Page 42 of Nora
“Do you mind if I call Sabina?” she asked, interrupting his thoughts.
“Who’s Sabina?” he asked, grateful to have something else to think about. His mind had been wandering in a direction it had no business wandering. He was comfortable with Nora. She appeared to be comfortable with him. He should just leave it at that.
“A woman who does a lot of incredible tech work. She’s with a private security firm and is looking into the prior nine victims for me. She’s pulling data from all sorts of places, adding it to what I sent her, then using a new AI algorithm to see if she can find any connections among them,” she answered.
Lucian gestured to the in-dash screen that was hooked up to her phone. “Please, go ahead.”
Nora hit a few buttons on her phone, and soon the sound of ringing filled the car. Two rings in, a woman answered. “Nora.”
“Sabina, how are you? I half expected to just leave a message given it’s a Saturday night.”
“Ha,” the woman laughed. “As if I have a life, weekend or not. But let’s not get into that. I assume you want an update?”
“I figured you’d call if and when you had something major. But a lot of questions are swirling in my head, so I thought I’d reach out.”
“Did you know that the first kill in each of the three sets was a stabbing?” Sabina asked. “Like what happened on Wednesday with Michael Kelly? The remaining two murders at each location varied as to which method came second. In Scotland, the burning came next—and gross, how medieval. In Louisiana and Turkey, it was the strangulation. But they all started with the stabbing.”
Lucian glanced at Nora for her reaction. She was staring out the window, her forefinger pensively tracing the line of her lips.
“Have you found anything that ties them together? Not all the victims, but the first ones?” she asked.
“They are all runners or amblers or hikers. Which I know isn’t much of a tie. The man in Massachusetts was a runner, and the man in Scotland was an ambler. The woman from Louisiana and the woman in Turkey were both hikers.”
“Any chance they were active on online forums?” Lucian asked. Nora turned her head to look at him.
“Nora?” Sabina asked.
Nora let out a small breath. “Sabina, meet Lucian Salvitto, Six’s cousin. Lucian, meet Sabina O’Malley,” she said, making the introductions.
“Not to be nosy, but I’m going to be nosy. Wasn’t he suspect?”
Lucian had assumed that at some point, he was. But even so, he darted a sharp look at Nora, who’d returned her gaze to the window. “Not to me, but I promised Franklin I’d treat him as one.”
“What changed?” Sabina asked.
“I decided that if Franklin assigned me to this crazy op then he could deal with how I run it. Which includes not treating Lucian as a suspect.”
Sabina snorted, and Lucian’s lips twitched. Nora might be all that was kind and gentle, but she was never a pushover.
“Okay,” Sabina said, drawing the word out. “So back to the question—which is a very good one—yes, they were all part of various online forums.”
“We suspected the killer used the internet to meet Michael Kelly before his arrival here. It was the only way to explain how he could have known where to find him on that trail. But we didn’t know where or how. I suggested Detective Miller look into it and Cyn is as well. I’ll have to point Cyn to those forums,” Nora mulled out loud.
“It would explain why they are the first to die,” Lucian suggested. When Nora looked at him, he continued. “The participants were told the location of all the sessions when they were accepted into the program. It wouldn’t be hard for the killer to cultivate relationships online with people in those regions, not just Michael Kelly. And forums on hiking and running are common enough. If he accessed those, then by the time he arrived for that session, he’d have a victim and, likely, a location already picked out.”
“Leaving him with some time on the ground to identify the second two victims,” Nora said.
“Assuming there’s nothing tying the others together in the same manner as the first victims?” he asked.
“Nothing like that so far,” Sabina answered. “I’m still working on those, but nothing has popped.”
“I’ll ask Cyn to dig into the social media accounts, including the forums, of all first victims. Maybe she can identify conversations they might have had with our killer,” Nora said.
“I’ll keep working on the other victims. I got the algorithm updated yesterday, so it shouldn’t take me as long to run them,” Sabina replied.
“I’m grateful for anything you can do. Thank you,” Nora replied, always gracious.
“Any time,” Sabina said, then unceremoniously ended the call.
