“Don’t even know what the hell that is anymore,” she replied. “My stomach thinks my throat has been cut.” At that, she remembered what happened to these women and winced. “Oh, crap, poor choice of words. Never mind the food. I’ll just grab something in a bit.”
“Okay, I’ll see you in an hour or so.”
With any luck, she might be up to speed in an hour; she hated being behind the curve on information. If Rodney—or Reese and her two assistants or the IT techs or whomever—had found something that could potentially help with this puzzle, she needed to know every detail. She printed off all the info Rodney had forwarded to her, then grabbed her first cup of coffee.
As she headed toward her desk, she picked up her print job and dropped that on her desk, then sat down, her feet up on her desk, and started reading. Not a whole lot here, but enough that she had to start several searches. By the time she was done, she could confirm Rick’s location per murder site.
At the time of the two murders in Alberta, the kid had been in juvie. In Alberta. For the two murders in Saskatchewan, he was doing time in an adult prison. In Saskatchewan. She frowned as she thought about that.
He hadn’t had an easy time in prison either. Did he have people who moved with him? Did he have people he knew from the system? Where the hell was this going? She frowned and realized it was pretty damn early to be making phone calls, but if Rick Lord was going to work today, she needed to see this kid before work.
She phoned him, and, when she got a cranky voice on the other end, she identified herself and said, “We need to have a talk.”
“I’ve done all the talking I’m going to,” he snapped. “My mother has gotten a lawyer for me. You want to talk, you talk to the lawyer.” Rick promptly hung up.
She stared down at the phone. “Little prick.” At the same time, that wasn’t very helpful because he hadn’t given her the name of his new attorney. She called him back. “In order to contact your lawyer, I need to know who it is.”
He asked, “Really?”
“Yeah, idiot. How do you expect me to contact anybody if I don’t know who it is?”
“So you’ll actually talk to my lawyer?”
“If that’s what you want, yes. It makes you look suspicious as hell but whatever.”
“Hey, hey, hey,” he replied, “what do you expect? You said I wasn’t a suspect.”
“I said that we were doing everything we could to clear you,” she muttered, “so don’t go putting words in my mouth.”
He frowned. “That doesn’t sound quite like the same thing.”
“That’s because it isn’t, but, if you didn’t have anything to do with it, you don’t have anything to worry about.”
“Oh, no, you don’t,” he replied. “I listened to that shit last time, and look where I ended up.”
“You also confessed,” she reminded him, “a fact that you keep trying to ignore.”
“That’s because I don’t want to remember it,” he snapped.
“So have you got a few minutes now?”
“Maybe. What do you want?” he asked in a grumbling voice.
“When you were in juvie,” she began, “you spent time in Alberta, didn’t you?”
“BC and Alberta, and I spent a couple weeks doing some special research bullshit in Manitoba and Saskatchewan.”
“Did you go alone?”
“Sometimes my mom came,” he replied. “Sometimes my dad.”
“Anybody else?”
“Yeah, lawyers, probation officers, and scientists. Whoever it was who was trying to study my brain to figure out why I supposedly did this. You know they really could have saved themselves a ton of money and just listened to me.”
“Don’t forget that whole ‘you confessed’ thing. That in itself is something they probably want to study, to understand why you would confess. Especially if you didn’t do it.”
“What do you meanespecially?” he snapped. “I told you that I didn’t.”