Chapter 13 Chapter Twelve

Before answering the phone, McCarthy waved Laura to see the two children out-the breakfast table is never a good place for a cop to take a work call, and he doesn't want the children listening to "Murder", Words like "murderer" while eating cereal with milk to start their day.After the children were out of the house, McCarthy pressed the "call" button on the phone. Unsurprisingly, the bad news. Jason spent the whole weekend and all Monday in the restaurant where Erin and Stella worked. He drank almost ten liters of coffee, so that even his pee smelled of coffee. Backed up by him, he talked to everyone he could at the restaurant about the case, but got nowhere.Everyone categorically denies any involvement, and most of them have ample alibi—no checking, you can tell they're not lying.And worst of all, the gangsters who haunted the victim—the number one suspect Jason could think of—were having a good time in New York, four hundred miles away, when the crime happened.The only clue—if it could be called that at all—was when a high-school teacher who used to come to breakfast told him that "Saffirino" was not an Italian surname but a Greek one.The case was finally getting a little Greek again, but not in the way McCarthy had imagined.

Oh shit! McCarthy told Jason in frustration that the cell phone number was also a dead end—Frank spent the weekend checking every call on Stella's cell phone bill one by one, and finally found the murderer's number—it was a prepaid phone number. The number is sold in every convenience store on the street, and it is thrown away after use.This means that this is not an impulsive crime, but premeditated - there is no romantic relationship at all, and from the first moment the murderer saw Stella, he never wanted to let her live. McCarthy hung up the phone and stuffed the last sandwich into his mouth—he resisted the urge to smash something, trying to get himself out of the bad mood, when the tuna sandwich turned into mush in repeated chewing, accompanied by With one last gulp of coffee down his esophagus, he felt better, at least regained his ability to think.The case fell into the worst situation again, and all the clues were cut off. The only thing he can do now is to wait.

It was Tuesday, four days before the murderer committed his second crime—and that bastard would never have imagined that there would be a policeman waiting for him by the creek on Friday evening, where he planned to commit another crime.