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They had already gone through everything he owned. It was only in the dirt on his shoes. And he could have been telling the truth, although it was unlikely. “You can’t hold me forever. And if that’s all you’ve got, your charges won’t stick. You know that as well as I do. You’ll have to do better than that. You’re full of shit and you know it. The arrest is no good.”
    “We’ll see. I wouldn’t count on that,” Jack said with a confidence he didn’t fully feel. They needed some hard evidence to use in the case. They’d had enough to arrest him, although not enough to convict him yet. Hopefully it would come, with a few more lucky breaks. They had good men on their team. Maybe another snitch would turn up, although Quentin didn’t look like a guy who talked. He was much, much smarter than that. And the forensic evidence they were waiting for would nail him.
    The questioning went on for several hours, about where he’d been, what he’d done, who he knew, who he met, the women he’d gone out with, the hotels where he’d stayed. It checked out that he’d been in the cities where the women were killed, but so far there was nothing conclusive to tie him to the other girls. They were hanging by a slim thread, but it was good enough for now, and they were counting on the forensic lab to give them more with DNA.
    “You’ve got to prove a hell of a lot more than that I ran in the same park.” But the blood and hair would do for now. Even Luke Quentin knew that.
    They had never mentioned his passion for snuff films during the entire interrogation. They didn’t want to tip their hands yet. They had offered to have his public defender with him that morning, but Quentin said he didn’t care. He was not afraid of cops, and he thought public defenders were jokes, they were always young and innocent, and most of the guys they defended were convicted anyway. The fact that they were guilty was irrelevant to him. And the PD he’d been given was no better. She’d been in the public defender’s office for a year. He didn’t care. He figured it would never get to trial, and for lack of evidence, they’d have to let him go. They couldn’t prove a goddamn thing, and blood on his shoes wouldn’t be enough.
    The blood from all four victims came from scratches they’d gotten on the ground when they’d been raped, or dragged away, one from a cut on a victim’s arm. The site of the bleeding hadn’t been the cause of death. They had been naked when he raped and killed them, and when they were found. He always took their clothes off and didn’t bother to dress them again once they were dead. The first two girls had been found in a shallow grave in the park, dug up by a dog. The other two had been dumped in the river, which was harder to pull off, but the killer had found a way, without being observed. The other bodies in the other states had been found disposed of in similarly casual ways, and some still hadn’t been found, but were almost surely dead. They had disappeared and never returned, often while jogging in the very early morning, or at night, in parks.
    The killer seemed to like a pastoral setting for his trysts. One girl in the Midwest had disappeared off a farm, she was just eighteen, and her parents said she had a bad habit of hitchhiking into town, but they knew everyone for miles around. This time, clearly, a stranger had picked her up. They waited for months, hoping for news of her, and that she had run off with some handsome young guy, she was a bit of a wild thing, but a beautiful girl. They never heard from her again, and her body was found in a field when a bulldozer was moving dirt months later. And she had died just like the others, raped and strangled.
    They interrogated him for three hours, and then sent him back to his cell. Quentin sauntered out of the room, without even a look back. He didn’t look in Alexa’s direction on the way out, and she was as tired as the police officers and