[MD1, Miami Field Office, 4:58PM]

>"But if an egg split with no sperm involved, it could
>have the correct number of chromosomes?" September
>asked.
>
>"I suppose, but it's the joining of egg and sperm that
>causes those haploid cells to begin splitting in the first
>place. Either correctly or incorrectly."
>
>"Well it's still something to look into."

Kate leaned against a desk and shook her head, feeling uncharacteristically that all of this talk was getting them exactly nowhere. Still, she knew it was necessary. And until they had some kind of solid lead to follow up, it was just about all they could do.

"There’s one more angle we haven’t talked about yet," Kate said, dreading the thought that it was going to prolong the discussion. But it needed to be dealt with. "It’s probably so obvious that no one thought to bring it up, but typically, a woman is only capable of conceiving a few days out of each month. Yet this guy appears to be batting a thousand, if you’ll pardon the metaphor."

"Even without the absence of sperm, the odds of all of these women getting pregnant would be astronomical," September said, nodding.

Paul groaned and shook his head. "I’ll grant you that it all sounds quite impossible and quite mysterious, but the way to figure it out is not to stand around twiddling our thumbs and worrying over questions we can’t answer. What we have to figure out is who, and then someone can find out how."

Newt nodded in agreement, then saw the way Kate was glaring at Paul and smiled apologetically.

"What we should be doing," Paul went on, "is going out and talking to the witnesses, in this case the women."

"I agree," Kate said. "But we can’t just ignore one side of the question. If we can figure out how, it might lead us to who." Try arguing against that, she thought. "In the morning, we’ll begin the process of interviewing the women. Right now, let’s try and see if we can identify some kind of pattern. Maybe that will give us an idea of what sort of questions we should be asking. Paul, you’re officially in charge, so go see if you can requisition us a chalkboard or something."

Kate ushered Paul out of the room quickly, before he had a change to argue or to recognize the absence of any form of logic in her request. As soon as he was out the door, the tension that had been hanging over the room dissipated.

Kate sighed before she could catch herself. "All right, then. Did you find anything, Flynn?"

Flynn nodded. "Social security records. Kaleb Lewandowski was employed until 1987. According to the records, he died in February of ’89, at the age of 31. I did a quick check of the local newspapers, in hopes that there might be something there, but the articles in their online morgue don’t go back that far."

"I’d like to know if there’s a death certificate on file. And anything else we can find out about the circumstances of his death."

"I can stop by the library first thing tomorrow," Flynn volunteered.

"I’ve been wondering how that reporter got a hold of the story in the first place, since it happened so long ago," Sharlyn said.

"Good question," Newt said. "Maybe we should ask him."

"I was thinking the same thing, but if we ask him straight out, he’s going to take the story and run with it. I don’t know about you, but I don’t particularly want to be featured in a tabloid article."

Sharlyn and Newt moved away from the others, consulting on how to go about approaching the reporter.

Kate turned to September. "Looks like that leaves you and me to start the interviews."

September nodded. "I think we should start with the earliest victim, and not just because I want to get a look at this mystery baby."

Kate laughed. "Oh, of course not."

*****

[Field office, 7:30PM]

Over a dinner of pizza, they had managed to assemble the information from the case files in a more usable form. The names of the fifteen victims had been listed in order, along with any salient information that was available. They had been looking for patterns, but so far, there had been very little to find.

"There’s no way to predict when he’s going to strike again," Flynn said, a little disappointed. "There have been three some months, and then there was nothing for nine weeks in July and August."

"That’s the height of summer," Newt said. "Could that be significant?"

"Could be," September said. "Or it could mean nothing."

"There were four weeks in March and April, too," Kate said. "There could have been victims that we don’t know about. Not all of these were reported right away."

"Or he could have been on vacation, active somewhere else," Sharlyn said.

Kate groaned good-naturedly. "As if we don’t have enough complications already," she said with a grin.

"Not much of a pattern among the women, either," September added. "We’ve got just about every ethnic group represented here, all walks of life. The only similarity is in their ages."

"21 to 28 is a pretty narrow range. Why?"

"Makes you wonder if there isn’t some other hidden connection, doesn’t it?"

Paul made a sound that was a cross between a cough and a laugh.

"You have an objection," Kate asked.

"He’s targeting women in their child-bearing years. No great mystery there," he said.

"The ‘child-bearing years’ begin in the teens and these days last well into the forties. No, there’s got to be some other reason, some connection among them," Kate said.

"Of course there is," Paul said, a bit sarcastically. "They all live in Miami. Maybe at one time or another, they all shopped in the same grocery store. You’re grasping at straws."

"Maybe."

*****

[MD2, hotel, 5:45AM]

Kate woke up with a start from a dream she couldn’t quite remember. It was still dark and the room was cold. The air conditioner, which had been hardly working the evening before, had kicked in sometime during the night. She pulled the bedspread from the foot of the bed, wrapped it around her and stumbled half awake to turn of the rush of cold air, then dropped into a chair.

She dozed off for a little while. The next thing she was aware of was the sun beginning to push through the heavy curtains and a dull ache in her neck from sleeping in a chair.

"You’re getting old, Kate," she muttered to herself. She thought about getting up, but decided that five more minutes of not moving couldn’t hurt.

She remembered that she had forgotten to call home last night. Conveniently forgotten, she thought. So far, she could still say that she hadn’t lied to the boys, but it was a very fine distinction. She should have told them about Paul, but she hadn’t known how. What was she supposed to say to them. "Hey kids, I’m going to be working with your father for a while, and no, I’m sorry, he hasn’t taken two seconds to ask about you."

He should have at least done that. Even if he didn’t care, it was just common courtesy. And from the selfish perspective, it would have made talking to the kids so much easier.

Of course, telling them over the phone would probably be worse than not telling them at all, so at this point it was best to just say nothing until she got back to Washington. That thought, although she knew that it was the ultimate cop out and a very weak excuse, made her feel a little bit better.

The other problem was Paul himself. She recalled how things had been in the office the previous night, and it made her feel a bit ashamed. Sneaking around, pushing him out of the room, and then discussing things behind his back - it all seemed a little bit childish. The reason for it was simple enough, but it was something she couldn’t tell anyone - with one possible exception, assuming that Josh was still speaking to her. Paul terrified her. It was an unfocused fear. She wasn’t afraid of some specific thing that he might do, but rather the dawning certainty that he was capable of anything.

She remembered a long ago conversation with her grandfather. It was a few months after Dillon was born. Jimmy had hired a baby-sitter and taken Kate to lunch. It had been about the first time she’d gotten out of the house on her own in two years, and at the time, that thought had been like a slap in the face. The lunch had been pleasant, the conversation light, and then as they were sipping coffee and relaxing, Jimmy had leaned back in his chair, fixed her with a very serious look, and asked her a question that would later come back to haunt her. "Does he hit you?" The answer, the honest answer, had been no. That came much later, and when it did happen, she had been strong enough not to give him a second chance. But why had he even thought to ask such a thing.

Of course, now the answer was obvious. During the years she had been with Paul, she had been a completely different person, a person who, in retrospect, she really didn’t like all that much. She often wondered how she could have fallen so completely under his control for so long. But she could answer that, too. Fear. He knew her fears and he knew how to play them. His method of control was so subtle, and he was such a master of it.

She had hoped that knowing that would help, but hadn’t she already started falling back into some of the same old patterns? Playing mind games to avoid confrontation, pretending to agree with him, and if she had an independent thought and wanted to act on it, sneaking around so he wouldn’t find out.

Well, no more, she promised herself. Yesterday she’d had an excuse - she hadn’t slept at all the night before, and she was too tired to stand up to him. But not today.


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