“I mean,” said Eli, “that the killer clearly sees the executions as necessary, but I doubt it’s their sole objective.”

“We need to find this person as soon as possible,” said Stell.

“You want me to hunt a hunter.”

Stell raised a brow. “Is that going to be a problem?”

“On the contrary,” said Eli. “I’ve been waiting for a challenge.” He crossed his arms, studying the pictures. “One thing’s almost certain.”

“What’s that?”

“Your hunter is an EO.”

Stell stiffened. “How do you know?”

“Well, I don’t know,” said Eli. “I can only hypothesize. But what are the odds of an ordinary human successfully executing three distinct EOs without the slightest signs of resistance?” Eli held Gladwell’s photograph up to the fiberglass. “A single, consistently positioned, point-blank headshot, in all three cases. A level of accuracy that means one of two things—either the shooter is an expert marksman, or the victims didn’t put up a fight. Blood spray suggests they were conscious and upright when they were shot. Which means they simply stood there.

Do you know many ordinary people who could convince or compel a person to go so willingly to their death?”

Eli didn’t wait for an answer. He shook his head, studying the pictures, his thoughts turning. One week. Two months. Nine months.

“These killings are far apart,” he mused. “Which suggests that either your hunter isn’t very good at finding EOs, or they’re not looking for all EOs.”

“You think they’re targeting specific people?”

“Or specific abilities,” said Eli.

“Any ideas?”

Eli steepled his fingers.

Determining an EO’s abilities postmortem was an impossible task.

Abilities were hyperspecific, informed not only by the way in which the EO died, but also by their reason for wanting to live. He could speculate—but Eli hated speculating. It was dangerous, and inefficient.

Educated guesswork was still guesswork, not a substitute for firsthand experience. Paper clues could only tell you so much—look at Sydney and Serena Clarke. The same near-death experience—a deep plunge in a frozen lake—resulting in two wildly disparate abilities. People were individual. Their psychology was specific. The trick, then, was to aim for vague shapes. Focus only on the outlines, the broadest conditions, and collect enough of those that he could find the pattern, the picture.

“Give me everything you can on these three,” he said, sweeping his hand over the photos. “They may be dead, but that doesn’t mean they don’t still have secrets to tell.”

Eli pointed at a box by Stell’s feet. “What are those?”

Stell nudged it with his shoe. “These,” he said, “are all the execution-style killings that fit the hunter’s MO, but not the EO profile.”

Humans. Of course. He hadn’t considered that the hunter’s scope might go beyond EOs. But that was because his own hadn’t. What a careless assumption. “Can I see them?”