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Lauren was saying, her words ringing in his ears like the distant tolling of church bells. “Of course. It all makes sense now. How long ago?”
    Caught in a memory of the funeral, he didn’t answer until she repeated the two words, “How long?”
    The death knell in his head fell silent long enough for her question to sink in. A question, as simple as it was impatient, without a trace of the pitying condolences he was so damned sick of hearing.
    “Two years,” he answered. “Two years ago today.”
    “The other killings,” she continued, sounding as detached and clinical as a federal agent investigating strangers’ deaths. “Did at least one of them happen on the first anniversary?”
    Recognizing the coping mechanism for what it was, he shook his head and clamped down on his own emotions, too. “No. And there’s no correlation among any of the other dates, except that the suicides I’m tracking have all been in Louisiana, Texas, Arkansas, and Oklahoma. One possible outlier in Albuquerque, but that’s the farthest I’ve found.”
    “So you’re thinking that this troll—this killer’s—located in Texas and choosing victims within driving range?”
    He would almost swear he heard her plotting points and drawing lines between them on a mental map, the way one of the bureau’s data geeks would. If he hadn’t seen the other Lauren, the one who’d pleaded for him to tell her the news of Rachel’s death was a mistake, the one who doted on a throwaway dog, he might have believed she was some sort of robot.
    “It’s a pretty broad range, considering the size of Texas, but yeah,” he said, gratified by how quickly she had grasped an argument that no one in the bureau had been willing to consider. Or maybe they had looked into his theory, just as Special Agent in Charge Fremont Daniels had sworn, leaving Brent out of the loop because of his relationship with an alleged victim. In the end, though, they’d refused to see it, figuring the connections he saw so clearly as figments of a guilt-stricken mind. A mind broken on the rocks of his wife’s suicide.
    “Why’d she kill herself?” Lauren asked him bluntly.
    “She didn’t. Kill herself. She was fucking driven to it, same as Rachel,” he barked, the frustration of not being heard for two long years beating at his temples, “the same as if he’d slashed her wrists himself. So don’t ask that again.”
    She flinched, grabbing the door handle beside her as if she might bail out at any moment. As if she thought he would try to hit or even shoot her.
    Her reaction stopped the red wash of his anger cold, filling him with shame. Was he really so far gone he’d take out all his fury on a frightened woman? A woman grappling with what was undoubtedly the worst shock, the deepest grief she’d ever known?
    Yet she was the one who burst out, “I’m sorry. I’m not always so good at—Rachel always says I cut straight through the niceties, get to the point without all the useless verbal foreplay.”
    He’d be willing to bet her bluntness didn’t get her a lot of second dates, or maybe even first ones, in spite of her trim body and unusual blue-green eyes. But he wasn’t here to make friends with her, much less teach her social skills. In the past two years, he’d been having trouble enough managing his own. Or so the exodus of his friends had informed him. Not even his own sister called him anymore.
    Still, what was left of his conscience nudged him, and common sense said that acting like a crazy man was no way to gain her cooperation.
    “I’m the one who should be sorry. I didn’t mean to scare you.” He casually hit the child safety lock button on his own door to be sure she didn’t hurt herself with an unscheduled exit. “But Carrie didn’t kill herself. She was forced into it, coerced.”
    “Rachel always said I cut straight through , not says.” Lauren corrected herself with a frown, as if she hadn’t heard his half-assed apology. “I keep