by Lori Ryan
Zach cursed under his breath. He was doing too much of that, but damn, this case just got worse and worse.
“That’s all new. No drugs and no sexual activity in the old cases,” Dr. Kane said.
Shauna nodded. “No sexual activity with our guy. That’s not to say the killings weren’t sexual in nature, of course. But never any evidence of intercourse or other activity. And no drugs in our vics.” She turned to Dr. Kane. “How long to run the semen through the system? I can send it up to our lab if that helps?”
Dr. Kane nodded. “That would probably be faster. I can put a rush on it, but with our backlog …”
“No problem.” Shauna looked to Zach and Ronan. “I can run it up to our lab while you guys make some calls and get those hockey players in?”
“Sounds good. We don’t have enough to get warrants on any of these guys yet. I wish like hell we did. I’d love to see if any of these little pissants match the semen you found, Doc.” Zach looked back at Adrienne Edwards. “Maybe we can get them in for voluntary interviews and then pin them down on something that will let us get warrants for DNA.”
Ronan held up his phone. “I’m going to start making calls. Do we want to pull in the whole hockey team?”
“I think so,” Zach said. “One of them will be weak enough to hand over their social media accounts, even if the first line guys stick together and back their captain.”
“Got it.” Ronan walked out, phone already at his ear.
Shauna turned back to the medical examiner. “How sure are you that the rope and the lipstick are a match to the crime scene, Dr. Kane?”
The doctor’s brows only went up a hair, but Shauna noticed. “I’m sorry. I don’t mean to question your results. It’s just that so many aspects of this scene don’t fit with the old crimes. I just want to be sure before we link these together.”
Dr. Kane nodded. “I’ll show you.” She waved a hand for them to follow and they moved into a smaller room.
“These are photos of the rope from the last murder before your killer dropped off the face of the earth.” She pulled the close-up images of a length of rope out of a folder and spread them on a small table. One showed the knot used on the rope. A slip knot of some sort. Another showed a close-up of the end of the rope. The third showed an even tighter shot of one of the cut ends of the rope and a fourth showed a similar photo but it was clearly a different cut end of the rope.
“Here.” Dr. Kane pulled the third image toward them and pointed at the frayed edges of the rope. “This is the rope from your last murder thirty years back. Both ends of the rope were cut with something that our killer must have needed to saw back and forth with on the rope. It’s not a clean cut. If you look on this end, you’ll see where the tool must have slipped further along the rope as he was sawing back and forth. What you end up with is a cut where some strands of the rope were cut a few millimeters shorter than the other strands of the rope.”
Shauna and Zach leaned in and the brush of her arm against his did shit to his body it shouldn’t have. Hell, he was in trouble here.
“Oh yeah,” Shauna said, using her own finger to trace the spot on the photo that showed the cuts.
Zach focused back on the rope and saw what they were talking about.
“Now,” Dr. Kane said, pulling out a new photo from a separate folder. “This is one end of the rope we found on Adrienne Edwards.”
She placed the image next to the older photo and Zach watched as Shauna’s mouth formed a perfect oh. He glanced down and froze.
“Wow. That’s—”
“The same rope.” He finished Shauna’s sentence.
“I’ve sent the two ropes off to the lab for them to analyze further, but there’s very little likelihood it’s not the same rope,” Dr. Kane said. “Now, I will tell you I think your killer got smart and got something better to cut that rope with this time around.”
“What makes you say that?” Shauna asked.
“This is the other end of the Edwards rope.” Dr. Kane laid down another photo, this one showing a very clean, even cut end of the same rope.
“Wow.”
Zach grinned at Shauna’s repeated wows but he had to admit, she had the right word for the situation.
“And the lipstick?” He asked.
Dr. Kane moved to a microscope. “I had a feeling you’d want to see it.” She bent over the microscope and fiddled with the dials on the side. “I’ve got both samples set up in here. The sample on the left is from one of the girls thirty years ago. The one on the right came from Adrienne.”
She stood and Zach raised his hand to gesture for Shauna to go first. She looked and murmured another wow. Stepping back, she let Zach look through the lens.
He didn’t see it. “What am I supposed to be wowing over?”
“You don’t see that?” Shauna laughed.
Dr. Kane took pity on him. “The color, the texture, the density. All of it matches.”
Zach bent to look again. It was two side-by-side smears of red. “Okay. I’m going to take your word for it.”
He could see the shared grins on Shauna and Dr. Kane’s faces as he stood.
It was Dr. Kane who spoke. “As well you should. But I also ran tests and the composition is the same. There are two ingredients that were banned from the market fifteen years ago.”
He and Shauna nodded, sharing a look.
“I’ll get you the semen samples to run up to the lab, Shauna. I’ve got a vaginal swab and oral.” Dr. Kane said, before walking out.
Zach hated to think that there might be two separate semen donors, but knew both samples needed to be run. This case made his stomach churn on so many levels.
Zach caught Shauna’s elbow as she moved to follow. “Shauna,” he said. It was the first time they’d been anywhere close to alone. Never mind that Dr. Kane would be back any minute and there were lab techs right next door.
Shauna looked down at his hand on her arm, then slowly up at him. Her face told him she didn’t appreciate the contact.
He dropped his hand. Clearly, she didn’t feel the same charge racing through her body at the simple touch that he had. “I just feel like we should clear the air since we’re working on this together.”
She gave him a strange look and he was reminded of Liz and her are all adults this stupid? looks. “There’s nothing to clear, Zach. We’re good.”
Did she feel nothing between them? He wanted to step into her. Wanted to challenge her to deny she felt the heat that swirled whenever they were close to each other. The old him would have. Maybe he was no worse than the hockey players he was looking at for rape.
Instead, he stepped back. “Yeah? We’re good?”
Shauna only nodded, once, as Dr. Kane walked in. If the medical examiner noticed anything out of the ordinary, she didn’t comment. But then, she wouldn’t. Dr. Kane was all about the job.
As he walked out of the building next to Shauna, one fact hit Zach in the gut. The draw he felt toward her was even stronger than it had been years before. This time, though, it was different. Yeah, he still felt all the attraction he always had for her, but there was more to it this time. There was something different in how he was drawn to her now. It was more … real. More substantial somehow.
She was sharp and strong, bringing a passion to her work he could respect the hell out of. The realization made him regret the fact he had screwed up with her so many years ago. That, even though she said she was okay working with him, she probably had this image in her head of a frat boy who only wanted what her body could offer him. He didn’t want that to be the way she thought of him. He wanted to show her there was more to him.
Ronan got out of the car as they approached. “I’ve got two players whose parents are taking this seriously enough to come in this evening. I’m halfway through the list, but so far most of them have said they could come tomorrow or—” he took on an affected tone that Zach assumed was his imitation of some of the people he’d talked to— “they�
�ll ask their people to call us to schedule something in the coming week.”
“Really?” Shauna said, and Zach grinned at the tone. She would no more allow that than he and Ronan would. “I take it you educated them?”
“I did. I told them we’ll see them in the morning or we’ll show up at their homes in a marked car with lights going to discuss it there.”
Zach let out a laugh. No one needed to know their captain would hand their asses to them if they pulled that move. Right now, whatever got these people in the door was fine with Zach. He wasn’t about to let anyone stand in their way now that they had one dead teenager and another one still missing.
Chapter Nine
Ronan’s strategy paid off. They’d brought in some of the backup players on the team and sent Shauna in to interview them with their parents present. She’d talked to them about not taking the fall for the other guys—the first string. As soon as they found out she knew about the scoring system the boys were using with the girls, their parents had handed over their sons’ phones and forced the kids to give them the passwords.
Watching from the other side of the glass, he could almost feel the parents’ anger as they realized what their sons had been part of. More than one parent had mumbled something about Sawyer and his buddies being behind it. One woman had gone past mumbling, smacking her son in the back of the head and telling him to start thinking for himself instead of following Sawyer like a damned puppy dog.
They would go back and interview the kids more in a bit. For now, they stood in Stephanie’s office where she worked her magic with a keyboard and computer.
“Holy shit.” Shauna was the first to speak.
“Yeah.” Ronan echoed the sentiment.
Stephanie had projected the Facebook group they’d tracked down in Kyle Lawler’s account up on the large screen that took up one wall of her small office. The pattern was clear. The hockey team—mostly the members of the first line and the captain, but there were others—posted a picture of a teenage girl. Each time, there were codes just as Stephanie had shown them before.
Stephanie scrolled through, starting earlier in the posts and moving toward more recent posts.
“Stop.” Zach pointed at the screen. A picture of Adrienne Edwards had been posted by Aiden Fleming. She was sitting at one of the benches outside the cafeteria on campus. She looked at something off in the distance, tucking her hair behind one ear. He had a feeling she wasn’t aware anyone was taking her picture.
“CBF,” Ronan read from the post.
“Can’t be fucked.” Stephanie translated for them as she took a screenshot of the post and saved it in the file she’d created. She’d download and save all of this, he knew, but having screenshots of anything of note would be helpful.
Minutes later, they stopped on a similar post where Carrie Athill was pictured with the same abbreviation in the post.
“Nate Mathews. He’s one of the guys that’s coming in tomorrow, isn’t he?” Shauna asked.
“Yeah.” Zach looked down at the hockey roster he’d pulled up on his phone. “First line, left wing.”
Stephanie took the screenshot and continued to scroll.
Seconds later, they were all silent as she stopped on the next photo of Adrienne Edwards. Stephanie stayed behind her computer, but the other three all shuffled toward the screen, almost as one.
“We’ve got him.” Zach said what they were all thinking. “Can you print it for me, Steph?”
We’ve got him, Zach thought again, as he waited for the printout, fists clenching and unclenching at his sides. He couldn’t wait to get into that interview room.
Chapter Ten
Keeping Jonathan Michael Sawyer and his parents waiting had been fun, but it also meant Zach had to keep his own temper under control. He’d been pacing in the observation room next to the interview room as they waited for a warrant to come through. With the timing of the Facebook post, the presence of GHB in her system, and the fact he’d claimed in the Facebook group that they had sex the day she died, they should be able to get a warrant for the kid’s DNA. Zach couldn’t wait to spring that on the parents.
Zach watched as the lawyer they’d brought with them stood, clearly getting ready to pull his clients. He didn’t blame him. If he’d been the lawyer, he’d want to walk, too. Zach stepped out into the hallway just as Shauna came down the hall, paper in hand. He grinned, but wiped it from his face as he turned to the interrogation room in time to catch the lawyer and his clients.
“We’re not finished.”
“On the contrary, officer, we’re not going to begin. My clients came down here as a courtesy and you’ve kept them waiting almost an hour. We’re leaving.”
“Sure,” Zach said, showing his teeth now, but not in anything that could be termed a smile, “as soon as we get a DNA sample.” He tossed the paper toward the lawyer and crossed to a chair at the table. He didn’t bother to encourage them to join him. No way that lawyer was going to waltz them out of here after he looked at that warrant.
“What is he talking about?” Mr. Sawyer barked more than spoke to the lawyer, and the lawyer raised a hand to halt his questions while he scanned the paper. With a nod, he directed the Sawyers back to the table. The parents and lawyer murmured a few words, while Zach set about laying a photo of Carrie and Adrienne side by side on the table in front of Jonathan Michael Sawyer, whom he now knew to be Jonathan Michael Sawyer, the third.
The boy looked at the girls and paled. Zach laid out the third photo. This one showed Adrienne on the medical examiner’s table. It showed only her shoulders on up, the lipstick and rope removed, but there was no mistaking the fact she was very much dead. Of course, Sawyer knew she was dead, but he seemed to turn green now.
Zach waited until the boy’s mother looked over. “Oh, my Lord.” She fell into the seat next to her son as her lawyer and Mr. Sawyer lit into Zach.
“I’ll have your badge for this shit, detective.” Mr. Sawyer’s face was red, in stark contrast to the pale white sheen of his wife.
Zach ignored him and focused on the younger Sawyer. Tapping the photo, he spoke quietly. “When I run your DNA against the semen we found in her mouth and vaginal cavity, is it going to be a match?”
The look on the boy’s face told Zach the answer to that.
It was going to be a match. Or at least the boy was reasonably sure it would. Either way, it didn’t bode well.
“Of course, it’s not going to,” his mother all but pled. “Jonathan, tell him it’s not going to match.”
“He can’t,” Zach said, not looking at her. He kept his eyes locked on the kid. “Because he knows it will.”
The lawyer wasn’t dumb. He stepped right in. “Jonathan, don’t say anything. Officer, get your technician in here to take a sample. We’re not going to answer any more questions today.”
Zach leaned back in his seat, hands behind his head with his chair tilting back to two legs as the door opened. He hadn’t needed to call for a technician to collect the sample. They’d had one ready and waiting behind the glass.
He spoke as the technician set about her job, pulling swabs out and labeling the time and date. “Well, now, I gotta tell you. If we were only looking at Adrienne’s murder I might let you walk on out of here while I ran that sample, but here’s the thing. Carrie Athill is still out there. We’ve got a missing young woman and we have every reason to think her disappearance might be linked to you, too.”
He let the feet of his chair slam back onto the floor with a thud, as he pulled the screenshots of the private Facebook group out of the folder he’d sat in front of him.
He tapped the photo Sawyer had loaded to the Facebook group. The one that showed he’d had sex with Adrienne the day she died. “You were stupid, Sawyer, bragging about what you’d done to Adrienne. I’m going to do everything in my power to bring Carrie home to her parents in one piece. And that means holding you here until you’ve told me a bit more about these.”
Zach’s
blood was boiling as he watched the indignation bloom on Sawyer’s face. Zach had long ago learned to control his rage during questioning, though. Sure, the squad might taunt him when he spent twenty minutes in the bathroom after this, growling and counting under his breath to calm that rage, but he wasn’t going to let it out in this room. Letting your anger get the better of you in the interrogation room or with a witness could cost the case.
Sawyer gaped as he looked from Zach to his lawyer and back to Zach. “You can’t do that. That’s a private Facebook group. I have an expectation of privacy there. You can’t look at that without a warrant.”
“Big words. You been studying your legal rights?” Zach asked.
“I know my rights.” Now Sawyer covered his chest with crossed arms and dug in.
“Well, you’d be right if—” Zach made a show of shaking his head like he was sorry to have to be the one to tell Sawyer the bad news “—if one of your buddies in the group hadn’t given us access to his account. I guess he didn’t expect we’d be able to match your DNA to the semen in Adrienne.”
Mrs. Sawyer made a choking sound, but the lawyer spoke up. “You don’t have a match yet, officer. Let’s not get ahead of ourselves here.”
“Oh, hey,” Zach pulled out one more sheet. The report showing Adrienne had been drugged. “Did I forget to mention this?” He put the paper on the table. “GHB. Needed a little help to get Adrienne to—” out of respect for Mrs. Sawyer, Zach didn’t fill in the blank “—well, you know.”
“You know what GHB is, right, Mrs. Sawyer? The date rape drug?” Zach looked to Mrs. Sawyer for a split second, but then looked back to her son, shoving the Facebook posts back to him and pointing to the Can’t Be Fucked code under Adrienne’s image. “We know you couldn’t get the job done without it, Sawyer.”
Zach hated talking about Adrienne in such crass terms. He almost flinched at his own words. But it had to be done. He needed to crack Sawyer and get him to tell them where Carrie was.