“What do we need to talk about?” she asked, immediately going back to what she was doing.
I heaved in a deep breath and let my words rush out all at once. “We need to talk about this morning.”
“What about it?” she asked absently.
“Shelly, would you please close your computer and look at me?”
“Not right now, Will,” she said. “I’m busy.”
“It’s important.” I crossed my arms and tried to glare at her.
She pointed to her computer screen. “So is this.”
“What are you working on?” I walked closer so I could look over her shoulder. She had police reports spread out across her desk. I looked at a few of the names. “You’re still working on the vigilante justice killer?”
She glanced up at me. “Well, that’s what you told me to work on.” She went just as quickly back to what she was doing.
“How’s it going?”
“Oh, I’m done. I was just compiling all the data so I could show you.”
I perched on the edge of her desk. “You’re done? What does that mean?”
“It means I know who it is.” She typed furiously, and then hit a button that made the printer go crazy. She motioned for me to pass the papers from the printer to her with an impatient fling of her hand. I grinned and did it.
“So who is it?” In my head, I knew there was no way that Shelly had any idea who the vigilante killer was. It was too abstract. We didn’t have enough information.
She made a stack of three pages with women’s pictures. The one on the top of the stack was Marley.
I stared at it. “You’re grasping at straws. What does Marley have to do with this?”
“Marley doesn’t have anything to do with it. I’m simply decoding facts. It’s all here in the numbers.”
I scrubbed a hand down my face. “You seriously think Marley had something to do with this?”
“I just said she doesn’t.” She waved a hand breezily in the air. “I know Marley didn’t have anything to do with it.” She fanned out the three pictures. “And it’s not Megan.” She pulled the third from the stack. “This is Riley. Riley James.”
“Holy fuck,” I breathed.
“Megan and Marley are not the only personalities. There’s a third one.” She shrugged. “There could be more. But I know there are three. Number three is named Riley James.” She looked at me and grinned. “Guess where she works.”
“Where?” I stared at the three photos. They looked so similar. Someone who had never met the multiple personalities would never understand the differences between them. To a casual observer they looked like the same woman, but to me they looked like two women I’d met before and one complete stranger.
“Riley James works as a data entry clerk at the police station.”
“And how did you figure this out?” I pulled a chair close to her as she turned to face me.
“I took all the information from every single police report for every victim, from their earliest crime to their latest. I entered all the information, like witnesses, officers, prosecutors, judges, even going all the way down to the transcriptionists. Then I cross-referenced all the information to look for common denominators. The only one I found was ‘RJ’ who scribbled their initials on the filed documents. So I started looking to see who ‘RJ’ was, and lo and behold, there she was, in living color, sitting behind a screen at the police station.”
She shoved a bunch of documents at me and showed me the spreadsheet she’d used to cross-reference the information.
Finally, when she’d convinced me, I sat back and let out a huge breath. “I can’t believe you figured this out.”
She pretended to be offended. “Ye of little faith.” She bumped the tip of my nose with her index finger.
“This is good work, Shelly.” I was seriously impressed.
“The lingering and most obvious question is why she did this.”