Levi said, “We need to know how many possible suspects we have, out of Havoc’s staff.”
“That may not be as difficult as you might think,” Phillip said. “The two office workers have been with Havoc for eight and ten years, respectively.” He gave Levi their names.
After a few moments, Levi said, “Neither is on the hotel register for either Boston or Hartford.”
“Which means,” David said, “we can probably eliminate them.”
“Of the remaining six trainers,” Phillip said, “four were hired in the last two years.”
David asked, “Has Havoc been having trouble keeping help?”
Levi said, “He must be hard on the trainers. Anyway, they’re all ruled out because they weren’t employees when the two East Coast murders occurred.”
David asked, “What about the other two?”
Phillip said, “Bradley Slavens and Patti Roland.”
“A female trainer in the mix now.”
Levi said, “Both were on the Hartford and Boston trips.”
“Jordan’s family was attacked by a man,” David reminded them.
“If one killer is responsible for these atrocities,” Phillip said, “the woman is eliminated, as Jordan tells us the Riveras were attacked by a man. But ruling the Roland woman out entirely would be a mistake.”
David cocked his head. “Why’s that?”
Levi, who followed Phillip on this line of thought, said, “Bradley Slavens or Patti Roland could be working with Carlyle or Havoc.”
David frowned. “A killing team? Like the Hillside Strangler pair? That’s rare. Particularly a male-female duo.”
“But not unheard of,” Phillip said.
“No,” the writer said. “There’s Doug Clark and Carol Bundy, Karla and Paul Bernardo, Gerald and Charlene Gallego.”
“You do know your stuff, David. Yes, such teams go all the way back to the Honeymoon Killers, the notorious Martha Beck and Raymond Fernandez, and undoubtedly long before — Ahab and Jezebel, perhaps, in First and Second Kings.”
Nodding (though he knew none of these references), Levi said, “Other than Jordan, no one has gotten so much as a glimpse of the murderer — why can’t he be they?”
David nodded. “So, it could be Havoc or Carlyle or Slavens working alone...”
“...or,” Phillip continued, “any one of them working with the help of one or more of the others. They were all in the right cities at the time of the murders in question.”
David’s eyes were tight. “Finally we’re making sense of this.”
“Are we?” Levi asked. “I still don’t get it. The why of it.”
Phillip asked, “How so?”
Levi floundered for the words. “It’s just that... killing families, destroying families... why? There has to be a motive — these may be insane acts but they are not random fits of rage, they are planned, they are stage-managed, and what the hell motive could Havoc, or any of them, have?”
“An insane act,” David said, “by definition lacks a rational motive.”
“But not a motive,” Phillip insisted. “To a madman, an irrational motive would seem quite sane.”
“I mean, Havoc’s enjoyed success,” Levi said. “He came to this country, built something, made it thrive — what would possess him to attack families as a sort of... sick hobby?”
David said, “There are individuals among us who are both highly intelligent and deeply insane. A sociopath, for example, essentially mimics behavior, like compassion and love, he witnesses in others. And plays that against those others.”
Phillip said, “This is no sociopath.”
“No. But he’s smart and he’s crazy. That much we know.” David sat forward. He got his cell phone out and gestured with it. “I think we should share what we’ve learned with Pryor, and right away.”
The teacher was shaking a lecturing forefinger. “Your young detective is very inexperienced and prone to jumping to conclusions. If we don’t ground him in sufficient information, he’ll foul this up, and worse, he’ll turn his superiors against him and they’ll never listen to him again, much less us. We have to keep digging until we can give Pryor something more substantial than a longer suspect list.”
Clearly, David didn’t like that, but Levi could see the writer’s face moving from irritation to acceptance. It was like watching someone go through Kübler-Ross’s five stages of death right in front of you.
“Okay,” David said. “Let’s start with motive. How are we going to find that?”
Phillip asked, “How would you shape a motive planning one of your thrillers?”
David let out air. “I would determine what my villain was after, what he would do to achieve it, and what he had been through to get him to that point.”
Phillip’s lipless smile was something Levi couldn’t quite get used to. “Is that what we’re up against?” the teacher asked. “A ‘villain’? Evil, in the Old Testament sense?”
“Yes,” David said. “I guess so.”
“Evil born that way? Or created by circumstance and experience?”
“What’s the difference? Does it matter how a fire starts, once it’s raging?” Then David realized what he’d said, and apologized.
Levi waved that off, then David said to him, “Are we going to find our villain on the Internet, do you think?”
“Maybe, but we’ll start by digging into the lives of four people instead of just one.”
David shook his head, smiled ruefully. “Fellas, you don’t suppose we’re in over our heads, do you?”
“I don’t think it, I know it,” Levi said. “But nobody else is stepping up.”
“Except one lone rookie detective,” David reminded him.
Phillip said, “I admire you, and all the rest of our little team. It takes a lot of strength, and a good deal of tenacity, to do what you’re doing.”
“Same back at you,” Levi said. “And we’re not the only ones with tenacity — our ‘villain’ has it, too. He’s been working at his ‘hobby’ for at least a decade.”
David was staring into nothing. “You really have to hate people,” he said, “to be able to do what this predator does, for as long as he’s been doing it.”
Phillip let out a raspy sigh. “The poor soul probably doesn’t even see them as people anymore. They likely became something else to him a long time ago. Something less than human.”
“If not people,” Levi asked, “what are they to him?”
“When we figure that out,” David said, “that’s when we’ll have him.”
“Tall order,” Phillip said.
“But we’ve made progress,” Levi said. “The three of us, a trio damaged by him or the likes of him. Sitting at computers, fighting back.”
“True,” David said. “I’m something like encouraged. If our prey ever gets wind of us, though, it may take a very different kind of fighting back.”
Chapter Twelve
The moment Jordan ended the call with Mark Pryor, she knew he’d think she was stalling. But she’d told him she was on her way out, and that was true, throwing on a denim jacket over her T-shirt and jeans, pulling on her cycle helmet. Soon she was climbing onto her scooter, laptop computer in her backpack, ready to head to Kay Isenberg’s place.
All the members of their support group spin-off team had long since exchanged last names and addresses. Having Kay’s address had given Jordan a new lead, and she had already done some preliminary research into the alleged murder-suicide of Katherine and Walter Gregory, Kay’s sister and brother-in-law.