Alex Delaware and Leimert Fusco

Alex Delaware and Leimert Fusco pursue the Michael Burke case from different positions: Alex brings the perspective of a psychological consultant drawn into the investigation of Eldon Mate’s murder, while Fusco supplies an extensive body of research shaped by his own history in the FBI. Their collaboration is built less on trust or sustained direct contact than on a difficult exchange between evidence and interpretation. Alex takes Fusco’s case seriously enough to search its details, but the Bureau’s account of Fusco as dangerously obsessive prevents the investigation from settling into simple agreement.

An Indirect Investigative Partnership

The connection first takes shape through Milo Sturgis. When Milo asks whether the developing inquiry has something to do with Mate, Alex answers by returning to the name Burke, which seems familiar without yet being clear. Fusco’s research gives that name a history and a pattern: he has assembled records linking Michael Burke to a series of killings and believes the pattern bears on Mate’s murder. Alex’s role is to examine whether the account holds up, not merely to accept Fusco’s certainty.

Fusco’s central working document is an imposing, carefully organized collection of case material. Alex finds it arranged into sections, punched for a binder, and filled with Fusco’s summaries, analyses, and original police reports. The files are specific enough to invite close comparison, but their accumulation does not automatically prove the conclusion Fusco draws from them. Alex reads with the awareness that a detailed case can still be an interpretation—and that the person who built it may be as important to understanding it as the pages themselves.

The relationship is therefore investigative before it is personal. Alex does not have an established partnership with Fusco, and much of what he learns about the agent arrives through documents or through other people. Yet Fusco’s files become an active instrument in Alex’s reasoning: when a later crime scene recalls their contents, Alex knows where to return for comparison and whom he may need to contact.

Reading Fusco’s Case Against the Murders

Alex works through the dossier late into the night, in a cold house and under the narrow beam of a green-shaded desk lamp. At 3:22 on Thursday morning, having read every word, he finds no decisive conclusion in the prose itself. It is a second pass through the photographs that sharpens the connection. One Washington State unsolved case concerns Marissa Bonpaine, a twenty-year-old waitress last seen serving shrimp cocktail at Pike Place Market in Seattle. Her body was found a week later in a remote part of Olympic National Forest, propped in front of a fir tree.

The scene gives Alex concrete points of comparison with Fusco’s theory. Fusco treated the placement of victims against or near trees as consistent with Burke’s technique. Bonpaine’s killing also included a slashed throat, abdominal mutilations, sexual posturing, and a deep trapezoidal wound above the pubic bone. The body had been exposed to eleven days of rain; no footprints were found, and the forest floor’s pine needles and decaying leaves yielded no useful forensic evidence. These details do not identify the killer by themselves, but they make the case harder for Alex to dismiss as a superficial resemblance.

Fusco’s notes do not mention the toy Alex has in mind, and Alex considers telling Milo if they can speak soon. He continues to study the photographs and the changing identities attached to Burke, yet the person behind the pattern remains elusive to him. Alex’s assessment stays divided: the wounds fit, and Fusco’s research supplies a potentially important structure, but a fitting pattern is not the same as a settled identification. That distinction keeps Alex from turning the dossier into a verdict.

The Tree Motif and a Renewed Search

After Alice Zoghbie and Roy Haiselden are found murdered, the staging of the scene brings Fusco’s work back into immediate focus. The bodies are propped against a tree; Alex recognizes the combination of tree placement and geometric wounds as marks associated with Michael Burke. The recognition produces a sudden, almost juvenile excitement, but it does not make him ignore alternatives. He considers Eric Doss, Richard Doss, and Donny Salcido Mate, then notes that none has an apparent motive and that their whereabouts over the preceding days are accounted for.

Alex decides the next step is to review Fusco’s large collection of research. He wants to reach Fusco, but first believes Milo deserves to hear what he has found. The order matters: Alex treats Milo as his immediate investigative partner, while Fusco remains the source whose material may help explain the new scene. When he wonders whether to contact Fusco directly, he recalls that the FBI agent had said he was flying to Seattle to check the unsolved cases there.

That Seattle lead yields another specific point of contact between Alex’s reading and Fusco’s work. In a small notation near the bottom of a page, Alex finds that a plastic hypodermic had been discovered on the forest floor at the Bonpaine murder scene. The object had been cataloged and then forgotten. Its presence does not, by itself, establish who killed Bonpaine or connect the murder conclusively to Mate’s case. It does, however, give Alex a neglected detail to add to the pattern he and Fusco are trying to understand.

Fusco’s FBI History and the Question of Reliability

The FBI’s Mary Donovan and Mark Bratz arrive at Alex’s home to question him about Fusco. Donovan describes Fusco as a highly admired member of the Bureau and part of the original FBI Behavioral Science Unit at Quantico; she also notes that he holds a PhD in psychology, as Alex does. The agents confirm that Fusco contacted Milo and asked to meet Alex about a homicide, most likely Mate’s, presenting himself as someone who knew the murderer. Bratz adds that Fusco wanted Alex to believe in Dr. Michael Burke.

Alex is unwilling to discuss Fusco on the record without understanding the larger picture. He has spent time with him and wants to know who he was dealing with. The agents say Fusco was asked to leave the Bureau and describe his present condition as a problem of excessive focus. They also say he has committed numerous felonies, mostly multiple thefts. Their account changes the terms of Alex’s engagement: the files may contain useful investigative work, but their compiler is under serious suspicion and may be pursuing his theory compulsively.

The warning does not amount to a dismissal of Fusco’s findings. After the agents leave, Alex understands that they have labeled Fusco obsessive without ruling out the substance of his investigation. He also recognizes the limits of what they have told him: it is an internal Bureau matter, and he cannot know from their account whether someone else in the FBI is independently examining Burke. Alex continues to distinguish the credibility of a witness from the possible value of a clue, even as the two questions become harder to separate.

An Unfinished Collaboration

When news of the Zoghbie-Haiselden murders reaches Fusco, Alex expects that Fusco will be drawn back toward the case, perhaps attempting to contact Milo or returning from Seattle to Los Angeles. Alex fears that Fusco may be intercepted by former colleagues and taken into custody, ostensibly for his own protection. That prospect underscores the fragile character of their connection: the investigation needs the knowledge in Fusco’s files, while the Bureau may treat the investigator himself as a danger or a liability.

Alex’s later call to Milo from Mulholland shows the practical limit of his access to Fusco. Milo is at the scene, staring at the dirt and wondering whether he missed something. Alex tells him about Ulrich; he does not report a direct exchange with Fusco. The collaboration remains mediated by the dossier, shared investigative questions, and the possibility of future contact rather than by a confirmed resolution between the two men.

As a result, Alex’s relation to Fusco carries both investigative promise and unresolved doubt. Fusco provides a detailed framework that helps Alex recognize recurring features across separate crimes, including the tree staging and the overlooked object at the Bonpaine scene. Alex, in turn, tests that framework against particular facts and keeps its conclusions provisional. Their connection dramatizes a central problem of the inquiry: evidence may become newly legible through an investigator’s obsession, but the force of the pattern does not erase the need to examine the investigator—or to distinguish what the files show from what Fusco believes they prove.