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And just three days ago, the second victim, Leslie Fowler, another high school math teacher, was shot at close range coming out of the Alselm Cleaners on High Street, in Paulette, Virginia, just before closing at 9 p.m. Again, there were no witnesses, no evident motive as of yet for the husband, and the police were sucking him dry. Leslie Fowler had left no children, two dogs, and a seemingly distraught husband and family.

Savich sighed. When the story of the second shooting broke, everyone in the Washington, D.C., area was on edge, thanks to the media’s coverage. Nobody wanted another serial killer in the area, but this second murder didn’t look good.

Dane Carver had found no evidence that either woman had known the other. No tie at all between the two had yet been found. Both head shots, close range, with the same gun, a .38.

And as of today, the FBI was involved, the Criminal Apprehension Unit specifically, because there was a chance that a serial killer was on the loose, and the Oxford P.D. and the Paulette P.D. had failed to turn up anything that would bring the killers close to home. Bottom line, they knew they needed help and that meant they were ready to have the Feds in their faces rather than let more killings rebound on them.

One murder in Maryland, one murder in Virginia.

Would the next one be in D.C.?

If the shootings were random, Dane wrote, finding high school math teachers was easy for the killer—just a quick visit to a local library and a look through the high school yearbooks.

Savich stretched a moment, and upped his speed. He ran hard for ten minutes, then cooled down again. He’d already read everything in the report about the two women, but he read it all again. There was no evidence of much value yet, something the media didn’t know about, thank God. The department had started by setting up a hot line just this morning, and calls were flooding in. Many of them, naturally, had to be checked out, but so far there was nothing helpful. He kept reading. Both women were in their thirties, both married for over ten years to the same spouses, and both were childless—something a little odd and he made a mental note of that—did the killer not want to leave any motherless children? Both husbands had been closely scrutinized and appeared, so far, to be in the clear. Troy Ward, the first victim’s husband, was the announcer for the Baltimore Ravens, a placid overweight man who wore thick glasses and began sobbing the moment anyone said his dead wife’s name. He wasn’t dealing well with his loss.

Gifford Fowler was the owner of a successful Chevrolet car dealership in Paulette, right on Main Street. He was something of a womanizer, but he had no record of violence. He was tall, as gaunt as Troy Ward was heavy, beetle-browed, with a voice so low it was mesmerizing. Savich wondered how many Chevy pickups that deep voice had sold. Everything known about both husbands was carefully detailed, all the way down to where they had their dry cleaning done and what brand of toothpaste they used.

The two men didn’t know each other, and neither had ever met the other. They apparently had no friends in common.

In short, it appeared that a serial killer was at work and he had no particular math teacher in mind to target. Any math teacher would do.

As for the women, both appeared to be genuinely nice people, their friends devastated by their murders. Both were responsible adults, one active in her local church, the other in local politics and charities. They’d never met each other, as far as anyone knew. They were nearly perfect citizens.

What was wrong with this picture?

Was there anything he wasn’t seeing? Was this really a serial killer? Savich paused a moment in his reading.

Was it just some mutt who hated math teachers? Savich knew that the killer was a man, just knew it in his gut. But why math teachers? What could the motive possibly be? Rage over failing grades? Beatings or abuse by a math teacher? Or, maybe, a parent, friend, or lover he hated who was a math teacher? Or maybe it was a motive that no sane