Amanda approached expressionlessly with a file, handed it to Jena, and said, "This is the new victim's background. As expected, he was also a night-shift worker."
"What did he do?" Jena picked up the file and began reading. After a while, she said speechlessly, "Breaking and entering counts as night-shift work?"
"You can't break in during the day," Amanda said. "This guy specialized in sneaking into those shared villas at night when no one was around, using the blind spots of surveillance cameras to steal..."
"Wait," Jena said. "Shared villas? The ones in the South Side?"
"Of course. That's the only place with them. Everywhere else has apartment housing. If you ask me, Brainiac should have flattened that place back then. Now it's caused all this trouble..."
Amanda was complaining, but Jena had already fallen into thought. "This serial killer is extremely skilled and at ease. He can convey multiple layers of information through his crimes. That means every victim he chose must have served a purpose."
"I get it." Tim suddenly understood. "He was telling you there was something wrong with the victim in the first case."
"How so?" Jena looked at him.
"You inferred that there was something wrong with the South Side, right?"
"Right. Because both Pelota and Chick met with trouble in the South Side. It wasn't hard to infer."
"So he found a victim connected to the shared villas in the South Side, intending to remind you that his victims weren't chosen at random. He would use the victims' identities to tell us something. The message he conveyed happened to match what you already knew, leading us to wonder whether the victim in the first case had something suspicious about him too."
"Exactly." Jena nodded. "The second case deliberately used a clue I'd previously inferred.