Page 61 of Investigate Away
A memory tickled the back of his brain. He recalled Callie mentioning something about the hairstyles during one of their fights.
But did she mention it in the book?
Come to think of it, he didn’t think she had.
Why not?
A wave of nausea gripped his gut. He turned and took long strides toward the front door, Jenna and DeSantis riding on his heels. A million things raced through his mind, but he couldn’t make sense of them.
All he knew was that somehow the hair was connected, and it all led back to Renee somehow.
He glanced over his shoulder. Albert had rolled his vehicle to a stop in front of the house, just behind the CSI unit.
“Jenna, I need you to do me a favor.”
“What’s that, Chief?”
“Go to my place and tell Callie to pull up headshots of all our victims, even the ones from the Mood Ring cases. She’ll know what those are. Have her compare hair styles both while alive and then the crime scenes.” He scratched at the center of his chest.
“You don’t believe that this is a copycat at all, do you?” Jenna asked.
“Nope,” he admitted. “And I think you were dead on in the car on the way over here. Only, I don’t think Callie was a trigger. I think our killer has been waiting patiently for her return.”
“Do you think she’s on his list to be murdered?”
He swallowed.
Hard.
If the theory he was forming in his brain was correct, Callie could easily be one of the victims just based on her looks, but something told him that she was more connected to these girls than even she knew.
Than even he suspected.
But what the fuck was the connection?
13
Callie hated taking over Jag’s office, but she needed to compare her information with as much of the police files as he was willing to give her.
“I didn’t want to be right about the hair,” she mumbled as she pinned another image on the corkboard he’d bought her on the way home from the crime scene.
Jag leaned his ass against the desk, curling his fingers around the sides. “For the record, I believed you when you said it after Stephanie died, but you never let me tell you that.”
“I thought the hair on the other women, while not styled, was manipulated a little to look a certain way.” She joined him on the desk. “Did you have any luck finding cases like the Mood Ring ones?”
“Albert did.” Jag held up his finger and twisted his body while he found his tablet on a desk filled with files. “He sent me nine possible. I ruled out all but two, with a third being iffy; however, feel free to take a look at all of them.”
She glanced at him with an arched brow. “Are we questioning our instincts?”
“No. I’ve just learned not to question yours.”
She bit back a smile as she scrolled through the information. Every murder that Albert had sent was a white female under the age of twenty-one who had been found in a park or campsite and had something in her left hand.
Two of them had what were known as mood stones. The rest were necklaces or pictures or other objects, except one.
She zoomed in on one image that had no trinket at the scene, but met every other criteria, as well as the girl having gone to the same college as the first three victims of the Mood Ring Killer, only the body had been found in her dorm, and it hadn’t been staged.
Her face had also been beaten.
