"What will kill me is this delicious food, not some damned criminal. Do you understand what I'm talking about?"
Larry opened the door of Ángel's car. He sat in the passenger seat and said, "There's nothing better than dying in your sleep, buddy."
"That's disturbing."
In no time, the car sped off.
Larry nodded and rested his head against the back of the seat.
Back in his medical school days, he had a serious obsession with misophobia. He could take how clean everything was, but unlike him, others weren't as clean as Ángel's car now was.
"Get comfortable, this car's my girl." Ángel said in a rather humorous tone.
"Where's Max in all this?"
"He's got a terrible stomach ache, the poor guy can't be away from the toilet for more than five minutes before needing it again."
Larry nodded in understanding and looked at the files Ángel had handed him earlier.
"Take a good look at what I worked on all night!"
"I spent all night comparing the photographed tire marks, and I finally found the source of the tire tracks left at the crime scene." Ángel, along with Sergeant Doakes, had examined these pieces of evidence found around the crime scene.
"Do you believe the locals didn't leave those marks?" Larry didn't trust the locals' statements.
"Well, none of them have a truck with those tire measurements. According to experts, those marks belong to a truck." Ángel said, totally confident in his words.
According to the analysis of enthusiasts in this area, these marks could have been left by a large truck, but not so large as to pass unnoticed.
That made Larry think, who strongly suspected many things that didn't make sense. One of them was that this killer might be an imitator of the prostitute killer case, the one Debra was working on.
But since those murders hadn't been made public, it didn't make sense that someone else would avoid those killings.
"It doesn't make sense."
"What doesn't make sense?" Ángel frowned as he looked at Larry, who was deep in thought.
"Let's go back."
"Fine by me."
Ángel, who was pensive, asked, "How old are you?"
"What's with the question?" Larry looked at Ángel, who was driving.
"Maybe I could set you up with my sister, I thought you'd be her type." Ángel said this casually. He liked Larry and knew that men committed to their work wouldn't be out there looking for a partner on their own.
"Do you want your sister to be with someone potentially unstable? The worst thing you can do is pair her up with a criminal profiler." Larry didn't feel mentally unstable, but he wasn't interested in relationships that could compromise his work.
"Holy God, Larry, are you unstable?"
"That's not the case."
"Then it's fine, when I get the chance, I'll show you a picture of her."
Of course, Larry hadn't always been alone. He had had a girlfriend at one point, they weren't the ideal couple or an example in love, but they made it through together and eventually separated.
But that made something clear to Larry, he wasn't the kind of guy who could be easily taken out of his environment. He could make sacrifices, but he would never change his way of thinking just to make others happy.
Besides, as long as he had a case, there was no way to pull him away from it until it was completed.
Once they returned to the police department, Larry signaled to Max to bring him everything on the homicide case that narcotics had notified them about.
"It's true that there are similarities, but just because there are two, we shouldn't think it's an imitator."
Larry walked over to a whiteboard and said, "This is what I do, Ángel. A criminal profiler always analyzes the homicide cases he works on and tries to find patterns to see if there's a much longer trail to follow."
"If we consider the killer transported the body in a truck, we need to find the face around the location. Let's distance the search trail as much as possible until we find traces we can follow."
Ángel, who didn't underestimate Larry's abilities, immediately got to work.
At that moment, some detectives arrived, and one of them said, "Forensic Luk, we'd like to share this information with you."
"Did you find a trace?"
Ángel handed over the photographs brought by the two investigators and asked them to verify them.
The three of them approached Larry, where a wall-sized whiteboard was covered with writings and drawings on every aspect of the case.
"Hurry up and sit down!"
"The surveillance investigators who conducted the investigation last night went to the crime scene. Right at the northeast corner of the pond, they found a surveillance camera from a company directed in this direction, but the image quality wasn't very high."
"As ordered, we reviewed all the surveillance videos we could find from around the dates the victim died. The only thing we could compare to the tire marks in the report is an ice cream truck."
Larry turned his head toward the whiteboard as he delved into his rapid thoughts. "An ice cream truck, it seems like someone's trying to mess with me…"