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pulled into the department parking lot.
    “That’s what I’m talking about,” she said as they slammed doors and headed for the police station. “That’s exactly the kind of thing we don’t want leaked to the press.”
    Pausing in the middle of the sidewalk, Elise went through the photos on Jay Thomas’s digital camera. One boring picture after another. Once she was satisfied that he hadn’t taken any of the crime scene, she passed it back to him. “Next time I’ll break it.”
    He smiled at her, no annoyance or half-hidden anger in his eyes this time. “I think I’m in love.”
    David smirked. “Join the club.”

CHAPTER 5
    T he next few hours were spent at headquarters. While David and Elise sat at their computers accessing databases, their new friend, Jay Thomas Paul, waited in line for lunch.
    “Good idea to send Jay Thomas for food,” Elise said as she stared at her computer screen, her damp jacket tossed over her chair.
    “Genius to send him to Zunzi’s.”
    They both laughed, knowing the popular sandwich shop would have a line a block long and Jay Thomas would be out of their hair for a couple of hours.
    God, we’re the mean kids , David thought, not with pride.
    He finished composing a confidential e-mail to the handwriting analyst at the Georgia Bureau of Investigation, then attached a photo of the lettering he’d taken at the crime scene, plus an image from the first victim. Confident the script would be the same, he hit “Send.”
    “Defaeco,” he said. “Is that a place? A person?”
    Elise clicked some keys as she did a quick search. “In Latin it means ‘to cleanse or purify.’”
    “Hmm.” David leaned back in his chair. “How does that have anything to do with the word on the first body?” They’d speculated that the first word, virgo , had been a riff on the Zodiac Killer, but this new word made the Zodiac Killer nod seem less likely.
    Elise did another search. “ Virgo is Latin for ‘virgin.’ So the one thing they seem to have in common is Latin.”
    “The first victim, Layla Jean Devro, was a heroin addict and a prostitute,” David pointed out. “Definitely no virgin. Someone who lived a darker existence. Certainly no innocent.”
    “Right.”
    “So virgin . . . cleansing . . .”
    “Wish fulfillment?” Elise asked.
    “Maybe. Virgin being the opposite of what she was. Or, if you consider this glyph thing your buddy was talking about, then it could be the killer sees these murders as a rebirth.”
    “Not my buddy,” Elise said absentmindedly as she continued to stare at her computer screen. “I’m running the crime-scene photo through FACES to see if it can deliver a match.”
    Her landline phone rang. She glanced at the ID, then picked up. A brief conversation and she was done. “Avery. He’s e-mailing a fingerprint from the morgue.” Another monitor check. “Here it is.” More key clicking.
    David came to stand behind her, one hand on the back of her chair as he watched her transfer the JPG image to IAFIS, the fingerprint database.
    What David hadn’t shared with Elise out there in the park was that the Puget Sound murders had been the case that ruined his life. Not because the killer had gotten away, making David feel like a failure. Well, there was that. It had definitely knocked him down several pegs. But no, the Sound Killer had also ruined his marriage.
    He was never home. His wife had been left on her own with their son in Virginia while David was in Washington State working on the Puget Sound murders. And when he did make it home, he spent every waking second on the case.
    Beth began having an affair.
    They warned you about that stuff when you were training at Quantico. How you had to protect the personal side of your life; otherwise it would go all to hell. He hadn’t listened. He’d been cocky enough to think Beth would be there for him no matter what, because she’d been crazy about him.
    In the beginning she’d done the pursuing. That