Redheads by Jonathan Moore

court. I wouldn’t ignore him either.”
    “Also,” Chris said, “it fits with the Vancouver case. At least a little.”
    He turned and looked at Mike. “Wasn’t there a police theory in Vancouver—the young girl on the boat—that the killer might’ve come there by swimming across the channel, since no one saw anybody going down the docks?”
    Mike nodded. “That’s right.”
    “You think Jimmy Hutchinson actually saw him?” Julissa said.
    “It fits. It’s a strange thing to see. We can’t directly connect one strange event with another on the same night, but it seems like too big a thing to ignore,” Chris said.
    “Maybe we can find other witnesses,” Julissa said.
    “I’ll try,” Westfield said. “There’s a fishing pier out at Seawolf Park. If he swam that way, maybe someone would’ve seen. If anyone was fishing that night. As for Hutchinson, I believed him when he told me. He probably had a thing for Allison, but he wasn’t a drunk and he wasn’t a nutcase. And he didn’t seem to think the story explained anything. He was just giving me what he had.”
    “But nobody can swim that fast,” Mike said.
    “Especially someone over fifty,” added Julissa.
    “Maybe he was wrong about the speed. It was dark, he saw a guy in the water moving fast. Maybe there’s a tidal current through there that helps with the speed,” Westfield said.
    “Or maybe your question about the electric scooter was right. That could give him an extra five or six miles an hour. If he held it under his chest, Hutchinson wouldn’t see it,” Mike said.
    Westfield shrugged.
    “Escaping by water would be a good route, if he came here on a ship and planned to leave on a ship,” Chris said. “Imagine it. He thinks the neighbors might’ve heard. The police might be on their way. He’s probably covered in blood. The water’s an easy way out.”
    “I can think of a lot of better things to do besides swim in the ocean at midnight while covered in blood,” Mike said.
    “I can think of a lot of better things to do besides everything this guy does,” Julissa said.
    They all looked at the white board, and after a while, Chris got up and wrote Swimmer in the column for suspicions.
    They took a break after that. While the others moved their bags to the rooms he’d reserved, Chris descended to the lobby, found the hotel’s business center, and printed the thirty-six files he and Mike had assembled. They didn’t have one yet for Allison. He made four copies of each and went back upstairs to the conference room.
    Mike had showered and changed clothes and was back at the conference table with his laptop. Julissa was out on the balcony with Westfield, but they came inside when they heard Chris.
    Mike cleared his throat and looked at them.
    “Before I came here, Chris asked me to take a look at the FBI’s Violent Criminal Apprehension Program, see if I could figure out why there isn’t an international manhunt on for this guy. Everyone familiar with VICAP?”
    Julissa shook her head and Mike explained the network.
    “Thing is,” Mike said, “VICAP should pick up the similarities in all these crimes. All these murders—at least the ones in the U.S. and Canada— should be in the system. I mean, they all fit the profile. Unsolved, extremely violent rapes and murders that are totally random. It’s exactly what VICAP was made to pick up. Chris and I wrote a simple search and filter program and found thirty-six of these just by going through Internet news stories. You gotta figure the FBI’s program is more sophisticated than ours. If it had these cases in the network, it would’ve linked them in about a second. So I borrowed a friend’s login and password and had a look at what VICAP is showing.”
    Chris felt his arms break out in goose bumps. He sensed what Mike was about to say, and what it meant. If they were chasing a rabid dog, it was either incredibly smart or incredibly well protected. Or both.
    “I found only one