She’d seen plenty of tragedy in her years on the force, horrible things done by humans to other humans, sometimes in a fit of rage and sometimes utterly calculated. But crimes committed against children and animals were another kind of horror entirely.
She thought of what she knew about how serial killers prepared, using animals before they trapped their first human victims. The mass shooter in Sutherland Springs had reportedly gotten dogs off Craigslist to use as target practice.
A part of her couldn’t help but wonder if that was what was happening here. Was there someone in suburban Plainfield taking domesticated pups because they were easy marks? Were they dealing with a killer in training?
“Hey, Larsen, you in there?” Hank was snapping his fingers in front of her face.
“Just thinking,” she told him and brushed away his hands.
“About Kelly Amster, or about the dogs?”
“The dogs,” she told him. “I have an angle.”
“So do I,” Hank said, putting out his idea first. “There’s a network of barking dog haters, and they’re delivering steaks full of ketamine in the dead of night. They knock out the pups and haul ’em off to another county so they can finally have some peace and quiet.”
Jo squinted. “Hmm, I think I like mine better.”
“What’s yours?”
“My bet’s on a creep in training,” she said.
“A creep in training,” he repeated, and she could tell he was trying not to laugh. “That’s some hunch.”
“It fits, Hank.” She felt miffed. “For sure, it’s not animal activists stealing dogs from a medical lab. It’s not someone trying to sell old dogs. Whoever took them targeted them. Older dogs would not put up a fight . . .”
“Okay.” He waggled fingers. “Keep going.”
“What if our dog thief was acquainted with Duke and Tucker, even tangentially, like someone from a vet’s office or a part-time dog walker,” she said. “They might use the same services even if they live in different neighborhoods.”
“Let’s look at the locations,” Hank said.
“That’s as good a place to start as any,” she agreed.
With Hank at her elbow, she put her fingers on the keyboard and plugged in Jill Burns’s address along with that of the Pearson residence, pulling up an interactive map.
“I know that street,” Hank said, pointing to the road where Jill Burns lived. “I must have walked by her house a hundred times, taking the girls to the park.”
“Hmm,” she said as she sat back and gazed at the map, zooming in and zooming out again. She knew the area where Jill Burns lived, too, as it wasn’t far from Hank’s zero lot line property, where neighbors practically sat on top of one another. The Burns house was just a couple of blocks away from a community playground with an adjacent dog park, which was one reason the neighborhood was popular with pet owners and families.
But it didn’t help Jo to make a connection.
“The Pearson place and the Burns house are at least five miles across town from each other,” Hank said.
Jo sighed.
There had to be something.
They just weren’t seeing it yet.
So Jo went back to her keyboard. She clicked the mouse to zoom out farther, wanting to get a bigger picture of the streets from which the dogs had disappeared and the area between them.
“The old water tower’s in the middle,” Hank said right off the bat.
“Yeah, ’cause it’s in the middle of everything.”
“Zoom out a little more,” he urged.
Jo did but only a bit. If she zoomed too much, she’d be outside the Plainfield city limits. Heck, she’d be out of Dallas County altogether and into Collin County.
“What are you looking for exactly?” she asked her partner. He had his forehead pleated, he was concentrating so hard.
“I’m not sure. But, whatever it is, I’m not finding it,” he said. “There’s just the municipal buildings, the high school, a couple of churches . . .”
The phone on Hank’s desk started ringing, and he sighed.
“It’s okay,” she told him. “How ’bout I look for barking dog complaints against the victims’ pets?” she suggested, and Hank gave her a nod.
Then he rolled his chair back home and picked up his phone. “Yeah, this is Detective Phelps,” he said.
Jo heard the rumble of his voice as he thanked the caller for getting back to him so quickly. But she didn’t listen long enough to figure out who it was.
Instead, she fixed her gaze on her monitor and opened another window over the map on her screen. She got into the department’s system, looking at old 311 complaints, just as she had when she’d narrowed down the address of the house party Kelly had attended.
But this time, she looked solely at barking dog complaints. She checked the past two days in particular, scrolling down the list of reports and the complainants, hoping to find a phone call or two relating to the dogs that had disappeared, something that could make Hank’s theory pan out.
It wasn’t long before she gave up.
Her partner got off the phone and stood, stretching. Then he came around to her desk with a notebook in hand and tapped it with his pen. “I just had a pretty interesting conversation with Fred Babcock over at Animal Services,” he said. “I left a message for him after we talked to Amanda Pearson, and I just told him about the second missing dog report.”
Jo rubbed her eyes. “And?”
“Seems they averaged twice as many calls about lost dogs in the weeks since school started versus the summer months.” His eyes brightened, like he was on to something.
Jo didn’t think that sounded so odd, but she played devil’s advocate.
“Summer’s a lazy time,” she said. “Kids are home from school, and families are traveling. But once school begins, schedules get crazy. It’d be easy to forget to shut a gate when you’re worried about homework and tardy slips.”
He leaned a hip against her desk. “You might be right about that. But Fred thought it was odd that the disappearing dogs were all big breeds, like pit bulls, retrievers, huskies, none of those puny types. No Chihuahuas, terriers, cockapoos, or doodle dogs.”
“Why’s that suspicious?”
Hank glanced at his notepad. “Usually when he hears about stolen pups, they’re the little ones, grabbed out of parked cars. The purse puppies are an easier resale. Top three swiped breeds are Yorkshire terrier, Maltese, and Pomeranian, in case you’re wondering.”
She wasn’t.
“So does Animal Services think we’re on to a dognapping ring in Plainfield?”
Hank blew out his cheeks. “He didn’t exactly put it that way, but he did say dog flips are up.”
“Flips?”
He gave her a cockeyed grin. “You’d think we were talking about house renos, right? But it’s what they call it when someone takes a dog and sells it to someone else, and it’s an easy way for criminals to make some money if they know what they’re doing. But if the owners had their pets chipped, there’s a shot some vet will find it and do the right thing. Otherwise . . .” He shrugged. “There’s a good chance they won’t ever be recovered.”
“Great.” The rate of success for finding a missing person after the first twenty-four hours got dimmer and dimmer. Tracking down a missing pet was even trickier, she realized. The dog could never talk and say where it lived or what its name was. Without collars, no one else would know, either.
“Although,” Hank went on in his gravelly drawl, “Fred said they did have one dog turn up that went missing three weeks back. It was an older black Lab that vanished from his backyard a street over from Amanda Pearson’s.”
A street away from where Duke had been taken?
“Really?” Jo perked up. “How come we didn’t hear about it before now? Was there a report?”
She couldn’t always remember every call that came in, every incident, particularly if she wasn’t the one who responded.
&n
bsp; “The owner didn’t file a missing property claim with us—I checked—but she kept on Fred’s back for weeks, asking if her Lab had turned up. Then a few days later, Fred says, the dog did turn up in Celina. It was found on the side of the road by someone who works at the Bethel Church.”
“In Celina?” It was a town of mostly farmland, about fifteen miles north of Plainfield in another county entirely. “How’d a dog from Plainfield end up there? That’s a far walk. It’s twenty-five minutes by car.”
“No clue, but it was on its last legs,” Hank told her grimly. “Fred said the dog looked like it was hit by a vehicle. It was taken to an animal hospital, where they found the chip, but the pup didn’t make it.”
Jo grimaced. “Why would a backyard dog that disappeared show up in farm country?”
“Maybe he hitchhiked?” Hank joked, but it wasn’t funny.
“Someone took him, that’s how.” She looked at the map on her computer screen and zoomed out again, so she could see the endless length of Preston Road running north to Celina. She pinpointed the Farm to Market Road, FM 455, and its surroundings. It was, as Hank had noted, full of acreage parceled out mostly for produce farms, cattle ranches, horse farms, and country property.
What did they really have, after all? Two missing dogs with their tags left behind, and the tale of another lost dog that had turned up dead in the next county.
Were the three cases connected? If so, what the hell was going on?
“So what’s next, partner?” he asked.
She sat back in her chair, looking up at him. “If we can spare a couple of uniforms, they can pick up the collar at Jill Burns’s house and knock on doors in the neighborhood, but it’s not like we can put out an Amber Alert for missing dogs. I’m not sure what other rocks to kick over right now.”
“We could call a real pet detective.”
“Ha.” She smiled feebly. “At the very least, we can e-mail the information on the missing dogs to the local rescue operations and tell them we’d be interested to know if they turn up and in what condition.”
“Already did that for Amanda Pearson’s retriever,” Hank said. “I can call back and give them whatever you’ve got on the second dog.”
“Thanks.”
Jo’s desk phone rang, and she jerked her head toward the noise.
“Maybe that’s somebody sayin’ they found a stray pup,” Hank said, giving her one of his crooked half smiles that reminded her of a slightly deranged Ward Cleaver.
“Right.”
As her partner wandered back to his desk, she snatched up the receiver. “Larsen,” she said.
“Hey, Detective, it’s Bridget from Digital Forensics,” said an excited voice on the other end.
Jo smiled at Bridget’s euphemism for her cluttered desk in the room with the computer server.
“What’s up?” Jo asked.
“Can you come down here right away?”
“Please tell me you got into the laptop,” Jo said, because surely, something had to go right today.
“I did,” Bridget practically chirped, “and I think I found something interesting.”
CHAPTER TWELVE
Jo and Hank squeezed themselves into the tiny space around Bridget’s desk in the server room, the level of white noise giving Hank a permanent wince. At least he didn’t have reason to complain about it being hot, considering the fact that it wasn’t.
Jo was too psyched to care about the goose bumps on her arms or the background cacophony of whirring and beeping and spinning.
She had her eyes glued to Kelly’s laptop, which Bridget had hooked up like a deathly ill patient to a string of IVs. There were cords connecting it to another laptop and to a trio of flat screens, and even more black cords trailed in and out of various pieces of machinery that littered Bridget’s desktop.
“Let me tell you where things stand so far,” she announced, headphones sitting at the base of her neck. She made no move to turn around and look at them. Instead, she bent her dark head over the keyboard and started tapping so quickly, Jo felt dizzy just watching her flying fingers.
“I finally got the drive operational, although it wasn’t easy,” she said, voice raised so they could hear, and still her gaze didn’t waver from the monitors as Jo and Hank hovered over her shoulders. “Kelly’s laptop had a shutdown virus, which wouldn’t let me into the registry editor.”
“A what?” Jo said, and not because the words had been drowned out. She had no idea what Bridget was talking about.
“A shoot-down virus?” Hank howled in Bridget’s ear. But he looked equally bewildered and dared to ask, “What the devil does that mean?”
“Shutdown,” Bridget repeated, raising her voice at least a decibel. “It kept her laptop from booting up. I had to download and install a new registry editor before I could do anything.”
“Of course you did,” Hank replied, giving Jo a sideways glance as if to say: Are you sure she’s speaking English?
“What I ended up doing was going through the system and creating a restore point for everything so I wouldn’t further damage any program files. I found the shutdown auto-run keys and deleted them, and then I located the execute files that had a similar name and got rid of them, too.”
“Great,” Jo said, waiting for Bridget to say something that she understood, although pretty much these days when it came to tech, her knowledge didn’t go much beyond “on” and “off.”
“Next, I cleaned up the bad files in the Task Manager and emptied the Recycle Bin, so I could feel secure about restoring the system to a point before the virus attacked. I’d like to think we didn’t lose any potentially useful files, but I can’t be sure,” Bridget admitted, finally glancing back at Jo, like she needed to catch her breath, or maybe she was just waiting for their inevitable questions.
“So you got the thing to work?” Jo asked, hoping that was the point of all the gobbledygook Bridget had just hurled at them. “You did get it booted?”
“Yes, and I’m in.” Bridget smiled, and her right hand left the keyboard in front of her long enough to push at the black specs on her nose. “I used the password you gave me from the school district to get into Kelly Amster’s files.”
“Now we’re cookin’ with gas.” Hank rubbed his hands together. “Tell me she kept a diary or shared every freaking part of her life on Facebook.”
“I haven’t gotten that far yet,” Bridget said. “I can definitely do a search on social media and see what turns up. Much of the younger crowd has deserted Facebook, but she may be there. IGen is pretty much either into Snapchat or Insta to share photos, although lots of schools use Facebook for announcements and events, and for organized groups. If she used Snapchat, we’re screwed unless she made screenshots of anything important. About as bad would be a secret group on Facebook, or if she has a Finsta in addition to a Rinsta.”
“Whoa, whoa. Slow down there, sparky,” Hank drawled, leaning down nearer to better hear. “What’s an iGen and an Insta?”
“And Rinsta and Finsta?” Jo added, feeling like she was quoting Dr. Seuss.
“Yeah, please explain for the oldsters in the room.”
Bridget swiveled so they could read her lips if they had to. She grinned nervously. “Um, well, iGen is Generation Z, whatever you want to call it. Think the next generation after the millennials, mostly people under twenty-two.”
“Got it,” Hank said and tipped his head.
“Insta is Instagram,” she explained. “Rinsta is what kids call a real Instagram account, and Finsta is a fake account. You know, like using fake account information so they can post photos or say things they might not want attached to their true selves.”
“Oh, great,” Hank moaned. “More crap for me to worry about with my girls.”
“They’re in grade school, partner,” Jo reminded him. “They’re not posting naked pictures on the net yet.”
“Thanks for the reassurance.” Hank scowled at her before turning his attention back to Bridge
t. “Can you break into her accounts?”
Bridget wrinkled her nose. “You mean, like, hack them?”
“Isn’t that what they always do on TV?” he said and snapped his fingers. “Takes ’em, like, two seconds to beat any password and get to the meat and potatoes.”
“On TV, yeah, right. Because that’s real.” Bridget pursed her lips. “I can try resetting her passwords, since I’ve got her laptop and a valid e-mail address. We’ll see if that works.”
“That would be great,” Jo said, then looked at Hank. “We seriously need to get back to the house. I want to go through Kelly’s room . . .”
“And talk to good ol’ Barb again,” her partner said, finishing her thought.
“I’d like to know more about her relationship with the Eldons,” Jo added. “Was Barb aware that Kelly had been in touch with Trey again? That she’d supposedly begged an invite to his party?”
“If she wasn’t, she will be soon enough . . .”
Bridget cleared her throat. “Would y’all like to hear more, or you want to come back after I finally take a really late lunch break?”
Jo and Hank stopped talking.
“No,” she said, as he said, “Yes.”
But they meant the same thing, and Bridget seemed to get it.
“Okay then.” She clickety-clacked her fingers on the keyboard, pulling up what looked like the contents of Kelly’s e-mail file. “Check out her in-box.”
Jo squinted at the screen as Bridget scrolled down through the dates, from most recent to oldest. She saw a handful off the bat that were clearly about homework, easy to tell by the subject headers.
“What am I supposed to be looking for?” Hank asked from over Bridget’s other shoulder.
“Here,” the young woman said, dragging her mouse to highlight a flurry of e-mails from one user in particular. The dates on them were all from August, after the night of Trey’s party. “These aren’t related to schoolwork,” she said.
“How do you know?” Jo asked.
Bridget sighed, clicking on one e-mail as she explained, “Notice anything?”
Jo could see the subject header, Advice, which hardly rang warning bells. It had gone back and forth so many times, there were quite a number of RE:s preceding it. Then Bridget scrolled down the screen to the body of the e-mail.
Walk a Crooked Line Page 10