“Your parents.”
“Only them, yes, only my parents came to visit me,” he repeated. “And I don’t know if people were following me, like some fan club. And, if I didn’t know about it, what can I say?”
“Nothing,” she agreed.
“Did you ever get any DNA from any of the other sites?” Rick asked.
“One,” she replied, “and the current one we’re checking right now but haven’t heard back from Forensics.”
“This guy has been really clean,” Rick noted.
“Yes, at least since the beginning.”
He nodded. “He was clean then too. It was just me and my family, but then we all lived there.” He turned to stare at the house. “I can’t imagine what Mom went through.”
“Neither can I,” Kate noted. “So you have nothing to give us? No names, no dates, no nothing?”
He spun back a little too quickly for her liking. “I already told you that.”
“Okay, fine,” she stated. “Now I’ll talk to your mom. Either I can go knock on the front door or you can send her out to talk to me.” He frowned at her, but she held up a hand. “Don’t even start. We need to talk to her.”
“Fine. Okay, I’ll send her out. Please don’t upset her.” He turned and stormed up the stairs.
She turned to look at Rodney. “What do you think?”
“Something isn’t adding up.”
“Yeah, we need that DNA,” she stated. “You want to make a phone call?”
He nodded. “You already knew the uncle, that his visits and the murders didn’t line up with his jail terms, didn’t you?”
She nodded. “Yeah, I figured as much.”
“Are you still looking at the kid?” Rodney asked.
“It’s around the kid. It’s about the kid. I just don’t know how much of itisthe kid.”
He nodded. “It’s pretty sad to think that this could be going on.”
As she looked up, Rick’s mother stepped out onto the porch and waved them to join her. “I’m not coming down there,” she stated. “I can’t do stairs at the best of times.”
“How do you get up there?” Kate asked.
“Well, the house is built into a hill, in case you didn’t notice,” she explained. “So the car is on the ground level at the back of the house, with easy access inside for me. So I avoid these front steps that are just hard on my knees.”
Kate realized that the older woman walked with a decided limp. “I’m sorry. Are you all right?”
“Nothing that time won’t heal,” she replied, with a wave of her hand. “Now my son said you have more questions. Have you cleared him yet?”
“I’m sorry,” she stated. “We’re still working on that.”
The woman snorted. “You know he’ll be dead of old age before you ever get that fixed, right?”
“We’re working on it,” Kate repeated gently. “When you visited your son in prison…” Kate began, and then she asked the mother the same questions that she had asked Rick. Neither were too happy about answering them. Had to be done regardless.
She and Rodney returned to her car. “Let’s go check out their previous home, the site of the first murder, and let me just take in the whole scene.” And that’s what they did.
Unfortunately it led them nowhere.