Santina started off her task by asking for all the available police reports of all crimes committed in District 12 within the past few months.
To which has not been too difficult for them to acquire since Officer Aragon was silently supporting them and had their back on the investigation.
With those pieces of information that they managed to acquire from the police intelligence, Santina was then able to reduce the scope of her investigation to those murders who happened to share the same nature of injuries inflicted on its victims that were similar to those found on the dead boy that they were working on their case.
Later on, Santina found out that the body in their custody that they initially referred to as 'Victim No. Three', was actually a boy named Marco Polo. Which all thanks to them had now a family grieving over him just like 'Victim No. Two' Inigo Saavedra.
Well, the numbering was obviously made according to the sequencing of the date to when the body was discovered.
On the months that followed, more and more cases of missing children were eventually found dead on regular intervals until the murders already reached a staggering number of cases that were more than what the fingers of their both right and left hands combined could actually count.
Like most of the unsolved and neglected cases in their country, poverty was one of the few things that the said victims all had in common
Not a single one from these poor victims had dental records as such it only made it harder for their bodies to be identified.
Yet this fact did not actually come as a surprise to Santina and nor to Mikael anymore because if their intuition was pointing them right, these said victims would most likely be part of the poorest of the poor in the society.
They might even barely have money enough to buy food for three meals in a day, let alone money to pay for tuition and rent and dental bills.
Marco and Inigo were only lucky enough to have one or two articles of clothing within their bodies when they were found, or else they would have been nearly impossible to identify just like the others.
Truth be told, the Bureau of Investigation actually had over eighty thousand dollars worth of DNA testing equipment but this was of a little help for Santina's investigation.
Because the agency's so-called experts just kept on telling her that they were still currently not able to carry out mass DNA testing yet on the bodies because they were still building their database.
Actually this was the same shitty excuse that they used before during the identification of the victims of the explosion that happened on the controversial buy-bust operation that killed not only Sebastian but also other police officers in service way back in the year 2014.
In Santina and Mikael's joint effort of investigation that was conducted on the two previous murders, it was revealed that the two bodies had been actually found in different areas within the same dumpsite.
Some three to five days after the medico-legal officer's approximation of the date and time of death.
In which in both cases, the earliest possible date of death coincidentally fell on a Saturday. Both during the last weekend of the month of January and February.
Santina also performed a second autopsy on the body that they had in their custody and she too arrived at the same conclusion
The body was found on the first Tuesday of April 2019 but the earliest approximate time of death was the previous Saturday. The last Saturday of March.
From these findings, the initial result of the investigation had started to come together. The victimology, frequency, as well as the method.
What now remained was to understand why these victims were selected.
Why murders were committed as often as they were?
And why they were committed in such a fashion?
All of these required the skills of a criminal profiler.
And it was precisely for that same reason why Officer Aragon specifically instructed Mikael to seek for Santina's help.
Because the nature of the injuries inflicted on the victims was actually out of ordinary.
This also seemed to indicate that the perpetrator of all these murders was extremely disturbed!
Just like Santina, Mikael also shared the same view that serial killing was not solely just a Western phenomenon.
And the only thing that stood in the way of its detection was the inadequacy and sloppiness of police methods and their severely lacking intelligence techniques.
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