“A pattern,” Tagen said, drawing a deep, clarifying breath. “I knew that you would. What is it?”

“Don’t get excited,” she warned him. “It’s not a real clear circle.”

Tagen blinked. He turned his head, frowning at the corner of the room as he conjured a memory of the map before him. Surely, he would have seen something as obvious as a circle.

“That’s not all. Or, actually, there’s more, but some or all of it could be crap.”

He doubted that.

“Do you want to come see?” she asked hesitantly.

“Yes.” Tagen left the rest of his clothing where they lay on the floor and went half-clad out into the hall, preceding his human and moving with great purpose.

“It’s probably nothing,” she said again, her head bent and cheeks pink.

“So I hear.”

“The stairs need vacuuming,” she muttered.

He turned around mid-step, one claw raised to the level of her eyes. “If you so much as touch that appliance—”

“Here, look.” Daria ducked under his arm and crossed into the sitting room, indicating the map spread out on the floor. There were more marks on it, black ones to indicate the deaths at the movie theatre and, presumably, this new killing site at the motel she spoke of. But there was also a rash of small, red circles, some of then enclosing black marks, others merely nearby.

Tagen stood beside her, looking down at the map with his hands clasped behind his back in officer’s stance. “What am I looking for?”

“It starts here, on Highway 20, when he’s on foot. These are the first murders, we agree on that, right?”

“Yes.”

“East, east, east…and then he gets his car and he goes all the way out here. Now, we can kind of consider these his feelers. He never goes out that far after this, and he’ll never kill two times in a row while traveling in the same direction again. Okay?”

Tagen shrugged and nodded, his brows still drawn together in confusion.

Daria looked up at him, bit at her lip in that endearing expression of nervousness, and then hunkered down and put her finger on the map. “He went out on I-84 and he came back the same way, I think. Then he turned up I-15, going north. Here’s the tattoo parlor, a day or two after the motel guy in Idaho. And here’s Blue Ridge, off I-5, way down by Sacramento. Now…” Daria’s teeth found her lip again. Gods, that was distracting. “The only way your guy can get from I-15 northbound to Blue Ridge, is if he stopped and took Highway 12 west back to I-84, and then to Portland first and hop on I-5. See?”

“If you say it’s so,” he said, believing himself to be a very patient man.

Daria pointed at a red circle aside of what, presumably, was Highway 12. “This is an abandoned car,” she said. “It was registered to one of these guys—” She pointed at the second of E’Var’s killings. “—and the day after it was ticketed, a missing persons report came in from the family of a young man who was supposed to be coming to Portland from Missoula, which meant he probably took Highway 12. They haven’t found him yet, but his car turned up over here—” She indicated another red circle, low on the map. “Right about the same time another family filed another missing person report. Now do you see it?”

“I…see it lies east of Blue Ridge,” Tagen said slowly. He dropped to one knee beside her and in a doubtful voice, added, “Is this the circle of which you speak?”

“Don’t look for a circle-shape,” she told him. “Look at the roads.”

She took his hand, placed his finger on the first black mark and drew it east on the thick line used to designate a roadway. East and north and west and south and east upon another road and then…

“What is this?” he asked, moving his finger from the eastward highway onto a north-running road to a red circle.

“That’s Sugarush, Nevada,” she told him. Every muscle of her was tense, betraying a great uncertainty. “Where thirteen kids got horribly killed in the woods. I didn’t think to look into that too closely when it happened because the cops have the girl who says she did it already in custody, but you get to Sugarush by going south on I-5 from Blue Ridge and east on I-80, and then take a north on Highway 95, see? And if you keep going north on 95, you’ll hit Highway 20, which will take you—”

“West,” Tagen said.

“To Hillmark,” Daria finished.

Tagen leaned back, his claws flexing on his bent knee, and stared grimly at the map. “What exactly happened in this place, Sugarush?” he asked.

“A lot of massive head trauma, I found out that much. One survivor, a girl, high as a flippin’ kite. She confessed, Tagen. At the time, she claimed she got high and imagined ‘that guy from the bible’ came and must have told her to kill everyone.”

“Bible?”

“A book most of us humans have read,” she said, shaking her head to show that wasn’t the point. “Until now, I didn’t have a reason to find out any more, but the murders she’s taking credit for fit your guy’s M.O. too damn well. I poked around a little, and I found a sound bite where she finally says just which guy from the bible she thinks she met.”

“And—?”

“And it’s a guy named Cain.” She looked up into his thunderstruck face. “Does this prisoner of yours, Kanetus E’Var, ever shorten his name?”

“He may,” Tagen said numbly. He stared down at the map. “And from Sugarush to Hillmark.”

“From Hillmark south about an hour on Highway 395 to another motel where three guys were killed the same night as the movie theater massacre. From there, south just to Route 31 eastbound, and straight out to Pinesborough. You see, it’s not a round sort of circle, but it’s always like that. He doesn’t appear to be traveling every single day, but he turns when he kills and he turns in the same exact pattern along the big roads. East, north, west, south. Which means,” she said, leaning back to look at him, “that he probably took 97 north after he was done at Pinesborough. And…and I’ll tell you something else, if you want to hear it.”

“Speak,” he said. His voice was hoarse enough that he did not recognize it for his own.

Daria glanced at the timepiece on her wrist. “The news report specified it was the graveyard shift guy who called the cops. Graveyard starts at two. Now…going back here to Hillmark and the motel he hit the same night…”

“Yes?”

“I don’t think he set out to kill people at that motel. I think he stopped there to sleep.”

“Surely not!”

“He did his thing at the theatre, and then he drove about an hour and stopped at the motel. He killed those men, and then he drove another hour and stopped again. This time, he did sleep. In a motel, and I’ll tell you why I think so.”

“He would never take such a risk!”

“Assuming E’Var’s driver isn’t speeding—which I’m guessing she isn’t, seeing as she has an alien in the car—and assuming an average speed of sixty miles per hour, plus an hour for rest stops and fill-ups, you can go from Pinesborough on Highway 97 north to where it turns into I-82 north and from there to the I-90 intersection in ten hours. At the I-82 and I-90 intersection, you will find many cheap hotels with check-out times posted at eleven or noon. Now, if E’Var is camping in the woods somewhere and not sleeping in a motel, he would already be on the road before then because he’d want to start moving while it was still cool and not sit around waiting for it to get that hot.”

“That…makes sense,” he admitted.

“The distance varies a lot,” Daria continued, “but for the most part, I can see an eight or nine hour drive between each of these murders. Hillmark is only eight hours from Sugarush, but it’s ten hours if you start counting down by the I-80 intersection instead of by the murders. It’s nine and a half hours from Sugarush to the Highway 20 intersection, where there happens to be a cute little town with a lot of summer resorts…hotels. Eight hours from that place back to Blue Ridge. Eleven hours from Blue Ridge to Portland, but seeing as that was I-5, I’m guessing that was more than one day’s drive anyway. The reason why this is important is because eight or nine hours of driving will take you quite handily from check-out time at most hotels to the time of day when it starts to cool off outside enough that you don’t go into Heat anymore, Tagen.”