Just Right, page 12
"James is apparently shocked that there was a survivor of the crash. He knew nothing about it," he told Cami.
"He didn't mention it in the article," she agreed.
"He said that he never heard anyone refer to a survivor. He even asked to watch the video again.”
“He did?” Cami frowned.
“Yes. He said he feels better about it this time, and that knowing someone walked away has given him renewed hope. That he's not feeling so despairing anymore, that he might be able to come back from rock bottom."
"That's good?" Cami asked tentatively.
"It's good if he's not the killer. Which I'm still not sure about. But giving him the benefit of the doubt, if he did report incorrectly on the crash, without knowing the son survived, it doesn't help us. Because there's nothing whatsoever to be found on Hayden Becker. My office has checked. No address details. No employment. No record. Nothing."
Something that Connor said gave Cami the flash of an idea.
"You know, I was wondering if he'd gotten help for his amnesia. Assuming he was concussed in the crash and suffered memory loss. And that when the memories returned, they caused psychosis, and he went looking for his family."
"That's an idea. Or rather, it would be if he existed," Connor said.
"I've been looking. I haven't found anything either. And that made me think."
Cami hesitated.
"Think what?" Connor asked.
"Think that maybe, his amnesia was so bad he didn't even remember his name. Maybe he was rushed to hospital, and he took on a different name. Maybe that's why we can't find him. Because he's been living the whole of his life, since the accident, under a different identity."
She saw the excitement in Connor's eyes as she continued. "And if that's so, we just have to fit the pieces together, and see if we can find it."
CHAPTER TWENTY THREE
Cami felt as if she'd been presented with an unsolvable puzzle. Somewhere out there was a killer, but since the accident and his serious injury, they had no way of knowing who he was, or the new identity he'd taken on. And if they didn't find out, then without a doubt, he would kill again.
After all, there had been five occupants of the car beside himself. He'd killed four people so far. If he was trying to hunt down every single person that he perceived to have been in that crash, then there was one still to go.
"He might not even stop at five," Cami said, seeing the worry she felt reflected in Connor's face. "He might just carry on, looking for people who resemble his family. He's not finding them, so he might not stop."
"Let's go over what we know about him," Connor said firmly.
"He's blond. That we know."
"We know his age. Twenty-five. And that he's tall and strong."
"He lives in this area, and he must have a car."
"And he's been able to track down all the victims."
Cami did yet another keyword search. "Amnesia." "Unidentified blond male." "Unidentified twenty-year-old." “Injured blond male.” “Mystery hospital patient.”
But she couldn't find anything in the news.
"If he was injured, he surely had to go to the hospital?" Connor said.
"I know, but I'm not finding anything that refers to that," Cami said. "Maybe he didn't go there. Maybe he crawled away from that crash and slowly recovered without medical attention. Or maybe someone picked him up and took him home and cared for him on their own. That might have happened, especially if he couldn't remember who he was, and he said he had no medical insurance."
Cami thought about that. It was definitely within the bounds of possibility that someone could have done such a thing. Whether they knew who he was or not.
"Maybe they read the news article that his whole family had died and didn't want to traumatize him with it," she suggested. "Maybe they thought it was best that he went forward with a new identity and new memories."
Connor nodded. "I'm finding here that things were not well with the family."
"Their house was foreclosed. Was there more that went wrong?"
"The Becker family was in dire financial straits. Now, my office has sent me through some information. It seems like the mother and the sister both had big outstanding medical bills from an earlier car crash. The father's business looks to have a ton of bad debt against it. It's on three different blacklists. He died of a heart attack a few months before this crash, it seemed, and left his affairs in a mess."
"Okay," Cami said. "So actually, if anyone realized who he was, there were very good reasons why they wouldn't have told him. Because he could even have ended up being liable for the family's bad debt."
“Yes, that’s a possibility.”
"Maybe his memory worked well enough for him to seek out distant family and friends, someone who knew him before the crash? And they kept it quiet intentionally, to protect him? "
Cami felt as if they were stabbing in the dark here. She knew there had to be a way of finding this out. There had to.
But there were too many possible scenarios.
She looked away from her screens, briefly glancing at Connor, who was glowering down at his own laptop, scanning the databases, as if through sheer force of will, it would be possible to find the answers.
Then, summoning all her resolve, she took another look at the community groups. Would he have joined any of them? He clearly was on social media because he had been able to identify and track the victims’ locations. But that wasn't exactly helpful. He was one of millions, and she had no idea what parameters to use. They knew nothing about him.
His name wasn't Hayden Becker. He was an unidentified blond male. A mystery.
And the only way they could find him was if they learned his new name.
The police department was starting to feel claustrophobic. There was a flicker in the overhead light that she'd only now become aware of. Now, of course, she couldn't tune it out, and it was annoying her.
It was annoying her because she wasn't focusing one hundred percent on her search, Cami knew. And the reason she wasn't doing that was that she literally felt she was out of options.
"I'm looking up distant relatives. I'm not finding any locally, though," Connor said. "Why aren't you able to pick anything up online?" Now there was a note of frustration in his tone as he glanced at her.
"Because I don't know what parameters to search for," Cami shot back, annoyed by the perceived criticism.
"You don't know?" Connor said, his voice incredulous.
Cami could feel an angry flush rising up her cheeks, even as she tried to remain calm.
"I’ve tried them all," she shot back defensively.
"You can't have tried them all. Think, Cami. There must be something you're missing."
You? Where was the “we” in all of this? she thought irritably.
"I just need time to think. I'm doing my best."
"We don't have time," Connor said, his voice firm.
“I can’t work miracles! I can find hidden information, yes. But I’m all out of miracles.”
“Doing your job is not working miracles,” Connor insisted.
Cami stared at him, seething.
Now they were fighting. This entire situation was devolving into a ragged search for loose ends and minor clues that didn't seem to exist, and they were sniping at each other as if this was their first day on the job together and they hated one another.
She took a deep breath. Tipped her chair back and stared in the other direction from that annoying light and those useless screens. Stared out of the window, at the trees and road beyond, trying to clear her mind.
Surprisingly, Cami found herself thinking of her probation officer, the dark-haired, rich-voiced FBI agent Jacenta.
She hadn't realized that when you committed a crime against the FBI and then struck a deal with them where you were let off, you were assigned someone as your probation officer. Jacenta had touched base in both her previous cases, and she was sure that Jacenta would be in touch again soon.
She had initially thought that Jacenta disapproved of her. She'd gotten that impression. But she hoped that she'd done something to earn the rather scary agent's respect. And now, she found herself wondering what advice Jacenta would offer her.
Firstly, she knew, Jacenta would tell her to stop fighting with Connor. That was a certainty. Jacenta would give her a lesson on anger management and conflict resolution. Cami could imagine the words she would use. It wasn’t difficult because Jacenta had told her something similar in the past.
“You handle this like an adult, Cami Lark,” Jacenta would say. “There’s a time and a place for letting personal issues escalate, and that is not in the middle of a murder investigation. If you’re intelligent enough to be an IT expert, you’re capable of defusing an argument.”
And then Jacenta might tell her to review the evidence more carefully. That was what she would probably say, Cami thought. She was a detail-oriented person.
“Go over it again, Cami Lark,” she might say. “Nobody’s asking you for a miracle. But your job doesn’t involve looking at things just once.”
Maybe there was a detail she'd missed.
Maybe, seeing as she was channeling Jacenta's calm wisdom, she should go back and relook at everything they had already.
"I'm looking back at the location pins," Cami said, trying a different angle. She made sure to speak in a normal voice and not in a way that would escalate the fight. "I want to double check that we haven't overlooked something."
“Good,” Connor said.
She went back, checking over the information again. She started with looking at those location pins for each victim.
Undoubtedly, Patti's information had been set to public. So had Leanne's. But what about Sally-Anne Brewster’s? That was the one that intrigued Cami, because at the time, she'd wondered why this woman would set everything to public when there was no reason for it.
She checked back carefully. Thoroughly. Second-guessing herself along the way.
Now, she was looking with a different idea in mind. And that idea was that this man, Hayden Becker, was not an IT expert. Nothing pointed to it. All he was doing was following location pins. He was a troubled man with a difficult past. There was no evidence to show that he was a hacker.
So, if he wasn’t a hacker, he would have had to trace the women’s locations through conventional and obvious means.
And there she saw it. The mistake she'd made. The small detail that she hadn't taken into account.
"Connor, look here," Cami said excitedly. "When I was checking up on Sally-Anne Brewster, I didn't look properly at the parameters, because there was a way for me to override them. But her location pin here was set to friends and contacts. It wasn't public."
"What does that mean?" Connor asked, a note of hope in his voice to replace the earlier antagonism.
"It means that whoever traced her must have been a friend or a contact. There's no other way they could have seen her whereabouts from outside that circle, without some serious hacking skills. So, he's far more likely to have been a friend or a contact of Sally-Anne, especially if he does live nearby here."
"So, if we look through her friends and contacts?"
"We should find him there," Cami said.
CHAPTER TWENTY FOUR
It was their only hope. This was the break in the case, the detail that Cami was pinning everything on now. Sally-Anne’s recent locations had been set to friends and contacts only. So, for the killer to have seen them, he had to be connected to her.
And out of all of them, Sally-Anne had the smallest group of contacts. She wasn’t famous, or high profile, or a relentless self-promoter, like Leanne and Patti had been.
Now, they needed to see who her friends and contacts were. And for this, Cami had a very useful piece of code that she'd gotten a while ago off open source and had stashed away, thinking it would be something that might come in handy one day. It was called Connection Crawler.
It automated the process of finding lists of mutual friends and contacts. It changed it from a tedious, time-consuming process, to one that took a couple of minutes. This software would scan the friends in common and compile a full list of Sally-Anne’s connections, even though Cami was not direct friends with Sally-Anne herself.
"I've got a program here that's going to be able to search all her friends and connections. I'll send you a list as soon as I have it."
"How many people will it be?"
"It looks like only a few hundred. So within those, we need to search for the one we want. The age, the looks, the hair color. That should narrow it down."
Cami took a look at the list as the program obediently worked, the names flipping down, one after the other. Each one was a prospect that could help them solve this case. Carefully, she searched through, looking for the right parameters. Looking for the killer.
There were only a few men of the right age who were Sally-Anne’s friends.
Then the name leaped out at her.
"Becker Evans,” she said aloud.
"What? So, he used his family's last name as his first name?" Connor asked.
"Maybe he remembered it, or he wanted the connection, even if it wasn't obvious. But it's him, I think. Becker Evans is the right age, and he lives locally. I’m going to see what he looks like now and compare him to the old photos of the family."
Cami searched online, looking for a photo.
"He doesn’t have many photos of himself online at all. But there is one shot that matches up. The features look the same, except now, he has a scar on his head." She could see the red, raised mark clearly on one of his blond temples. "I think he had a severe injury, and it might have affected him from then on," she said.
"Let's get his address," Connor said. "Car number plate details. I'm connecting with the office. They can research those things. But that's not all we need." He stared at Cami. "An address might not be helpful to us at this time. We need to know where he's headed. Because this man is clearly not staying home. He's on a mission. He's literally moving from kill to kill with barely a break. And by now, it's likely he's going to be on the move again."
Cami nodded. Worry twisted inside her. It wasn’t enough to find Becker Evans. They had to find the last link, the final piece to this puzzle, the killer's next target. And she knew that if they didn't hurry, then based on the frequency of his kills so far, he would take another victim.
"I have two ideas," Cami said. “Because I see here that Becker connected with all his victims. He was friends, or a follower, or a liker of all of them. He does have a connection with every person he’s killed so far.”
"So, what can you conclude?" Connor asked.
"My programs can use this information. I’m going to run two different ones. The first is an algorithm that I'm setting up. I'm going to see if it can pick up any patterns to his movements that we haven’t seen so far, and then I'll feed that back to us. If it works, we might be able to predict where he's going to go next."
"That algorithm sounds good." Connor nodded. "As soon as I have his address details, you can feed it in."
"Yes. That'll be important. It'll help it work better for sure knowing where he’s based."
"And the second? You said you had two ideas?"
"The second is to look through Becker's friends and connections. Because he will be targeting his next victim from them. So, we need to look for someone who fits the right profile and who’s in the area where he will be going next, according to his pattern."
Cami ran her crawler program again. She was now looking to unearth the private list of Becker's connections. Those he knew and that he'd connected with. Because within them, his next target could be waiting.
"Okay," Connor said, sounding motivated. "I've got an address for him. He lives at 40 Spruce Gardens, in an outlying suburb of Chicago."
"I'm looking it up now. It's a low-cost apartment block," Cami said.
"I think that aligns with what we concluded about the accident," Connor said. He's not a high earner. He doesn't seem to have significant IT expertise. He's just looking to trace people who resemble his dead family, by fairly basic means."
Now that they were making progress, the friction between them had gone. Cami felt like they had a chance now. She added the address to the algorithm and let it do its work, watching the program run, hoping that the results it would bring them would take this forward.
Connor got on the phone again to his team in the office and Cami felt grateful that they were doing some of the legwork. This time, he was finding out the registration details for Becker's car. But that didn't seem to be as easy.
"I'm not picking up anything for a vehicle," he said, sounding as if he was about to lapse back into irritability. "It could be that he's rented or borrowed a car for this mission, or even stolen one. Who knows? But there isn't a vehicle registered in his name."
That was a big setback, Cami knew. A car registration and a vehicle description would have been very helpful. Connor wasn't giving up, though.
"I'm going to see if my office made any progress with getting the two sets of camera footage from the two different scenes. If they have that by now, or it’s coming soon, that could help us. So, how’s your program doing?"
He pressed his lips together, glancing again at Cami's laptop.
"It's running. It's running, I promise. As fast as it can," she assured him.
She was also staring at the laptop as if her own gaze might help the programs go faster, but she knew that they were working at maximum speed already. They couldn't go any quicker than they were. They were good programs. This was top drawer coding. She'd gotten it and tweaked it, and she knew that it was going to be as effective as it could.
When it finally threw out a result, of course. Until then, they'd just have to sit and wait. That applied to her. Connor was now standing up and pacing.
"Your programs. Can they run in the car?"
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