“I must have caught my foot on something.” She tried really, really hard to sound rueful. “It happened so fast, it’s hard to be sure.”

“No harm done.” He grinned as he watched her drop a spoonful of corn pudding onto her plate. “You seem to have had your share of bad luck since we met: you’ve tossed your cookies twice, lost your plate to a bowl of banana pudding, and Kaminsky tells me you fell down hard enough that it made you scream in the shower last night.”

“Did she tell you how she came to my rescue?” It was an effort, but Charlie managed to keep her tone light as she finished restocking her plate.

“She might have said something about it.”

Better to turn the conversation away from her own misadventures, Charlie thought as she led the way back to their table, than let him start really thinking about them and possibly realize the whole series of disasters had started when a certain convict had died under her ministrations. Kaminsky made a useful red herring.

“So, is Kaminsky married?” Charlie asked.

“No. None of us are.”

“Why not?”

He shrugged. “We work too much. We travel too much. At least two of us are hard to get along with.” That crooked smile appeared again. “And no, I’m not telling you which two.”

Charlie laughed, which helped to ease some of the tension that had her shooting wary looks at every moving shadow. Chill, she warned herself fiercely as they reached the table and sat down. If Garland’s here, he’ll show himself again soon enough, and then you’re just going to have to deal. In the meantime, there’s no point in making the others think there’s something wrong with you.

“We were beginning to wonder if you two got lost,” Crane greeted them a little too heartily.

“I dropped my plate and had to start over.”

Charlie, at least, had become immediately aware that Kaminsky and Crane had broken off an argument upon her and Bartoli’s arrival. Stabbing a fork into her pulled pork and lifting it to her mouth, Kaminsky was still glowering.

“This place seems to attract an older crowd than Bayley Evans and her friends.” Bartoli sounded thoughtful. He was looking around as he ate. “It’s expensive, too. Not the kind of place you’d expect a group of teenage girls to want to hang out.”

“Maybe they came with their families,” Crane suggested.

Bartoli shook his head. “According to her friends, they came in a group. Six of them. I just assumed the venue was the attraction, but now I’m not so sure.”

“Excuse me.” Kaminsky summoned their waiter with a slightly raised voice and a smile. When he reached them and looked at her inquiringly, she continued, “My teenage niece was here last Friday night and said she had a wild time. This doesn’t look like the kind of gathering she’d call a wild time. Was something special happening last week?”

The waiter smiled. He had introduced himself as Keith, Charlie remembered, as in Hi, I’m Keith, and I’ll be your waiter tonight. Keith was a cute blond guy in his early twenties, maybe a college student. Young enough to have plenty in common with a pack of teenage girls, Charlie thought. Old enough that they’d probably thought he was cool. Or hot. Or whatever teenage girls thought about cute guys these days.

“Kornucopia played last Friday night,” Keith said with enthusiasm. The blank looks around the table must have told him they didn’t have a clue what he was talking about, because he added, “They’re a boy band, real popular with the high school girls. They drew a big crowd, so management will probably do it again. Only we couldn’t serve alcohol, you know, because of the age thing, so I don’t know how much profit they made. If they didn’t make a lot of profit, I guess it might’ve been a one-off.”

“Tell me about them. How many guys are in the band? And how old are they?” Kaminsky asked.

“Um … four guys. Hank Jones, Axel Gundren, Ben Teague, and Travis Fitzpatrick. I don’t know how old they are exactly. Like, twenty-five, twenty-six, most of them.”

“Are they a local band? Or regional? ’Cause I’ve never heard of them; but then, I’m not from here.” Kaminsky’s tone stayed light.

“Mostly they play around this area. I guess you could call them regional.”

“You seem to know quite a bit about them. You a fan?” Bartoli tried to mask the sudden keen interest in his eyes with a friendly smile, but Charlie saw it.

“When they play, the girls show up.” Keith shrugged. “What’s not to like?”

Kaminsky laughed, and thanked him as another table beckoned and he hurried off.

Crane said, “Now, there’s a lead.”

Kaminsky looked around the table with a superior smirk. “Sometimes all you got to do is ask.”

“A band.” Bartoli’s eyes gleamed. “Good work, Kaminsky. When we’re done here, pull together information on them.”

“You thinking maybe they’ve played somewhere near where the other two families were attacked?” Crane asked.

Bartoli shrugged. “Won’t know until we check it out.”

“It won’t be the band members,” Kaminsky asserted. “They’re too young. At least, according to Dr. Phil here.”

Charlie shot her a withering look, but refused to engage.

“They’re only too young if this is actually the Boardwalk Killer,” Charlie said. “If it’s a copycat, the mid-twenties would fit the statistics.”

“You don’t think our guy’s the Boardwalk Killer, do you?” Bartoli asked curiously.

Charlie met his eyes. The truth was, she didn’t want to think it was the Boardwalk Killer. The idea that the predator who had stalked her nightmares for years was back, that he was nearby, that he was once again slaughtering families and preying on innocents, and might at any moment discover her presence and turn his sights on her was terrifying enough to make her blood run cold. But there were other, research-based reasons why it was unlikely to be him, and it was to these she clung.

“He would be too old now,” she said. “It’s very rare to find a serial killer older than forty. And there’s the time gap: where has he been for fifteen years?”

“Both are good points,” Bartoli said. “But I think we would be foolish to discount the possibility.”

“It doesn’t have to be the band members themselves. It could be someone connected with them,” Crane mused. “If the band’s traveling around, they’ll have people working with them, won’t they? Maybe we’re looking for a roadie, or someone like that.”

“I’ll check out everybody connected with the band, too,” Kaminsky promised. “How big an entourage could they have?”

Charlie told her, “Look for someone with a history of sex offenses against underage females at any time over the last ten years. A poor relationship with his parents. Hypochondria or other attention-seeking maladies. Probably someone working with him will have noticed that he can’t take criticism, so you could ask about that.”

They had all finished eating by that time.

“I’ll just give them all a questionnaire to fill out, shall I?” Kaminsky responded caustically. “Let’s see, I can start with, How much do you hate your mommy and daddy? Then, how about, Do you get sick a lot?”

Charlie’s eyes narrowed. “You want to find this guy? Those traits are markers. Think of them as the equivalent of a trail of bread crumbs leading to a particular destination, which in this case is the killer.”

Kaminsky hooted. “Oh, wow, now we’re Hansel and Gretel.”

“A background check should do it, coupled with a few interviews,” Bartoli said to Kaminsky before Charlie could reply. “Just keep it as low profile as you can. We don’t want to spook this guy. And remember, we’re all on the same team here.”

Kaminsky made a face. “Yeah, I know.” She shot Charlie a look. “Bread crumbs. I got it.”

“You up to a dance, Dr. Stone?” Bartoli asked. Charlie’s gaze shifted from Kaminsky to him, and her eyes must have given away her surprise, because he smiled. “Don’t look so shocked. I want to get this crowd on video. Kaminsky’s going to walk around recording us dancing from one angle, Crane from another, and between them we should be able to get a picture of almost everybody who’s here, including the staff, without alerting anyone to what we’re really after. Then we can take the video back with us and go over every frame.” He looked from Crane to Kaminsky. “Any questions?”