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      She left the station, confident that Mike Nell was not their man. Somewhere beyond that, though, she started to think of her father.

      She supposed it was bound to happen. There were a few similarities between his case and the current case she was on. Someone had come into the couples’ homes with no signs of forced entry, insinuating that the couples knew the killer and let him in willingly. She caught flashes of her father, sprawled bloody on the bed, as she recalled the images she’d seen of the Kurtzes and Sterlings in the case files.

      Thinking of a deceased parent made her feel more strongly for Harrison’s situation. She got to the motel as quickly as she could, yet when she knocked on his door, he did not answer. Mackenzie walked to the front desk and found a bored-looking receptionist thumbing through a Star magazine.

      “Excuse me, but did my partner leave?”

      “Yes, he left about five minutes ago. I called him a cab to take him to the airport.”

      “Thank you,” Mackenzie said, deflated.

      She left the front office feeling strangely alienated. Sure, she’d been on a few cases alone before, especially when working as a detective in Nebraska. But being in a strange city without a partner made her feel particularly alone. It made her feel slightly uneasy but there was no use in trying to ignore it.

      With that sense of displacement growing by the second, Mackenzie figured she’d put a stop to it the only way she knew how: by drowning herself in work. She got back into her car and went directly back to the station, thinking that while pursuing the case alone might be a bit depressing, it could also be just the motivation she needed to find the killer before the day came to a close.

      CHAPTER EIGHT

      Her motivation to bring the killer in on her own was quickly muted by a lack of answers and several hours that felt absolutely wasted back at the station. She sat in a small spare office provided by Rodriguez as the few scant updates came in. The first update was that after less than three hours, every single one of Mike Nell’s accomplices had panned out. There was now evidence from multiple sources that Nell had been nowhere near the Kurtz townhouse on the night of the murders.

      However, those same three hours also had Miami PD locate two pounds of heroin hiding in a small secret compartment of his truck. A few calls also proved that he had meetings to sell it, one of which was to a customer who was only fifteen years of age.

      The second update was a bit more useful but really provided very little to go on. Two of the initialed entries within the Sterlings’ checkbook that Mackenzie had not recognized were accounted for. One was a local animal shelter, to which they had made contributions twice a year. Another had been a small grassroots political campaign, and the other was still a mystery.

      With the other two eliminated, Mackenzie was able to focus on the remaining one. The initials in question were DCM. Joey Nestler was the officer who brought her the results of the first two, and before he could leave her tiny working space, Mackenzie stopped him.

      “Officer Nestler, do you have any idea what these initials might mean? Are there any businesses, organizations, or even individuals in the city that these might apply to?”

      “I’ve been wondering that myself ever since we got the results,” he said. “But I’m coming up with nothing. We’ve got some guys working on it, though. We’re also looking over the Kurtzes’ financial records to see if there’s any sort of connection.”

      “Great work,” she said.

      Nestler left her alone after that. She then turned her attention back to the crime scene photos. It was weird, but the vast amount of blood in both photos was not what unsettled her the most. There was something even more gruesome about the way the bodies had been arranged. As far as she was concerned, there was no question that the bodies had been moved and staged to be lying on their backs. With the evidence of a struggle of some sort having occurred at the Sterling residence, it was all but a given that the scenes had been purposefully set up.

      But why?

      She kept looking at the posturing of the hands. What’s he trying to tell us? That the couples are linked somehow? Is he highlighting the couples’ need for one another?

      She was fairly certain that there was some sort of symbolism in the posing of the hands in both photos: in the Kurtz photo, Julie’s hand was touching her husband’s thigh, almost draped lovingly over it; in the Sterling photo, it was Gerald Sterling’s hand draped over his wife’s thigh.