charge. You’ve always said the first victim is the key victim.”

“It’s standard in profiling, Matt. I was frustrated yesterday because I knew I was missing something. I spent all day reviewing every file, every photo, every interview...and realized when I woke up this morning that we have several major holes. Consider this—victims four and seven were both in the medical profession. Victims two and five were both in the educational field. Different jobs, but they were educators. Victims three and six were both in law enforcement. They seem random but they’re not—not to the killer. He’s choosing his victims based on their careers.”

“Yet the first victim was a stay-at-home mother of three,” Matt said.

“I believe she was in the medical profession before she had children. I looked through all the files in her case again this morning. There’s nothing in there about where she was born, raised, what she did, where she lived—she’d been married for more than ten years and lived in the same house in Portland for all those years and no one went back further. They stayed local.”