A door was in front of them. It was barely standing, and it went out to a balcony, and a shutter was over it. But he pulled both open, and there, across the street, was a huge building. And, sure enough, it had the same damn window on it.
She shook her head. “You know that I don’t really doubt you,” she explained, “but sometimes I do. And then this happens, and I find out that I’m full of shit and that you’re right.”
He laughed. “Well, in this case, I’m just relieved to see it because the only other answer for me would have been yet another victim out there somewhere, and I couldn’t stand that.”
“No more victims,” she confirmed. “The paperwork will be brutal, however, and it’ll take us a long time to get to the bottom of all that he did. Plus I’ve got a prostitute’s body missing somewhere, the true victim zero,” she noted, “though, in this case, it’s probably sitting in the morgue, unidentified.”
“It could have been buried even, as a Jane Doe, since it was so many years ago.”
She nodded. “Probably so. Hopefully they took DNA.”
“Surely they did,” he noted. “You’ll run it and test it later.”
“Yet we didn’t find that at the kid’s house.”
“Nope. Maybe because he didn’t have her there very long.”
“Maybe. Or maybe he cleaned up afterward. I don’t know. We’ll figure it out,” she stated. “You need to go home to get some rest.”
“I’ll go get your stuff first. Be right back.”
She nodded and turned to see that Rodney had just arrived on the scene. He walked over, gave her a big fat grin, and said, “So you found Chelice, huh?”
“Yeah, we did.” She nodded and pointed out the balcony to the window in the building across the way.
He stared. “Jesus, so Simon was right.”
“Absolutely. He’s gone down to get my stuff from his car, so he can leave and go home.”
“We should probably get a statement from him.”
“We’ll get that tomorrow,” she said absentmindedly. “He’s pretty overwhelmed at the moment.”
“With good cause, it’s a hell of a job you two did. I didn’t even think about doing a stakeout because I didn’t really expect it would be any of the family.”
“Well, if we can believe the stepfather, it sounds like the kid actually did kill his sister. He was drunk and high on drugs, and, at the goading of his stepfather, killed her under the influence, never really knowing what exactly happened. Rick confessed because he killed her,” she noted. “Yet it was the stepfather who tortured her.”
“Why?” he asked.
“She caught him fighting with a prostitute that he’d kept too long. So he got mad and killed the prostitute, and then he dealt with the stepdaughter before she could turn him in.”
“And the torture?”
“She wouldn’t shut up about how evil he was and how he would go to hell, and apparently she didn’t die easily, and she didn’t die fast, and the whole time she gave him shit.”
“I like her spirit.”
“Yeah, but it also made her life and her death a whole lot harder.”
“Yet, in the end, we can still only be who we are,” he noted quietly.
She turned and looked at him. “You know what? That’s a really lovely thing to say. Because she did her best the whole time. She thought her brother would save her, but instead he’s the one who dealt the final blow.”
“Asshole.”
“I’m not even sure he knows he did it,” she murmured, “and he’s already been tried and convicted.”
“At least now he can get the truth. I wonder how that’ll make him feel.”