Page 62 of Investigate Away
Callie flipped back to the other two cases.
Both girls attended the same college.
Jag glanced over her shoulder. “I was looking at the same three.” He tapped at the screen. “This one. Victoria Patterson is the victim’s name. I obviously haven’t had time to read everything, but doesn’t it feel like the killer was interrupted?”
“It does. And since the face was beaten, the hair should have been done, but it wasn’t.”
“And the evidence points to her being killed in the dorm. Other than your sister and Renee, the other victims were moved.”
“Not the first Mood Ring Killer victim,” Callie said. “Can you print those out so I can pin them?”
“Of course.”
“Six is the sign of the devil.” Callie handed him the tablet and stared at the wall of victims. “Ravens usually mean a bad omen or death. But I don’t get dolphins or mood rings.”
“Maybe we’re attacking that from the wrong angle,” he said.
“What do you mean?”
“I think we need to look to the victims for the meaning of the trinkets.” He stepped closer to the corkboard. “Mood Ring victim number one was a lesbian. As was dolphin trinket with the gold and then with the silver.”
“My sister was trans but identified as a lesbian,” Callie said, rubbing her temples. “But then that should have reset the killer’s cycle.”
“Not necessarily. Not if the number six means something. And maybe the killer would have kept going.” Jag found one of the raven trinkets on the desk. “Maybe she just would have gone to rose gold trinkets.”
“Okay. But why smash in my sister’s face when the Trinket Killer didn’t do that to number six?”
“I’m going to go out on a limb here and suggest that the killer might have been intimate with those she became overly violent with.”
“I could be on board with that. But why stop the killing for a year?” Callie was so tired of the same questions. No matter how much new information they uncovered, the same fundamental answers needed to solve this mystery were nowhere to be found.
“Well, let’s look at the timeline. Renee was murdered, what, about six years ago?”
Callie nodded.
“The first Mood Ring Killer victim was murdered fourteen years ago. Neither Albert nor Marlo from the cold case division could find anything in Seattle or the surrounding areas that come close. I’ve called a buddy I know in the FBI, and he’s going through their database. But we could be looking at a fourteen-year break.”
Callie turned, pulling out the chair. She pushed through a bunch of the papers and files. She wasn’t quite sure what she was looking for, but her brain told her she needed to find what pulled them all together, and she knew the connection was in this stack somewhere.
It had to be.
“Who found Patterson’s body?” Callie asked.
“I didn’t get that far. I think I might have been ten years old when those murders happened. I don’t remember them at all.”
“Why would you at that age?” Callie said. She found the file and scanned it. “It says her roommate found the body. The officer first on the scene reported that she entered the room, saw the body, and freaked out, running down the hall, screaming for someone to call 9-1-1.”
“She didn’t stay to see if her roommate was alive or to perform CPR?”
“Not according to the report,” Callie said, holding up the case file she remembered reading, and a few things jumped out at her. “Another interesting thing is the victim didn’t die until about an hour after she got to the hospital.”
“So, it’s possible that either the roommate did it or the roommate walked in and saw something.”
“That’s what I thought,” Callie said. “The roommate said she didn’t see anything but the body on the floor. She did say the door was locked and that was rare when they were in the room on a Wednesday afternoon. Also, the dorm room was on the first floor and the window was open, so the killer could have escaped that way when the roommate was trying to get in.”
“Who was the roommate?” Jag asked.
“I hadn’t looked that up yet.” Callie flipped to the front of the report. “The police cleared her pretty quickly. She was barely a person of interest.”
