Even the Ursulina hunt, filmed for television by Ben Malloy, turned out to be a bust. Darrell let Ben and his volunteers trample through the forest surrounding the crime scene, because he hoped someone might find evidence of the real murderer while searching the ground for Ursulina tracks and Ursulina poop. But we didn’t find a thing. Kip and Racer’s killer, like the Ursulina, had disappeared from the woods without leaving a trace.

“Question,” Darrell said, as we sat across from each other at the conference table. He liked to use me as his sounding board, as if the process of thinking through the case again would help us unearth something we’d missed.

“Kip, Racer, now Gordon Brink,” he continued. “What are the similarities between the cases?”

“Well, the crime scenes obviously,” I replied. “The Ursulina message. Plus, the extreme violence in how the victims were killed.”

“And the differences?”

“The crimes happened six years apart. The victims back then were two local thugs versus an out-of-town partner at a corporate law firm. There’s nothing to connect them. We’ve got different murder weapons and different locations, one residential, one in the national forest.”

“What about possible motives for Kip and Racer?”

“Take your pick. They had their fingers in a lot of pies, everything from drugs and poaching to theft and assault.”

“And Brink?”

“Presumably the lawsuit.”

Darrell frowned. “So what does your gut tell you? Are we looking at a copycat or at the same killer?”

I reflected on what to say. “Well, everything about the second crime scene feels staged to look like the first. They’re the same, but they’re also different. That sounds like a copycat, doesn’t it?”

I didn’t have time to find out if Darrell agreed. Before I could say anything more, I heard the rustle of paper and the loud crunch of someone eating potato chips. I looked up and saw Ajax in the doorway of the conference room. He listened to us, with his tall body slumped against the doorframe. “You’re both forgetting something, you know.”

“Oh, yeah?” Darrell asked. “What’s that?”

Ajax came into the room and sat down across from me. His long legs stretched out, and I felt him rub my calf with his boot under the table. I pushed my chair sharply backward. He grinned and extended the bag of potato chips to offer me some, but I waved it away.

“There’s someone connected to both crimes,” Ajax said.

“Who?” Darrell asked.

“Norm Foltz. Kip and Racer were in his trailer. He’s the one who found the bodies. And now we’ve got Gordon Brink, who was on the other side of Norm in the mine lawsuit. He has links to all the victims.”

“Norm also has no motive,” Darrell pointed out.