“She’s been a cop for twelve years? She’s too young.”

“She’s thirty.”

He’d figured she was closer to twenty than thirty. And she made detective when she was twenty-five? Not unheard of, but certainly rare for anyone, man or woman.

“Do you want me to get more?”

“No, if I need anything else I’ll let you know. I had a heart-to-heart with Quinn yesterday and we have too many other irons in the fire to worry about why a vacationing cop wants to spend all her time investigating a murder. By the way, you’re doing great. Trial by fire.”

“Thank you, sir.”

“Elimínalo con los malditos señores,” he mumbled. Matt wished Ryder would just knock it off with ‘sir.’

Ryder just smiled and went back to work.

Matt read the note with the LA-FBI contact information. He hadn’t explicitly told Quinn he wouldn’t contact the FBI, but he’d implied it, and he was a man of his word. He sent the ASAC—Bryce Thornton—a brief email—apologized for bothering him, that he got what he needed from LAPD, thanks anyway. Then he sent Andy Knolls and Brian Maddox a message that he wanted to meet with them before the press briefing to talk about the case because he had additional information from the FBI profiler.

He was in the middle of crafting the message he wanted to hand-feed to the press when his cell phone rang. Portland area code.

“Costa.”

“Agent Costa? This is Detective Gino Jacoby from Portland. I worked the Anne Banks homicide.”

“Thank you for calling me back. I won’t beat around the bush. As you know, we believe that Anne was the first victim of the Triple Killer. We just caught another case here outside Spokane, Washington, but I was hoping to pick your brain more about the Banks case.”

“You know there’s disagreement about whether those six murders are truly connected,” Jacoby said.

“Perhaps among some agencies, but not ours. We’re not only positive the six murders were the work of the same killer, but he killed a nurse in the Spokane suburb of Liberty Lake two days ago. We believe he intends to murder two more victims before moving on. And I think we can stop him.”

“How can I help?”

“We’re doing a deep background on all seven victims, but because Banks was the first known victim, I wanted to reach out directly to find out everything you know about her life prior to her moving to Portland.”

“I can pull that together. I don’t think we went that far back, though. She was born in Idaho as Anne Goodman—that much I know—but she’d been married and in Portland for more than a decade, no prior marriages.”

“That’s good,” he wrote down her maiden name.

“Her past didn’t seem relevant to the investigation,” Jacoby said defensively.

“I read your reports, Detective. I don’t think you missed anything. You initially thought it might have been an attempted rape?”

“Yes—there had been a series of rapes in another part of the city, all in public parks, all at knifepoint.”