Survival Clause: A Savannah Martin Novel (Savannah Martin Mysteries Book 20), стр. 28

“Death and incarceration,” I said, since I’ve watched my share of Dateline and 48 Hours.

Grimaldi nodded. “I’ll get the records, and we’ll see whether there’s any overlap between Frankie’s periods of freedom and the murders. That would make it simple.”

It would. “Are you certain the Roman numeral I on Laura Lee’s arm was actually a Roman numeral I and not just a scratch? Because if it is Frankie, and he thought it was a numeral I, he could have started marking his own victims from that.”

“If he didn’t study Latin,” Grimaldi said, “he’d be more likely to go with the usual tally method, most likely. They’re not Serif letters. They’re Sans Serif.”

I blinked at her, and she added, “The I doesn’t have the little line at the top and the bottom. It’s just a single stroke with the knife. Like a tally.”

“Oh.” It had been a while since I’d worked on my magnum opus, Bedded by the Bedouin, but I knew what she was talking about. “Arial instead of Times New Roman.”

“Yes,” Grimaldi said. “I’ll check the crime scene photos from back then, and see if the line on Laura Lee’s arm looked like it might have been an accidental slash. Maybe he uses a knife to threaten them. Maybe she resisted and it’s a defensive wound.”

“It’s worth checking out. And if it looks like it might be, then Frankie might be a viable suspect.” If he’d had time between his various prison sentences to kill seventeen other women. And his prison record, once Grimaldi pulled it, would tell us that.

“Where to now?” I added.

“I figured we’d hit the high school before they close for the day, see if we can get contact information, or any other information, for Mr. Hanson or Olson, or Ms. Stevens. Mr. Wilkins is dead, so it can’t be him.”

No. Not if one person had committed all the murders. If one person had started and another person had picked up where that person left off, then it was possible that Wilkins was involved.

“An apprentice situation?” Grimaldi tilted her head in thought. “That’s a possibility. Serial killers do sometimes have them.”

“And copycats,” I said. Again, because I’ve watched Dateline and 48 Hours.

She nodded. “The numerals are information we haven’t released. It’s known that the bodies are marked, and that’s how we know they’re part of the same series, but the specific marking is a closely guarded secret. We need that kind of information for when we catch the killer.”

“I guess maybe it would have been better not to ask Millie Ruth about the Latin. So as not to give her any ideas.”

“I’m not worried about Millie Ruth,” Grimaldi said and steered the SUV back toward Columbia High.

Walking up the steps to the front doors of the school was like stepping back in time. “I don’t think I’ve been back here since I graduated. The reunion last year was somewhere else.”

And the less said about that, the better. It had been a bloody mess, and I mean that literally.

Grimaldi nodded. “I haven’t been back to mine since I graduated, either. For a reunion or anything else.”

She was a few years older than me, I knew. “How long since you finished high school?”

She shot me a look. “Fifteen years.”

She was a year older than Rafe, then. Two older than Dix. Not that that mattered. If the two of them didn’t care, why should I?

And since their relationship, whatever it was, was none of my business either, I didn’t say anything about it. Instead I looked around at the long hallway that ran through the middle of the building. “It smells just like I remember.” Of pencils and cafeteria food and sweaty gym socks and teenage angst.

Grimaldi smirked. “You couldn’t pay me to go back to high school.”

Me, either. Although it had had its moments. I dredged up the memory of a teenage Rafe, in a basketball jersey and with his hair in cornrows, swaggering down the hallway while everyone—me included—gave him a wide berth.

He’d told me once he’d liked me back then, but beyond a flirtatious wink and a cheeky “Looking good, sugar!”—to which I had responded with an upturned nose—he hadn’t done anything about it. I was, as he’d said, jail bait, and I came with an older brother and that older brother’s best friend, who wouldn’t have thought twice about ganging up on him.

With a sigh, I popped the memory bubble and followed Grimaldi through the door into the main office, and from there, into the lair of the principal, Mrs. Halliburton.

She’d been around when I was here, too, but as assistant principal then, if memory served. She looked about the same: maybe a little grayer in the hair and a little bigger around the middle, but otherwise the same. “Yes?” she said briskly, eying Grimaldi’s badge, “what can I do for the Columbia PD?”

Grimaldi explained that she was gathering information on a local cold case that had come across her desk recently. “The murder of Laura Lee Matlock. I understand she went to school here?”

“Yes,” Mrs. Halliburton said, “but she graduated at least a decade before she died. She was in her thirties then.”

Grimaldi nodded pleasantly. “I’m aware. We’re just checking on a couple of loose threads. I don’t suppose I could have access to the yearbooks for the years she attended school here? It would only take a few minutes.”

Mrs. Halliburton sighed, like it was putting her out considerably, but she got up from her desk and went to the door and told the dragon at the front desk to pull the yearbooks. The receptionist got to work, and Grimaldi slid out the door with a glance at me. I took it to mean that it was my task to keep Mrs. Halliburton busy for the couple of minutes this was going to take.

I gave her a winning smile. “I don’t know whether you remember me, but I used to attend school here.