“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?
Chapter 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?”
“Matt 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 Matt 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.
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,” 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. Matt 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
