Patrick sat down and slid the files across to Carina. “You think it might be the manager?”

“I don’t know. He loosely fits Dillon’s profile. Under thirty, college student, underachiever.”

“How is he an underachiever? He works full-time and goes to school.”

Carina rifled through papers until she pulled Kyle Burns’s transcript. “I had one of the uniforms pull his transcript. He was in and out of college for three years. His grades are good, not great. His advisor put a note in his file that he aspired to do great things with his life, but didn’t have the focus to stick with any one thing. His strength is management because he’s neat, organized, and disciplined.”

Nick nodded. “Our killer is organized, but I wouldn’t call him disciplined.”

“Still, Burns fits. He lives alone in a small duplex near the university. He has the light brown hair the half-blind librarian noticed. He has access to the Shack public computers. I think we need to interview all the employees again while Burns is off-site.”

“He doesn’t work Sundays,” Nick said.

“So we go there and talk to the employees, then track everyone else down at their homes. I have the files here. We were focusing on friends of Angie, so we only talked to the employees who regularly worked the same shifts as Angie. Now we need to dig deeper. We have a connection with the Shack and the killer-assuming Dillon is right and Scout is who we’re looking for. We focus there.”

“One more thing popped,” Patrick said. He put a printout in front of him. “This is a private message to an Elizabeth Rimes that he sent through the MyJournal server using the library Internet connection. He talks about his cat Felix being hit by a car.”

“And he told Becca that someone shot his cat.”

“When we pulled down messages from the Shack from the last three months, and reviewed all public comments posted by Scout that are stored indefinitely, he’s told several female MyJournal members over the last year that his cat had been killed. Died of cancer, hit by a car, drowned by his roommate.”

“For sympathy,” Nick said.

Patrick concurred. “Women are suckers for a good cat sob story.”

“Oh, stop that,” Carina said. “They sympathized because they didn’t think anyone would lie about something like that. It’s the old ‘help me find my lost puppy’ trick that pedophiles use to lure kids away.”

“Now where?” Nick asked. “Do we have an ISP?”

Patrick sighed, sat down. “Not yet. We know that Scout was in both the Shack and the library. We can get a warrant to search a house or business if we can get a name that goes with the profile-Dillon already convinced the DA of his reasoning, and he’s ready to take the stand on it if questioned. But because the MyJournal site is a free Web page, no one has to give truthful information. We have an e-mail address and it goes to a free e-mail account that is open, but it’s been inactive since Scout registered with MyJournal two years ago.”

Carina stood and walked over to the map. Red pins showed where the victims were abducted, blue pins where their bodies were found. “Angie was last seen more than ten miles from where her body was found, but Jodi and Becca’s bodies were found where they were last seen. Why?”

“He’s taunting us?” Patrick suggested. “He doesn’t care that they’re found.”

“Maybe it’s convenience,” Nick said. “Or he has a personal connection to the places.”

“We know he’s been to the Sand Shack, which is less than a mile from where Angie was found.” Carina placed a green pin on the Shack. “And the library.” She put a pin at the library, right next to the blue and red pins where Becca was abducted and found. “Nick, what’s Kyle’s address?”

He read from the report. “45670 Rupert Street.”

She found it on the map, put a yellow pin there. “Burns lives smack dab in the middle.”

“There were no drugs in Angie’s system, which suggests that she trusted whoever kidnapped her. She didn’t make a fuss, she seemed to voluntarily leave her house,” Nick said.

“And Becca he physically subdued. She was petite, much easier to control than Angie,” Carina said. “Do you think we have enough to ask for a warrant?”

“On Burns? Nowhere near enough,” Patrick said.

“But it makes sense, right?” Carina frowned at the map.

“Logically it makes sense, but you’re making a lot of leaps in reasoning and filling in blanks with theories, not evidence. We need something solid to tie Burns to the crimes.”

Carina knew Patrick was right. “I can still get the tail. Watch him until we gather enough evidence. And tomorrow, when he’s home, maybe we can stop by for another talk. See if he lets us come in, take a look around.”

“If he lets you in, you’re good to go. What does Jim have right now?”

“Nothing yet, but he’s working on it,” Carina said.

They sat in silence, reviewing the logs, when Patrick suddenly exclaimed, “I have an idea!”

“Give it to me,” Carina said. “I’ll take anything at this point.”

“What if we set Scout up?”

“How?”

“He has an e-mail alert through the MyJournal system that let’s him know whenever certain Web pages are updated. One page is that Elizabeth Rimes I told you about. We send an e-mail ostensibly from her to Scout with a redirect to my account.”

“For what purpose?”

“To get him into a chat room. To keep him in one place until we can locate him. If he’s logged on as Scout, I can find him within an hour.”

“I like it. I really like it.”

“Thank you, sis. I aim to please.”

“How long to set it up?” Nick asked.

“A couple hours, maybe less. I want to make sure we protect Elizabeth Rimes, alert the Atlanta police to keep an eye on her. We know Scout is in San Diego, but on the off-chance that he slips through.”

“I agree. I don’t want to jeopardize a civilian.”

“And I need to set up the technical end. I’m going to ask Dillon to chat with him online-he’s good at pulling people into conversations and he’ll know what to say.”

“Perfect. Thanks, Patrick.”

“I’m going to get started on it,” Patrick said, standing. “Sorry to leave you with all this paperwork.”

“I live for paperwork,” she said sarcastically.

Carina and Nick ordered dinner in. The task force room looked like a war zone, and they had come to the conclusion that until forensics came up with evidence they could use, or Patrick got a hit on his trap, they had nowhere else to look.

Carina was about to call it quits for the night. It was Saturday and there was little they could do until they had something to work with.

Then Jim Gage rushed into the room. “Good, you’re still here.”

“Like I’m going anywhere in this lifetime,” Carina said. “What is it?”

He waved a paper around. “I got a hit.”

“DNA match?”

“Almost as good. I have a match to a relative.”

“Explain,” Carina said.

“Mitchell Joseph Burns.”

“Burns,” Carina said. “You matched DNA to this Mitchell Burns? Is he a relation to Kyle Burns?”

“I don’t know at this point.” Jim pulled out a chair and sat. “Nearly eight years ago Mitchell Burns raped a woman in West Los Angeles. He used a condom, but either there was a tear in it or he wasn’t careful. Semen was found around the toilet bowl in the woman’s apartment.”

“And it matched Mitchell Burns? Was he already in the system?”

“He’s a repeat offender. Served four years for two counts of forcible rape.”

“Is he still in prison?”

“No, I’m getting to that,” he said impatiently. “He served his time, then a series of rapes popped up in West LA. When the investigators ran the DNA from the vic’s toilet, it hit on Burns. They went to arrest him, but his wife said he walked out one day and never came home.

“Ironically, the same day he raped the West LA woman.”

Jim let that sink in before continuing. “So when I ran the DNA we extracted from Becca-”