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of their clothing.
    Both were buried alive and died of suffocation. Jack didn't need more convincing.
    #
    By the time Jack investigated the death at Mammoth and drove as far as Reno, he decided to grab a motel and a few hours of sleep. Refreshed and feeling more himself, he rose early the next morning and ordered room service. While waiting for breakfast to arrive, he showered and shaved, then set up his laptop to work at the businessman's desk tucked into the corner of the motel room. By the time the food arrived, he'd reviewed the first murder case again.
    The perpetrator of the initial three cases had chosen victims whose families filed missing persons reports. A college student, an attorney, a waitress. But there was no such report on the unidentified woman buried on the Utah federal property.
    After the room service attendant set up breakfast and left, Jack sat at the desk, chewing on a bagel with cream cheese and sipping black coffee while he examined the second victim's folder. Case Number SX-29201. Henry Walker, male, age twenty-nine, death by exsanguination, January 23, the year following the first murder.
    The body was discovered hanging on a crude cross, made of intersecting pairs of two by fours. Walker had been drugged and strapped to the beams with bailing wire, and he was very much alive when the first nail pierced his wrist. Autopsy showed that a minute nick in the femoral artery quickened the slow bleed from wrists and feet and hastened death. Walker's remains were found in an auto dismantling yard thirty-five miles southwest of Las Vegas.
    Jack shoved the breakfast plate away and added several comments into his laptop.
    The third victim was Angela Buckley, beaten to death with a hard, metal club, possibly a tire iron or pipe. Metal shavings were found in the wounds. Her head and torso were so badly damaged that she had to be identified through dental records. The body was discovered less than forty-eight hours after she was reported missing May 15, the same year as the Walker man. She was a thirty-one-year-old waitress from South Bend, Indiana.
    They'd believed she was the killer's final victim.
    Jack put the file aside and opened a fourth, slender envelope which contained copies of the Latin notes they'd received from the killer, notes the Gant woman could help with – the woman whose first name Olivia had to be a coincidence because even the Judge wasn't that manipulative.
    As the lead investigator, Jack hadn't believed the cases were connected until the notes arrived. The first one came after Henry Walker's death and was mailed from Plano, Texas. No useful prints on the letter or envelope, no clues of any kind. The note was word-processed on standard bond paper with an ink-jet printer.
    The Quantico profiling team speculated that the killer, impatient with the behavioral unit's slow investigation, was taunting them. Inside their ranks, they named the UNSUB the DLK for Dead Language Killer. The profilers pointed out the inherent dark humor in the old chant, "Latin is a dead language, dead as dead can be, it killed all the Romans and now it's killing me."
    Having never studied Latin, Jack figured the bastard was just showing off.
    He had no way of knowing which note referred to which death, but Jack decided to take another look at the victims' backgrounds. Both Walker and Buckley were squeaky clean in every way – finances, criminal background, relationships – but the Peterson girl had an astonishing sexual history. It was a slim lead, but Jack took it. They interviewed boyfriends, girlfriends, ex-boyfriends, ex-girlfriends. Anyone with whom Laura Jean had a relationship, sexual or platonic.
    They discovered that at least half a dozen young men and two young women admitted to some kind of sexual encounter with the victim. Each one, however, had a solid alibi for the time in question. Jack's slim lead ground to another halt.
    He mentally ran through the first three cases – Peterson, Walker, Buckley.