He Kills Me, He Kills Me Not

the circle of people Carolyn associated with was thorough. In my opinion, there isn’t any evidence to suggest he targeted her from school and then followed her here.”
    “But there isn’t any evidence to suggest he targeted her here, either,” Logan said.
    Pierce frowned but didn’t respond.
    Riley was staring at the ground, apparently deep in thought.
    “No one has any fresh ideas? A new direction?” Logan asked.
    “What about the algorithm Amanda was putting together? Did anything come of that?” Pierce asked.
    “What algorithm?” Riley glanced back and forth between them.
    Logan flushed, realizing he’d never confided in Riley about the work Amanda was doing. He wasn’t sure why he’d never told him. Maybe he’d been subconsciously suspicious of Riley even before that day at the boxcar.
    “Amanda organized all the evidence into a new database and cross-referenced everything. She came up with a program to scan for similarities and patterns. That’s how Pierce’s men eliminated some of the potential suspects from the stacks of interviews. Amanda’s still fiddling around with her program, trying to come up with something better.”
    Riley nodded, suddenly looking distracted.
    “We should review all of the interviews again,” Pierce said. “Maybe there’s a nugget of information we missed. Or someone we should have interviewed that we didn’t. I can go back to the office and look through all of them again.”
    Logan shook his head. “There has to be something else to pinpoint how he chose Carolyn, or how he chose Dana and Amanda. That could be the key. I think we should look into Frank Branson.”
    Riley’s head shot up, a look of surprise on his face. “Dana Branson’s father?”
    “You do realize,” Pierce said, “that we ruled him out as a suspect? He discovered Dana’s body in the cabin and called 9-1-1, yes, but he had an ironclad alibi during Dana’s time of death.”
    “Yeah, so did a lot of murderers I’ve put away over the years,” Logan said. “Never completely trust an alibi, or a profile for that matter. We need to review his alibi again, see how ironclad it really is.”
    “Why do you want us to look at Branson?” Pierce asked.
    “As part of revisiting Dana Branson’s murder, Frank Branson was re-interviewed. I met him, briefly, and I didn’t get a good feeling about him.” Logan shrugged. “Probably nothing.”
    Pierce gave him a sharp look. “If it was nothing, you wouldn’t have brought it up. It certainly wouldn’t be the first time a father killed his daughter; happens a lot more than people realize.”
    Riley shook his head. “No, it wouldn’t be the first, but can I say, ick? His own daughter? She was raped.”
    “Dana was his stepdaughter, if that makes any difference,” Pierce clarified.
    “It doesn’t.” Riley shuddered in distaste.
    Logan flinched as his thoughts turned to Amanda. The police reports stated she wasn’t raped, at least not in the traditional sense of the word, probably because the killer preferred to rape his victims at the moment of death and Amanda had gotten away. But what had happened to her was just as brutal. “What about forensics from the Branson murder?” he asked Pierce. “Did your men find anything the state lab missed?”
    Pierce shook his head. “No trace from the perp, only the victims. And all of the blood collected at the scene was either Dana’s,” he looked at Logan, “or Amanda’s.”
    Logan winced then quickly schooled his features. Every mention of what Amanda had suffered was like a knife slicing into him. Judging from the expression on Pierce’s face, and their earlier confrontation in the cabin, he obviously wasn’t hiding his feelings very well.
    A flash of movement had Logan looking toward the front end of the park. Several men were milling around, talking in a small group and watching the three of them. “Looks like we’ve caught the attention of some of the neighbors. We’d better go introduce ourselves before they flood the station with suspicious-person calls.”
    “What do all of the victims he killed in the past four years have in common?” Logan asked as the three of them walked along one of the pine-needle-strewn paths. “Most were in different states so they couldn’t frequent the same businesses. Did they vacation at the same places?”
    “Not that I could find,” Pierce said. “About the only things linking the victims are their physical characteristics. They were in