FATAL FORTY-EIGHT: A Kate Huntington Mystery (The Kate Huntington Mysteries Book 7) by Kassandra Lamb

the photos, one at a time, for her to study them.
    Bile rose in her throat a couple times, but she managed to swallow it down. After she’d been through the photos twice, she asked, “Can you put two of them side by side on here?”
    “Sure.” He fiddled with the tablet for a moment and then turned it around for her to see.
    “Can we zoom in?”
    He punched a spot on the tablet.
    Suddenly she was looking at two bellies, one male, one female.
    “That’s the first and the last victims,” Tim said.
    She stared at the tablet for a full minute, looking back and forth between the two photos. She tore a piece of paper off her notepad and laid it on top of the tablet. But when she touched the tip of her pencil to it, the picture underneath changed. She’d accidentally told the tablet to zoom back out again.
    “Here, let me try.” Tim took the pencil from her and drew very light lines wherever the cuts appeared on the one victim’s stomach. He made dots for the cigarette burns.
    He moved the paper over a few inches and looked at it for a couple beats. Then he sat back in his chair.
    Kate turned the tablet around, the paper on top, and looked for herself. She let out a low whistle, a little surprised that she had been right. “He uses a template.”
    Tim grabbed the tablet back and punched the screen several times. “Here it is, the crime scene photos of the 2002 New Haven case.” He ran his finger over the tablet’s screen, searching. “Yeah, here we go. Close-ups of the wounds.”
    Kate handed him the piece of paper with the pencil markings.
    He laid it over the tablet and studied it for a moment.
    Looking up, he said, “Exact match!”

CHAPTER TEN
    2:00 p.m. Saturday
    Skip and Julie’s phone calls to apartment building managers had yielded five places on the second floor–the ones rented to the forty-something male roommates, to the company, and to three of the couples who fell into their age range.
    The middle-aged, single man’s apartment was on the third floor, but they’d checked him out first anyway. He was a bit heavier and taller than Charles had described, and mostly bald, with a fringe of salt and pepper hair. Since he could have been wearing a wig when Charles saw him, Julie Wallace ran a background check on the guy. He’d been a Maryland resident all his life and his only crime on record was speeding on I-83.
    The roommates turned out to be flamboyantly gay and neither was much of a match for Charles’s description.
    Out on the sidewalk, Julie let out a sigh. “What next? The couples or the company?”
    “Not sure,” Skip said. “Lemme think for a minute.” They walked toward his truck.
    He had been the one who’d talked to the manager of the apartment rented by the company. The guy had told him in no uncertain terms that they’d have to get a search warrant before he’d let them in. He had, however, given him the name and phone number of the real estate agent who had rented the place for the firm. She had said she’d been contacted first by phone and then had received a confirmation letter on the company’s letterhead. Her contact person had told her the firm did a lot of business in the Baltimore area, and it was cheaper to rent an apartment for their sales reps to use rather than putting them up in hotels all the time. She held the key at her office and the sales people were supposed to come see her when they got to town. So far, nobody had done so. When Skip had asked if they could borrow the key, the woman had paused, then said no.
    Skip pulled his truck key out of his pocket and held it out. “You drive, Julie. I’m gonna call that real estate agent back.”
    She raised her eyebrows in the air at the use of her first name. “And where exactly should I drive to?”
    “One of the couples lives near the place rented by the company. Head there for now.”
    “Which is it?” She held her phone up to show him the list of addresses.
    He pointed to one. “There.”
    Once in the truck,