Page 16 of End of Days

“Can you get DNA off of it?”

“I think so. It’s not a guarantee, but I think I can.”

“Do it. This asshole thinks he’s smarter than us, but he’s not.”

The coroner said, “This guy is twisted. Something is wrong in his head. He’s not hiding. And he’s not going to stop.”

Lia went around the room, cataloging everything in her mind, trying to find connections with the previous deaths.

The investigator said, “You going to do anything besides stand and look?”

She turned to him and said, “Do you have a problem with me?”

He shook his head and said, “No. I have a problem with you being in charge. You don’t have the experience for this work.”

She ignored him, seeing a Mi-Fi device taped to the window.

She said, “What’s that?”

The investigator said, “Internet connection through the cell network. They don’t have Wi-Fi here, so she paid for her own.”

Intrigued, she said, “Is it still on?”

Dismissive, he said, “Yeah, but it’s just a Wi-Fi connection. It doesn’t show anything. It’s just a pass-through for her to show porn. They all do it. You’d know that if you worked this area.”

“Does it show who’s connected to it? Did she have to give him permission to access it?”

The investigator, examining the carpet next to the mattress, realized where she was headed and stood up, looked at her, and said, “Yeah, she would have to do that.”

“Does it have a memory of people she’s given access to?”

Now animated, he pulled it off the window and said, “Yeah, it would have that.”

He scrolled through the last attachments to the Wi-Fi and saw a MAC address. He said, “This is the guy. It was registered last night. He was on this Wi-Fi.”

He laid it on the table, his face showing a new appreciation, writing down the MAC in a notebook. When he was done, he stuck out his hand and said, “I’m Franco Rossi. Sorry if I was rude.”

When she’d entered the room, she’d felt his disdain, as she had from the other men investigators in the past. She really didn’t want to get into a shoving match over who was in charge—becauseshewas in charge. As before, she’d let her abilities do the persuading. She’d found out early on that she had a knack for this, and all she had to do was show it.

Sometimes it created a situation where someone else felt threatened, but most of the time—like now—it caused the men to realize she was special. She was in charge because she was better at this than they were, regardless of her time in service.

She smiled and accepted his latent apology, shaking his hand. She said, “Is it a cell number?”

He began scrolling through the history of the device, saying, “No. It’s the MAC address for the phone, tablet, or computer he used. A unique identifier for the device. It’s a number that registers every time you attach to a Wi-Fi node.”

She said, “Can we get a cell number from the MAC? Or trace that by itself?”

“No, it’s not like a cell number that interfaces with the network. Its trace ends here at the sign-on to the Mi-Fi. But that number is a unique address to whoever killed her. If we get his phone—or whatever he used—we can prove he was here.”

She liked the “we” part of that. Franco was now on board. And like many endeavors involving teamwork, the sum of the parts was greater than the whole. They would find this man. All they had to do was keep digging.

She only prayed that they’d locate him before he killed again.

Franco said, “Whoa. Whoever has that MAC just signed on again. He’s live.”

Lia came over and saw the device registered one active user. “It’s the same MAC?”

“Yeah. My bet is the guy lives near here and his phone automatically connected when he went to a window or something, like when you enter a Starbucks you’ve been in before. He doesn’t realize it’s connected.”

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