“You let our people into your apartment this morning to start their search, right?” Ava asked. “Was Aaron’s truck in the lot?” Checking her paperwork revealed Aaron drove a Toyota Tundra.

“His truck hasn’t been back since he left for work Sunday morning.”

Ava scowled. Carson Scott’s vehicle had been left in his lot at his condo. But McKenna had said he’d been driving a silver Ford Explorer, which they still hadn’t found. What had their killer done with the men’s vehicles?

Ava liked having vehicles involved in her cases. They were hard to hide and often easy to track. Now they were searching for two different ones.

A task force email from Mason that morning had said that the white van on the Fremont Bridge had had a City of Portland logo on the back and side doors. Further digging had revealed no missing vans from the fleet. The fleet manager had stated that several employees drove their vans home, but claimed the one on the bridge wasn’t theirs. He could tell by looking at the bumper and wheels. Yes, they used Ford Econolines, but not like that one.

The City of Portland had dozens of the large magnetic sheets featuring the city logo, but tracking them was impossible. The fleet manager had said they were stolen off the vehicles all the time. Most of the vehicles had painted logos, but some used the magnets.

Zander asked Laura and Gordon a few more questions and then thanked and dismissed them. He walked them to the door and then fell into his seat with a sigh. “Gordon is the type of guy who will never get anywhere if he doesn’t stop looking for someone to blame for every little thing. Man, I wanted to smack him a few times.”

“I know the type,” agreed Ava. She scanned the photos of Gordon’s apartment that the crime scene techs had just uploaded. “What a shit hole. How do people live like that? Is that a male thing? The women I know clean their dishes occasionally.” She turned her laptop for Zander to see. He grimaced at the photos of the filthy kitchen and bathroom. She clicked on another photo of a couch in a living room, with two pillows and a couple of wrinkled blankets. She noticed the pillows didn’t have pillowcases. Dust mites. “Aaron hasn’t slept there since Saturday night and no one’s picked up his blankets?”

“Gordon doesn’t strike me as the type to be disturbed by a few blankets and pillows.”

“Good point.”

Plates, cups, and soda cans were stacked on the end table next to the couch. “I hope they find something. I don’t care what it is.”

“Aaron couldn’t be more different from Carson,” Zander observed. “These are two very different men, outside of their age.”

“We need to figure out where their circles connect. I don’t know if we need to be looking deep in their past or in their recent history.”

“We’ve checked the obvious history: schools, cities, jobs, family,” said Zander. “Nothing intersects. Both have lived in the Pacific Northwest all their lives; that’s about as close as we’ve come at the first glance. They don’t even belong to the same political party.”

“Then we slow down and look deeper,” said Ava. “Friends and acquaintances are the hard ones to investigate. They’re fluid and constantly changing for most people.”

“Or they have nothing in common but our killer,” Zander said. “We both know that’s not how it usually works.”

“We’ll find the connection.” She sighed and stretched to pop her spine.

“What was up this morning? You looked like you wanted to strangle someone when I first saw you.”

Ava had to think backward for a brief second. “You haven’t heard the latest episode in the story of my twin.”

Zander brightened. “Fill me in.” Ever since she’d gotten to know Zander on their last case, he’d been interested in her stories of her wild sister. He claimed his family was too boring and he had to live vicariously through hers.

He could have it.

Ava parked in front of the old apartment building where she’d last picked up Jayne to give her a ride to a “job interview.” She sat silently in her car, watching the rain slide down her windshield. She could still turn around. She looked in the rearview mirror and wiped a speck of mascara off her cheek.

Jayne’s eyes stared back at her.

She blinked and saw herself again. When they were younger, she’d have days when she wasn’t sure where she stopped and Jayne began. Jayne’s experiences would become her own. They’d told each other everything, to the point where it felt like they shared the same history.

Later on, she’d realized she’d dreamed about incidents that’d never happened to her; they’d happened to Jayne, but when Jayne had described them, Ava had placed them into joint memory banks. Once she’d explained it to a therapist as a hive collective. Like the Borg on Star Trek: each individual mentally dipped into a common cache of memories and claimed it as her own.

If it’d happened to Jayne, then it’d happened to her.

Until things changed. Looking back, Ava believed Jayne’s brain had shifted to a different path around puberty. She’d always been the attention seeker and selfish one, but in junior high she’d moved to a different level. Ava had started keeping things to herself, forming her own person, not wanting to be completely connected to a person who wasn’t . . . kind.

Ava stepped out of the car and pulled up her coat’s hood. Without knowing which apartment her sister had lived in, she searched until she found one with a dirty MANAGER sign next to the door. She knocked and waited. The apartment complex was old and tired. Toddler bikes and plastic garbage bags crowded some of the patios.