"This is soooo boring!" Joe fumed, turning away from the papers he'd collected to his older brother. Frank was hard at work on his laptop, but he glanced up long enough to grin at his younger brother.
"Sorry, buddy. We did promise Dad."
"Can't we just go interview someone and not tell him?"
"Let me think…no," Frank went back to his keyboard. Joe moaned impatiently.
"Frank this is killing me. I can't sit here and read all this junk." The younger Hardy leapt to his feet and paced back and forth impatiently. Frank sighed and checked his watch. "A half-hour more and then we'll quit, okay? We'll go for a run or something."
"No."
"No what?"
"I want to quit now."
Frank grinned again at his seventeen year old brother's two-year old behavior. "We'll go for a run and I'll buy you lunch."
"Oh come on, Frank, now. It's not good for you to sit in front of that computer all day."
Frank sighed, but as always maintained his patience "I'm downloading some files that FBI contact sent me, on criminal psychology. I don't want to sign off in the middle of a download."
"Frankiiiiiiiiiie…" Joe begged, laughing at his brother's disgust at his childhood nickname, "pleeeeease…"
Frank's eyes widened suddenly. "Shutup and look at his," he snapped, turning his laptop toward his whiny younger brother. Joe crossed the room and pulled up a chair. The screen was filled with solid, small print text only Frank could have the patience to pour through. Joe sighed just looking at it.
"Exactly what…"
"Here. 'Criminals are often obsessed wit order of some sort, even if it is an order that only makes sense to them.'"
"Big deal. You know that. Anyone who's watched Law and Order knows—"
"Let me finish. This 'Reaper' is a perfect example of this. He chose his victims primarily at random, but he chose the town they came from with a remarkably specific order."
"Does it say what?"
"No, but it's not hard to figure out."
"For you, you mean, Sherlock."
"Shutup, Watson." Frank pulled up the list of victims and their residences, then searched through an elaborately organized folder system and came up with a file labeled Victims + Spouses. "Okay. Each new victim came from the town of the previous victim's spouse, partner, fiancé, whatever. Romantic attachment."
"What if there wasn't one?"
"That was like immunity. When he checked them out there had to be. It was part of the way he killed." Frank minimized the one file and pulled up another. "Here's the creepy part. Look here."
Joe leaned over and squinted into the monitor to the entry at the bottom of the page:
BILL DAVIDS
Born: February 4, 1967
Died: April 3, 1998
Wife: Elise Davids
Hometown: Bayport
"Bayport as in…our Bayport?" Joe asked softly, looking up at Frank with nervous eyes. His older brother just nodded.
"It's like…fate, I guess. More than coincidence, that he'd end up in the same town as Dad."
"And us," Joe murmured, feeling a sudden chill as he remembered the eyes gazing at him from the folder.
"On that note," Frank said slowly, "think you can wait an extra half-hour?"
"On that note," Joe muttered, pushing his chair away and returning to his piles of papers, "I'll work round the clock."
