Girl, 11 Amy Clarke (e reader comics .TXT) 📖

him, hoping her smile disguised the guilt swelling inside her. There would be time to tell him everything later, after Natalie was safely home. She watched as he walked back up the stairs and disappeared down the hall.

Armed with a fresh pot of coffee and two slices of peanut butter toast, Elle settled in her studio. She sent a text to Sam, letting him know what Duane had told her about Luisa. He might not be her biggest fan right now, but the detective still deserved to know when she had found a lead on his case.

Then she turned on her computer. Dr. Douglas Stevens had been dating Luisa Toca. Luisa Toca had been missing since shortly before her ex-husband was murdered. He’d been killed within an hour of telling Elle that he knew who TCK was. Even though she wasn’t a cop, Elle knew what it took to put together a case for murder against a person. At best, this made Stevens a person of interest.

Elle had already proved to Ayaan that she couldn’t be trusted. She had suggested theory after theory and been wrong every time. If she was going to present Stevens as a viable suspect, she needed an airtight case—not a series of uncanny connections. Still, something about the visit to his house that morning nagged at her—the fear in his girlfriend’s eyes, the familiar body language of a battered woman. Elle had gotten an ominous feeling the first time she’d been to his house too.

But intuition wasn’t evidence.

It took a few searches to find an article about Dr. Douglas Stevens that included a short biography. He grew up in southeastern Minnesota, graduated top of his class from Harvard in 1992 with a joint concentration in math and physics. He then pursued a doctorate in applied mathematics, first at Yale and then finishing at Mitchell University in Minneapolis.

It was a strange move, going to two of the best universities in the country and then coming back to his home state to finish his degree at a midlevel university. She could only think of two reasons someone might do that: a family issue or a romance. Maybe one of his parents died or fell ill and he needed to care for them. Maybe he rekindled a relationship with his childhood sweetheart, giving up the Ivy Leagues to be with her. There were infinite possibilities, but whatever brought him back here, he had stayed.

Douglas Stevens did not fit the profile of a copycat. He was too old, too intelligent, too mature to be consumed with the desire for another man’s fame. That left only one option.

The biography included a photo from a few years ago, and she stared at it for a while. She wanted so badly to remember his face, to be hit with the realization of him. But there was nothing; a chalky blur where her memory of him should be. Once again, she pulled up the sketch Danika had helped develop and held it next to his face on her screen. She squinted at it, tilted her head to the side. It could work. He wasn’t completely dissimilar to the sketch, although she would never have picked him out of a lineup based on it. But Danika was just a little girl. Elle pictured the first grader—baby hairs laid against hazelnut brown skin, tight pigtails held in place by blue and purple baubles. She had sat next to her mother, describing the man to the sketch artist with a quiet, trembling voice. How accurate could she have really been?

Stevens didn’t have social media accounts, but he did have a full profile on the university’s website. It was pretty dry, full of abstracts from papers he’d written or cowritten, with equations and language that went over her head. But it also provided a more detailed overview of his résumé. When she got to the dates of his PhD, she paused: 1995–99.

If his PhD started in August 1995, he had moved back to Minnesota six months before the first Countdown Killer victim was killed.

The air in the room felt thin.

Swiveling in her desk chair, Elle looked at the Wall of Grief, at the victims carefully pasted in two rows of five.

Kerry Presley. Beverly Anderson. Jillian Thompson. They were all college students.

Taking shallow breaths through her nose, Elle looked at the notes she had under each victim. Kerry and Beverly were University of Minnesota students, Jillian from Bethel. Despite Minneapolis’s wealth of colleges and universities, the academic communities weren’t insular. There were plenty of reasons why students from different universities might meet one another: sporting events, musicals, debates, math clubs.

The first victim often told you the most about a serial killer. That was where he was learning, honing his craft, and most likely to make mistakes. It was also often the person who sent him over the edge, the one who triggered an instinct that had been dormant for years.

Elle opened her file on Kerry. He was studying physics, getting ready to graduate in just a few months. He had just broken up with his girlfriend the night he disappeared. Walked out of the restaurant where they were eating together, leaving her with the car to get home. He would have been upset, wandering. Cold. Police were confident he accepted a ride from someone. Men were more likely than women to get into a car with a stranger, but Kerry’s mom had seemed confident he wouldn’t have. He was cautious and small compared with the towering Nordic types that made up most of the men in the area.

Then Elle saw it, the simple dot point on the young man’s résumé she’d rushed past so many times before.

Audited thermodynamics class at Mitchell University—1996

She covered her mouth with both hands, staring at the screen. Stevens would have been in the graduate program at Mitchell the same semester Kerry audited a class in the physics department. Like most doctoral students, he was probably assisting professors as part of his funding