“Another good possibility,” she agreed. “As soon as we know on the DNA—which hopefully we can get a rush job on—then we couldpotentiallycompletely reanalyze what’s going on here.” She thought about it and then said, “It’s almost like we need to start right at the beginning again.”
“That’s where we have been,” he stated in protest.
“Yes, but the fact that the two Alberta cases have some DNA changes everything.”
“And do you think that’s because the killer got sloppy?”
“Or were we sloppy?” she asked, looking at him.
“Or maybe any DNA from the first case just wasn’t tested because we had the kid’s confession.”
At that, they both dove for the case records. “Most of it wasn’t tested,” she murmured.
“A ton of the kid’s DNA was there, but he lived in the house, so most of it wasn’t considered useful.”
She raised both her hands in frustration. “And that’s partly what clinched the deal. His DNAwaseverywhere.”
Owen nodded. “Yeah, everybody and their proverbial dog had DNA there, but why wouldn’t they? It was their home.”
“Right, so everybody in the family had a reason to have their DNA there,” she noted, “and no other DNA was found. So now what we need to do is compare all that DNA against the DNA in Alberta.”
“Wouldn’t it be in the database?” Owen asked.
“Not necessarily,” she noted, looking at him suddenly. “Not if you think about it. The kid’s DNA was everything, and yet it was nothing.” He stared at her in surprise, but she shrugged. “He confessed, and that made it a slam dunk. Game over. So, what we need to do is make sure that the kid’s DNA was even entered,” she noted, “and, while we’re at it, all the comparable DNA as well.”
He shrugged. “I can check up on that. I know the whole DNA database concept was pretty early back then.”
“Early, plus DNA wasn’t trusted.”
“Agreed,” he said. “Leave that with me.”
“Okay, good enough.” She scrubbed her face. “I’ll go through all the files—of the kid’s sister, of Cherry, compared to those two Alberta cases—and see if I can come up with anything either different or so unique as to be the same killer here locally.”
“It’s all so unique that it has to be the same person,” Owen stated.
“Maybe so, and I get that, but I need to see it all with my own eyes.”
With that, she grabbed the folders that had been printed off, poured herself a coffee, and walked into one of the empty interview rooms. There she sat down at an empty table and spread out the cases. As she went through the details from the autopsy reports, she realized that they were almost identical.Almost.
A little bit more ingenuity with each successive kill, a few more burns on the skin in several places, as if he were experimenting to fine-tune maximum pain with each woman. Yet the rest remained consistent. Both ankles broken, both wrists broken, and once again, a knitting needle through the hearts. All these victims looked similar. The same as the current missing woman, Chelice. A missing woman who they were still trying to track down. And every clue that Kate could possibly find was desperately needed right now. As she wandered through the various facts and figures, she took notes.
By the time she closed the folders, she realized that she wasn’t any closer to finding the killer, yet knew, without a doubt, that the same one who had killed the kid’s sis had also killed Cherry and the two women in Alberta, as he was planning to kill Chelice. He’d cemented a pattern, with a little bit of experimentation on the side. She wasn’t sure it was a sane mind that had done this because who could? Yet sociopaths were well known in the criminal world. They just didn’t give a shit. With that, she got up, collected her folders, and walked back to the bullpen. Then she sat down and called someone she knew in Missing Persons. “Any updates on your missing girl, Chelice?”
“No, not yet,” her friend said. “What’s this I hear that she might be related to something going on in your world?”
“Rumors travel fast,” Kate noted lightly, not knowing how to explain Simon’s visions.
“Just because we have a missing woman who looks similar to other cases,” her contact noted, “doesn’t make it so.”
“No, it doesn’t. As a matter of fact, it’s almost a red herring that takes us away from our cases.”
“And yet you were tracking and talking to the witnesses and relationships in Chelice’s world.”
“Yes,” Kate admitted. “We had to be sure that it wasn’t related.”
“Did you get that assurance?”
“No,” she replied, “we didn’t. Not at all.”