Page 50 of Shrapnel

He opened his eyes.

“It de-escalated,” he mumbled, standing up and walking toward the board. “Harvey, look at their faces. What do you see?”

Harvey grimaced. The man killed people with a cleaver but had difficulty looking at the pock-marked faces. “They’re…”

“No, really look.” Noah tapped on the first two victims. “They’re bruised and bloody.” Casting his hand around, he knocked over two stacks of files that Harvey had meticulously organized. His second sighed.

“Look,” he said again. “They had injuries consistent with a beating. But Andrews, Hughes, and Koehler didn’t. The first victims were tortured but the newest ones weren’t.”

Harvey blinked and began to nod. “What kind of killer…calms down?”

“They don’t,” Noah guessed, based on years of watching crime shows when he couldn’t sleep. “They usually get worse.”

“What does that mean?”

Noah considered it. “It means the first victims were personal. Or they knew something the killer needed. The others were just to send a message.”

“Or there’s more than one killer,” Harvey suggested.

Noah clenched his jaw. Two killers made sense. Donahue and Dalton were civilians, but the rest were hardened criminals. Literally. It wouldn’t be easy to take them out.

“Harvey, we need more information on our victims. Make copies of all this information and give it to Jamie’s guy. Copies of the CCTV, too. Tell him he can have anything he needs to get this done.”

It was a crumb. A tiny piece of information, but it was something. Another lead. If Jamie’s computer guy could get the information his people couldn’t, he might just gift him a wing of White Sand Mesa.

Hell, he could have the whole house. The job, too.

Arosette of colors bounced across the screen, striking each edge before whirling to the other in a kaleidoscope of distracting colors. Jamie leaned toward the laptop. His brain had checked out twenty minutes ago and at this point, he was only sitting upright by muscle memory.

Owen had suggested using his apartment to work on the Mesa murders. Something about going to White Sand Mesa made him nervous. It could be the presence of a hundred heavily armed gangsters, but it was probably the creepy painting of Luther. Jamie could still see it every time he closed his eyes.

Owen was hunched over his fancy computer, tapping the keys with mind-boggling speed and precision. Occasionally his hand would drift over to his mouse and stay there for a moment, but then it was right back to tap, tap, tapping.

All the papers Noah sent over were scattered around Jamie on the living room floor. His first job as Owen’s assistant, aka his bitch, was to scan them into the computer and give them to him electronically. Owen refused to even look at the hard copies. They offended his techy sensibilities.

Despite Owen telling him his portable scanner was ‘user friendly’ it took Jamie the better part of the morning to scan all the damn papers in. By the time it jammed on the last paper, Jamie was ready to riddle it with holes, but Owen had smiled at him dopily, nose scrunching up as he thanked him.

Jamie refrained from murdering the scanner. For now.

Now he was supposed to be researching the victims. Owen would send over documents he just so happened tofindon the internet and Jamie was supposed to read and ‘compile’ the data. Whatever the fuck that meant.

Unlike Jamie, who had burnt out three sentences in, Owen was in his element. The computer screen burning in his retinas, he flicked through websites and tabs like he was in a whole other dimension.

Judging by the number of energy drinks he had chugged—he might be. Jamie lost count but he was genuinely worried about Owen’s heart exploding.

His attention drifted to some of the photos on the wall above Owen’s couch. Pictures of Owen’s family, a gaming competition he had played in, his graduation…they were all painfully normal. So normal they didn’t look real to Jamie.

“Did you look at the financial statements for Donahue and Dalton? I thought we could cross-reference them with their phone records and see if there was any overlap.”

Jamie blinked and looked back at the laptop sitting in front of him. “Uh…”

Owen spun around in his chair and leveled Jamie with a look. “…the financials? I sent them to you ten minutes ago.”

“Right…” Jamie tapped the mouse pad and the screensaver blinked away. He stared at the document. “There’s a lot of numbers.”

Owen sighed. It sounded a lot like Elijah. “Shocking, I know. Financial reports often have numbers.”

Jamie scrolled through the pages, squinting. “She spent a lot of money at a sushi place.”