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observation suite. Edward Ogawa stood in front of the monitor to Interview Room Three. Zoë was sitting with her head in her hands but suddenly sat up, sneered at the bottle of water on the table in front of her, and batted it away.
    “That’s one angry young lady,” Ogawa said.
    “One damaged lady,” Greening corrected.
    Greening had pigeonholed Zoë Sutton as a drunken party girl when she had come busting through the cordon. That scar elevated her from some hammered chick to someone of great interest. She was a game changer. Their whole investigation had shifted in scope and emphasis because of her. They weren’t dealing with an isolated case.
    Greening flipped through his notes on Zoë Sutton and looked over the scant details he’d managed to get out of the Mono County Sheriffs. In the early hours of the morning, the duty officer had managed to track down a case number but couldn’t release the file without the investigator’s approval. He’d gotten lucky that the duty officer had been one of the responding cops, who’d been called to the scene of a naked, semiconscious Zoë found at the side of the road. The officer had been able to give him a snapshot of what had happened to Zoë and her friend, which highly suggested that the Jane Doe at Pier 25 and Zoë were connected.
    “What do you think?” Greening asked.
    Ogawa shook his head. “Something doesn’t smell right. The Mono Sheriffs never found the location where the girls were held, the friend, or anything else to support her account. There was also no sign of sexual congress, consensual or otherwise.”
    “She was doped. She’s not going to be reliable on facts.”
    “That’s my problem.” Ogawa tapped the papers with his finger. “Reading between the lines in this report, these guys couldn’t determine what was fact and what was fiction.”
    Greening had also gotten that feeling from the account. “I’ve got a call in with the lead investigator on the case. Hopefully, he can shed some light. In the meantime, just looking at the similarities, she is tied to this. Her scar matches ours, and no one outside of the investigation knew that detail. Her friend was supposedly suspended and flogged. Ditto for our girl. No sexual assault in her case, and it looks to be the same with ours.”
    “Most of her story is uncorroborated. Anything could have happened.”
    “But a few things support her story. One, the friend has disappeared. No one has seen her since the trip, and there’s no record of her since that weekend. So, where is she? Two, while the Mono Sheriffs wrote her off as an unreliable witness, they found Rohypnol in her bloodstream, so something definitely happened. And three, she has the scar on her hip. That scar cinches it for me at this stage.”
    Ogawa leaned against a wall of the cramped room. He stared at Zoë Sutton on the monitor. “That scar. Goddamn that scar.”
    That wasn’t the kind of reaction Greening was expecting. “Why are you all bent out of shape?”
    “If that scar is connected to all this then we’re looking at a serial killer and I don’t want that.”
    If the case went multistate, they’d forfeit it to the Feds, but Greening had worked with Ogawa long enough to know that losing the case wasn’t upsetting him. He didn’t care about jurisdictions and credits. He cared about getting criminals off the street, and a serial case would be hard to solve and suck up thousands of man hours. Serial cases made careers, and they also destroyed them.
    “I don’t like this twist in the tale,” Ogawa said. “Zoë Sutton could be the break we need or a pain in the ass. If she is connected, we don’t know how.”
    “She could be our best lead.”
    “Or our prime suspect.”
    It was a theory that Greening didn’t buy. Ogawa was tossing out all possibilities, and they couldn’t ignore any of them, but Greening didn’t believe that they were staring at the killer.
    “Right now, she’s a distraction. Zoë Sutton