Colleen took a couple of deep breaths. It was all going to be all right.

Jackson was wrapping up her phone call now. She flipped the cell shut, stowed it in her pocket, and crossed the room to Colleen. She didn’t smile, exactly, but her face was welcoming.

“Hell of a thing,” she said, sticking out her hand to shake. Colleen took it, grateful for the warmth.

“Good to see you again, Lieutenant.”

“Take off your coat, have a seat. Detective Ross took care of you?”

“Yes, thanks. He’s just put Flynn down for me. I’m sure he’ll be back in a moment.”

Jackson cocked her head and looked at her, but said nothing. Damn. She must have sounded a bit possessive of Detective Ross. Strange, she was feeling possessive of the man. She’d only met him five minutes before for God’s sake. Hormones. Her hormones must be in gear. It was probably getting close to her time; she always got a little horny when nature was about to make a visit.

God, Colleen, get your head in the game. She was getting punchy. No sleep plus a bucketful of stress and a healthy dose of fear did that to a girl. She tried to redeem herself by resorting to her most professional tone.

“So, Lieutenant, what do you have?”

Jackson turned and went to the table, sitting across from Colleen. “Trouble. A boatload of it. I need you to tell me everything you know about the murders.”

“Where should I start?”

“How about telling us where you got the information about the killings in San Francisco in the first place?”

Colleen shook her head. “I can’t do that. I have sources. If I burn them, they’ll never speak to me again. I can’t give you their information. I’m sorry.”

Jackson stared at her, then sighed. “Okay, we’ll come back to that. Why don’t you just start at the beginning and share what you’re comfortable with?”

Colleen could tell the woman was trying hard not to be adversarial, but there was the tiniest bit of anger in the soft words. She didn’t blame her—of course Jackson would want the names of the sources. But Colleen had no intention of burning anyone if she could avoid it.

“I knew there was something up when I got a couple of emails from San Francisco telling me there had been a murder that looked like the Zodiac. You have to remember, this happens a lot. People love to imitate him, and there are false alarms all the time. But something felt different about this. Right afterward, emails came in from New York and Boston. At first I thought it was some kind of joke, but it felt wrong. So I started digging. The reports I was getting were right on. I double-sourced everything. Two nights ago, three different cities were struck by copycat killers. They imitated the Boston Strangler, Son of Sam and the Zodiac. Yesterday morning, you had a fiasco in Nags Head, North Carolina, that I’m convinced was related.”

“You’re convinced. No one in the law enforcement community was drawing correlations between these four sets of murders, but you, a semi-pro true-crime blogger, immediately recognized a pattern. So you went off half-cocked and posted your theories on the blog, thus drawing the ire of some creep who decided to spook you.”

Colleen raised her chin a fraction. She refused to be condescended to. When Jackson said it aloud, she had to admit, it sounded absurd. But she knew she was right. Knew it in her heart.

“Say what you will, but I was right. And that’s what I do, Lieutenant. I run a crime blog. Sometimes the criminals I’m discussing read that blog. It’s a free world. But here’s the important thing—I help the police solve cases all over the country. People have an inherent mistrust of the police, of the system. They think if they tell the truth, or rat on a friend, the police will somehow sweep them into the case. I provide a forum for people to share tips, insight and information with law enforcement anonymously. I’m very good at drawing conclusions. I’m self-trained to some extent, but please don’t forget, I worked the crime beat for years and I was married to a cop. A good cop. Tommy taught me everything he knew. And you were one of the ones who taught him.”

Jackson gave Colleen a half smile. “Touché.”

“Please don’t blame me for all of this. All I’ve done is report the facts as I’ve seen them. Just like any good investigator would.”

Jackson ran her hands through her hair. Colleen was jealous, because the more rumpled it got, the sexier it looked. Her own hair would do nothing of the sort; when it was mussed up, it just looked like she’d slept on it for days.

Jackson put her hair into a fluffy ponytail, then started playing with a ballpoint pen. “No one is faulting you, or blaming you, Colleen. I wish you had come to me before you shared your theories with the rest of the world, yes. But what’s done is done. We just want to know what’s going on, and why you and the Felon E blog are being used as the vehicle for these murders. We’ve confirmed that everyone that we know of who’s been killed was a participant on your blog. Did you issue some sort of challenge to them recently, a contest or something?”

“Not that I know of. I went through my archives before I came down. I’ve done a couple of blogs on the Zodiac in the past, especially when they did the movie, but none on the Boston Strangler or Son of Sam. I haven’t ever run a contest, that’s not my kind of thing. As for a challenge, I don’t know what you mean.”

“Could you have accused someone of something, or asked your readers to rally around a certain case or victim?”

Had she? She racked her brain and came up with nothing. She shook her head mutely.

“Then why would he decide to use your blog in particular, of all the ones that are out there in the world? Why you, Colleen?”

Why me indeed. A deranged fan? A killer she’d helped put away who’d gotten parole?

“I can’t tell you that. I have no idea why. All I know is what I reported, and the fact that my commenters are dying because of it.”

“Not because of your story, I don’t think. Your blog’s been in play for a while. I wonder if you simply stumbled across something you weren’t supposed to.”

“Well, yesterday’s hacking certainly left no doubt that whoever is responsible is aware of the blog, at the very least. There must have been a hundred comments that said, ‘I know who you are.’ And no one, no one, knows who I am.”

“Someone obviously does. Your contacts know who you are, don’t they? Or is everything you do anonymous?”

Jackson had a disconcerting way of leaning forward as she talked, right into Colleen’s personal space. It was a good, solid interrogation technique: make the victim feel like they mattered, that you were hanging on every word. Colleen got the sense that very little passed by Taylor Jackson. She paid attention to every word out of Colleen’s mouth, but was reading the context, her body language, the unspoken as much as the spoken. Tommy had said she was one hell of an investigator. Colleen understood how that could be the case—she was able to pry information out of the littlest details.

“Everything I do is supposed to be anonymous. I protect my identity as much as possible, especially from my contacts. They call me Felony. It’s a private joke—”

“Yeah, on the blog’s name. I get it. So if they don’t know who you are, how do you get them to talk?”

“Any way that I can. I give them a sympathetic ear, mostly. Some want money. I’m willing to donate a little bit to the cause, twenty here, twenty there. I won’t pay up front for a scoop. They have to be willing to share without recompense, I’ll only pad their paws after they give me verifiable information. Honestly, you’d be surprised at how many people want to help for free, simply to see the right thing done.”

“How many people do you have in Metro?”

Colleen almost laughed. Almost. Jackson’s face had hardened; she didn’t like this. Colleen couldn’t blame her. The idea of her whole department leaking like a sieve might be a difficult point to swallow.