Beneath the Ashes

by Dea Poirier

  A rap at the door draws my attention, and I slip back outside. Austin stands in front of me, a sheet of paper clutched in her hands.

  “I spoke to someone in the human resources department. They confirmed that he was not at the hospital on February twenty-first, twenty-fifth, or twenty-sixth during the times the murders likely would have taken place.”

  I give this information to Sergeant Pelletier—who is still working on securing a warrant—and back out of his office. Austin retreats to her desk, and I go back to the interrogation room.

  An hour later, Trent is still silent on his side of the table. Pelletier knocks on the door. Trent mumbles something behind me as I exit the room. Sergeant Pelletier stands just outside, a smile lingering on thin lips.

  “We got the warrant.”

  With Ibben placed in the back of one of the cruisers, we curve through Camden to a small house right off the water. Blake slides out of his patrol car, Ibben in the back staring out at us. We prefer not to break down the door if we don’t have to, and Ibben offered us the keys willingly if he was allowed to sit outside while the search took place. The wood-frame house looks like it used to be a periwinkle blue, but now there’s so much moss clinging to the sides it looks like it’s five years from being reclaimed by nature.

  Two officers get the door open, and I follow them inside. I expect the house to smell like death inside. It just smells like stale cigarette smoke. The interior of the house feels like I’ve stepped into some time warp. It’s got brown shag carpet, yellow wallpaper, huge glass lamps with amber-colored shades. On the walls, though, hangs something more recent—framed posters of women in bikinis. The stark contrast would be humorous if the situation were different. I give the house a once-over, getting an idea of its layout.

  “I’ll take the bedroom,” I say, heading toward the hallway that leads to the left.

  The bedroom is in worse shape than the rest of the house. Piles of dirty clothes cover most of the floor, along with mismatched shoes. There are stacks of used plates on the nightstand. The stink of dust and sweat is so thick in the air I’m tempted to open a window. It’s stifling in here, only making matters worse. I head for the dresser and look through the drawers first. In the room to my left, I hear another cop searching.

  “Found a computer!” a man calls. If Trent had pictures on his phone, I can only imagine what’s on the computer. Most phones these days automatically back up to a computer or to the cloud. If he deleted pictures on his phone, there may still be traces elsewhere.

  At the bottom of one of his drawers, I find a silver necklace with a mermaid on it. I’m not sure if it’s evidence or not. I roll the charm over my gloved fingers and drop it into a plastic bag resting on the top of the dresser.

  In subsequent drawers I find other similar tokens: a key chain, a class ring, another necklace—this one a cross. My instinct tells me that they’re trophies. But I don’t dare say it aloud. We need to verify with the families to see if they recognize them. I bag them all, just in case.

  Other than the trophies, there’s nothing in here that stands out. I walk to the room to the left of the bedroom, where I heard the laptop was found. One officer now searches the rest of the office, while Maggie—a tech I’ve seen at the station a few times—clicks away on the computer.

  “Find anything?” I ask.

  She nods. “He has a link between his phone and laptop. Any picture taken on his phone is automatically backed up here and on the cloud.”

  My heart pounds, and excitement floods my veins. I chew the inside of my cheek. This could be it. We could nail this guy to the fucking wall with whatever is on this laptop.

  “And?” I ask when she doesn’t continue. I walk around so I can see the screen.

  “I’m just a tech, so I’m not entirely sure what it is I’m looking for, but there are lots of pictures here,” she says while clicking through folders.

  My eyes lock on the screen, and a picture opens in a large window, a selfie. Then pictures of memes, porn, and a flash of a face, but it’s gone so fast I nearly miss it. My breath catches, and the tension in the room expands, thickening like a cloud around me.

  “Stop. Go back,” I direct her.

  She clicks twice; an image fills the screen. There’s a picture of a woman with dark hair asleep in a hospital bed, her gown pulled to the side to expose her breast. This isn’t a woman I recognize, not one of the victims I’ve seen. But she clearly didn’t consent to this.

  “Continue, please.”

  She starts clicking almost immediately. More pictures of the same woman, several focused on just her breast. Then there’s more filler, a picture of all black—maybe the inside of a pocket—then a blurred figure, shoes, a squirrel, another meme, a different woman.

  “Slow down, please,” I say, trying to focus on the features. I have seen this woman before. Her slim nose, dark hair: that’s Melanie. In these pictures he’s not just exposing her breasts while she’s asleep; he’s taken a picture of her underwear, pulling it to the side to expose her completely.

  “Sergeant,” I yell, and after a few moments he strides into the room, his cell phone clutched to his ear.

  “Let me call you back,” he says, shoving the phone into his pocket. “What do we have?” His eyes flick from Maggie to me.

  “Show him the last four pictures, please,” I say as Sergeant Pelletier crowds around the desk with us and hunches over to see the screen.

  She flips through the pictures again, slower this time.

  “Look familiar?” I ask.

  Sergeant Pelletier crosses his arms and stares at the scene. His mouth is a thin line, his expression unreadable. There must be emotions hiding behind his dark eyes, but he doesn’t show any of them.

  “I need the time stamps from these pictures so we can figure out how close they were to when the victims disappeared,” he instructs Maggie. “Claire, come with me. The DA will want to charge him formally for the child pornography and voyeurism. Maybe that’ll make him talk.”

  Even if the pictures were taken of the victims close to their deaths, unless we can prove that the images were taken in that motel room, it’s not going to do us much good. It’s still circumstantial evidence. While I drive back to the station, I have Austin call Jessica’s, Asha’s, and Melanie’s parents to see if they can identify any of the jewelry that we’ve found in Trent’s home. After texting pictures, we confirm one bracelet belonged to Asha, a necklace to Jessica, and a ring to Melanie. While it’s great that the parents have identified them, they don’t remember what jewelry their daughters were wearing the day of their deaths.

  Once inside the station, we head to the bull pen. Sergeant Pelletier reads Trent his Miranda rights and leads him to a cell. While they process him, I go over what we’ve found and try to gather my thoughts for the questioning. Once they’re done with him, they deposit him back in the interrogation room.

  Austin and I take a few minutes to catch up. Though Trent didn’t give us anything the first time we questioned him, maybe being faced with all this evidence, what we know, will grease his lips some. With the plastic bags of jewelry we found at his place laced between my fingers, I walk into the room.

  Trent’s jaw is set when Blake hauls him inside. His eyes are tight, fixed straight ahead on the table until he takes a seat. He glances at me, then Austin, as we sit across the table from him. I slap a folder down between us, then drop the evidence bags. Though he says nothing, I watch his gaze trace over the bags. His eyes narrow, and he licks his lips before looking back up, his jaw tense.

  “Do you recognize these?” I ask, tapping the bag, the necklace inside shifting.

  “You’ve got nothing on me. None of my DNA. Nothing.” He practically hisses the words at me.

  It catches me off guard. I expected silence. Denial. Something else. Starting at DNA is a very direct approach.

  “And how are you so sure that we don’t have your DNA?” Austin asks, her tone combative.

  “Becau
se I didn’t kill them,” he says and cocks his head. His eyes gleam as he speaks.

  “But you know who did?” I arch an eyebrow.

  “I’m not a snitch.” He snaps the words at me and clenches his fists atop the table.

  “You may not be a snitch, but this”—I jab at the plastic bags, my finger slamming into the surface—“and those pictures, that sure makes you look guilty. Vera informed us that several of those victims on your phone were underage. We’ve got you on child porn, along with several other charges I know will come down from the DA. But if you didn’t kill these girls, you’ve got to give me more; otherwise, you’re going to be charged with murder, Trent.” I’m bluffing. We don’t have enough to charge him with murder, but if he thinks we do, maybe that will grease his jaws. Either way this guy is going to jail, but if he’s going to say that he didn’t do this, I have to know who did.

  There’s a knock at the door. It pops open, and Sergeant Pelletier waves me out. Austin and I stride out of the room together. Behind the sergeant, a woman in a sleek black suit well fitted to her wide frame stands with her arms crossed.

  “Claire, this is District Attorney Victoria Parker.”

  She raises her chin slightly but doesn’t extend her hand.

  “My office is going to take it from here,” she says.

  “Trent is saying that he didn’t commit these murders,” I say to Sergeant Pelletier. We’re not ready for a DA to take this. The case hasn’t been built enough. I might be able to bluff Trent into talking, but if they try to proceed with only what we have right now, it’s too circumstantial for a murder charge. There’s enough to hold him on the two other charges, though; that will at least get him off the streets for now. I don’t expect Trent to be completely truthful, but it still remains to be proven that he killed these women—and that he did so alone.

  She offers me a tight, patronizing smile, her eyes saying what she doesn’t. Of course that’s what he’s saying. What she really says is, “My team is used to situations like this; don’t you worry. The Maine State Police will be interrogating him after we get him in the system on his current charges.”

  “And what if he didn’t commit the murders?” I ask, probably a bit more forcefully than I should to a DA.

  “Could you give us a minute?” Sergeant Pelletier asks, glancing to the DA.

  She waves her hand as if extending permission. We walk together to his office, and he shuts the door once we’re inside. He doesn’t walk to his desk; instead, he lingers near the window with his arms crossed. “Look, they need to take Trent to charge him, but unless he confesses, as you know, we can’t charge him for the murders.”

  “Then they should let us question him more. We might be able to get it out of him,” I argue. I hate when a DA swoops in and takes a suspect before I’m done with them.

  “They have solid evidence of a crime that they can charge him with now. You can always go to the jail to interview him more if you need. That’s just how it works. We don’t have the resources to hold him long term here. They’ll question Trent on their own. If they get anything, they’ll pass it to us.” Annoyance leaches into his words, but I can’t tell if it’s aimed at me or at the DA for intruding.

  I grit my teeth in an effort to bite back my frustrations; otherwise I’ll say something that I regret. I know that much at least.

  “Have we turned over Trent’s devices yet?” I ask, an idea formulating in my mind.

  “No, not yet.”

  “Don’t mention it to the DA, or stall if you have to. I need Kenneth to look at the phone before we let them take it,” I say.

  He nods, his lips curving slightly. It’s the closest to a smile I’ve seen on his face. “I’ll do what I can.”

  As I stride from his office, I avoid looking in the direction of the DA. I walk to Clint’s desk, and he glances up at me, his dark eyes shadowed by his brow.

  “I need the phone we got from Ibben,” I say, low enough that I’m sure my voice doesn’t carry over the dull roar in the room.

  He grabs the phone from atop a stack of documents near his monitor. It slides around in the plastic bag as he hands it over. “I was just about to give it to Kenneth.”

  “I’ll handle it, thank you,” I say before grabbing the phone and weaving through the bull pen back to the tech’s office. When I open the door, I find Maggie, the tech girl from Trent’s house, sitting on the desk next to Kenneth. I caught her in the middle of rehashing the scene to him.

  “Hi, Detective,” he says when he looks up.

  “Sorry,” Maggie says before slipping off the desk and sneaking around me out of the room.

  “I didn’t mean to interrupt, but I was hoping you could look at this phone. We need it ASAP. The DA is going to take it.”

  He takes the phone as I hold it out. While being mindful of the plastic bag, he opens it up and plugs a cable into the phone.

  “What’s the priority on this?”

  “The phone number, text messages in and out, saved contacts. I need to know if this is the burner phone that’s been messaging our victims,” I say. My heart pounds as I try to estimate how much time we’ll have with this phone—it can’t be more than twenty minutes. I say a silent prayer that we can get what we need in that time.

  “Got it,” he says, his attention snapping back to the computer. I watch as he opens several windows, his fingers flying over the keyboard.

  My phone buzzes, and I glance at it, finding a text from Sergeant Pelletier. The DA is asking about the phone.

  “How long are we looking at?” I ask Kenneth as sweat prickles my palms.

  “I can clone the phone, all but the pictures, in ten minutes,” he says, without taking his eyes off the screen.

  “How much longer would the pictures take?” I know I can buy us ten minutes, but any more than that is pushing it.

  “An hour, I’d guess, based on how many he has on here.”

  I text Sergeant Pelletier. I need ten minutes.

  Within a few seconds my phone buzzes with a reply. I’ll do what I can.

  A progress bar appears on Kenneth’s screen. I watch it carefully, anxiety needling beneath my skin. If nothing else, what’s on this phone could help make or break a murder case against Trent. There’s too much on the line for these files to go to the DA without us getting answers. I know I might get a slap on the wrist for not following procedures, but I’m on loan to Camden. Quite frankly, as long as I solve this case, I don’t care what the DA tries to do to me.

  My phone vibrates again with another message from Sergeant Pelletier. They’ve got Trent in a car, she needs the phone ASAP.

  The progress bar is still only twenty-five percent complete. I glance at the screen; it’s only been three minutes since his last text. How did they get him in the car so fast?

  I need a few more minutes, I reply, and my fingers twitch against my leg as I watch the bar. Footsteps echo in the hall as it reaches the halfway point.

  “Come on, come on,” I mumble to myself, as if it’ll do me any good. My heart pounds as the footsteps draw closer. The progress bar ticks up: fifty-five percent, sixty, sixty-five.

  The door cracks open, and Sergeant Pelletier peeks in at both of us. “We’ve got to hand it over,” he says.

  The progress bar climbs, ticking higher, closer to one hundred. A clicking fills the hall, high heels ticking on the tile.

  “She’s coming,” he says, as if I hadn’t put it together myself.

  Sweat beads on the back of my neck. Ninety percent. The footsteps are right outside the door. Our time is up. I take a step forward as it hits ninety-five.

  “I need that phone,” the DA says from the hall.

  I scoop up the phone inside the bag, ready to yank the cable out the second it hits one hundred. It ticks higher, hovering at ninety-nine. Once it moves, I pull out the cable and hit the button on the side to dim the screen before I resecure the bag.

  “Thank you,” I say to Sergeant Pelletier as I pass it off to
him. The moment he curls his fingers around it, the DA pops her head in the room.

  “Got it,” Sergeant Pelletier says as he passes it to her. She flashes us a shark’s smile, then clicks her way back down the hall.

  “We got it, right?” I ask as I turn back to Kenneth.

  “We did,” he says, just as the printer to his right begins to spit out pages. “So first”—he types something on the screen, and a window starts to fill with text—“it’s not a burner phone.”

  I deflate. I’d really hoped that we had him nailed. But just because this phone isn’t a burner doesn’t mean that he doesn’t have a second phone. We just may have not found it.

  “But,” he says as he flourishes the papers toward me, “he has texts from the burner number with the coordinates.”

  I snatch the papers and pore over them. Sure enough, he received all the texts that the rest of the victims did. Was he there too? Did he meet them at the hospital or at the ATV races? The threads are all there, but I can’t see how they connect.

  “Thank you, Kenneth. I owe you a beer,” I say as I flip through the pages.

  The buzzing of the servers fades as I walk down the hall toward the bull pen, glancing at the texts that Kenneth printed out for me. But something sticks out to me about them. There are only incoming messages, and very few at that. Either he was very fastidious cleaning out old texts, or there’s something else—he had another phone. I weave through the desks toward Blake, Zane, and Clint.

  “When we searched Trent’s house, are we sure there wasn’t another cell phone?”

  Blake and Zane exchange a look. “I didn’t see one,” Zane says.

  “Me neither,” Blake adds.

  “Did we search his car?”

  Austin chimes in. “His car wasn’t part of the warrant.”

  I’ll have to ask Sergeant Pelletier about expanding the warrant, though I don’t know if they’ll do it at our request now or if it has to go through the DA.