Threads of Suspicion(58)

“This doesn’t feel like Jenna to me. Tammy lives one street back from small retail shops—the town’s version of a downtown square—sharing a ground-floor apartment with a girlfriend. The college is nearby on a map, but it’s really not when you see the area in person. Two different worlds, Jenna’s and Tammy’s. Locals live on these blocks, mostly single-story smaller homes, the student apartment building itself another outlier. You’d want to go east to blend in with the college crowd living off campus.”

“Tammy had a different life than a college student,” David said. “But this area still might have suited our guy. No good lighting around the apartment building, mature trees, tall shrubs, just eight parking spaces squeezed in behind it. Someone waiting on Tammy to arrive home wouldn’t be noticed by people out walking their dogs. He could wait unseen, watch her arrive.”

“That itself is another shift. Jenna walked back to her apartment after the concert. Tammy would have driven. And Tammy doesn’t live alone, not a setup for someone lying in wait. Then there’s the time gap. Tammy went to a concert on Friday night, but she didn’t disappear until Sunday evening. Why stick around? The building location and roommate presence can be explained away, but the time delay? Why stay from Friday night to Sunday if he came to town just for the concert?”

“It doesn’t make sense that he would,” David agreed, “unless this is where he lives, and Chicago—Jenna—was his road trip. He wants to target Tammy but has to work around the shared apartment, and it’s a hard crime to pull off. Maybe Tammy was always the real target and he used Jenna a hundred miles away as a practice run. Jenna was easier—lived alone, walked home. Then he came back and went after Tammy, his intention all along.”

Evie considered it and felt the case slide onto a new footing. “That would solve a lot. Jenna is a clean crime, so even if hers was a practice run, it’s still probably not his first. Let’s look through crime reports from this area for his first crime. Maybe the move to a college girl developed as a way to blend in when out of town. Your suggestion about music as his world still seems the likely way we tap him. We begin with Tammy and Jenna both at Triple M concerts. He’s choosing them because they’re overlapping into his chosen world of music. Maybe he’s a music major—not at Jenna’s college, but here in Milwaukee.”

David started the vehicle and kicked on the heater, let the engine idle while they talked. “I like the feel of it being a college-age guy. If someone sees Tammy with him, they just think ‘new boyfriend,’ not registering that this is someone to be worried about.”

“I lean toward young too,” Evie replied. “The more I think about Jenna Greenhill and why she went missing . . . it’s not her—the fact she liked strawberries and read philosophy and studied biology and wanted her postgrad work to focus on the genome—none of that is relevant. He wanted the outline of her. He wanted the female college student who liked Triple M music, who had a nice smile. I believe he chose her that night at the concert. He followed her home. And he took her. Tammy sort of fits that profile, but her disappearance . . . it feels different.

“Why Tammy?” she asked, continuing her deliberations. “What did he see that made him choose her? You’re talking serious premeditation to practice with a crime just to commit another crime. We need to understand a whole lot better who Tammy is.” And even as Evie said it, she found herself looking over at David and shaking her head. “No. It’s not this. Feel how complex the motive just got when I made that proposition. A college guy wanting Tammy picks her off coming out of work one evening; he doesn’t do a trial-run homicide to practice how to grab her. If Tammy was his target, he would have gone for her first.”

“Yeah, it gets complex with our proposed age of the offender,” David said. “It’s linear—Jenna then Tammy then Virginia, with a common motive threading through. Maybe a growing addiction to abduction and killing?”

“Which brings us back to the core question. Was Tammy one of his, or is this simply a girl who took off once again, looking for a different life but ran into trouble? She liked music, had even sung a bit to earn pocket money, yet the rest doesn’t fit Jenna.”

“Consider this possibility,” David offered as he checked traffic and pulled out of the parking lot. “Assume Jenna is his. He’s attending a Triple M concert the next state over, away from home, enjoying his night as a young man surrounded by college girls, and something clicks. He wants an even more exciting end to this special night. So he lifts Jenna’s driver’s license, stakes out her place, abducts and murders her, hides her body, and he gets away with it. It goes so well for him that the parts of that night form one cohesive whole. A year later when he goes hunting again, wanting the same thrill, he starts with the same band Triple M, same choice of a girl attending the concert, so he can experience it all again.”