“There is, indeed,” she agreed, “and that includes my work too.”
“And you’re at the bottom, I presume,” he said, with a laugh. “Otherwise, you wouldn’t be calling me.”
“I don’t know about the bottom,” she replied. “No, I’m definitely not at the bottom anymore, but I’m not at the top either.”
“Do you want to be?” he asked.
Hearing a sense of real curiosity in his voice, she replied, “No, I’m doing what I want to do, and that involves being on the streets and handling these cases. I don’t do well with politics and all that bending and bowing that’s needed to make shit happen.”
“No, I don’t imagine you are.” He laughed. “Listen. I’ve got to go to work. So do me a favor. Maybe, this time, you guys could work to set me free instead of putting me away.”
“Do me a favor,” she replied. “This time, don’t confess to something you didn’t do.” And, on that note, she ended the call. She sat here, staring at her phone for a long minute. When she looked up, Rodney stood in front of her. She gave a start. “Jesus! I didn’t even hear you come in.”
“I came in around the back,” he replied, lifting the cup of coffee in his hand. “You didn’t even finish the pot.”
“Nope,” she murmured, “just got off the phone with the kid.”
“Are we calling him in?”
“I’ll do some research first to see if I can get a timeline on when he had visits outside.”
He looked at her and nodded. “Are we thinking he did these other murders?”
“No,” she replied, “but somebody knew his schedule, and somebody knew when and where was a really good time that Rick could be pinned for murder again.”
“And yet nobody looked at it at the time,” Rodney noted.
“No, and I’m thinking that’s probably because all these cases weren’t linked closely enough. But, at any point in time, like right now, when somebody finally got around to connecting all this shit, Rick does look like a really nice viable option.”
“Yet he was a kid and in juvie at first, right?”
“Yeah, but, like we know, he moved around to other prisons,” she noted. “Plus he did some therapy sessions in a special program in Alberta for eight weeks—over the same time period of those two Alberta cases.”
“So he was there at the time?”
She nodded slowly.
“Well, Jesus, let’s bring him in.”
“He was in jail though. Remember that,” she noted.
He nodded slowly. “So he didn’t have access then.”
“That’s where the problem comes in,” she added. “His mother was in a bad accident, when his parents came to Alberta for a visit, but the kid didn’t give me the details of what happened to her. Anyway she was in the hospital, and he eventually was given dispensation to go see her. But I can’t imagine that he was given enough free rein to go kidnap, torture, and kill somebody, much lesstwovictims.”
“No, of course not,” Rodney agreed. “So either it’s somebody close to him or somebody who knew him.”
“We’ll have to run down everybody who handled his case and who brought him to Alberta for the counseling program and all that special dispensation for hospital visits.”
“Jesus.” Rodney shook his head. “Okay, I’ll start with the probation officer and see what he can tell me.”
“You think that’ll give you anything we don’t already know?”
“I don’t know,” he admitted, “but we’ll have to go deep into his probation file to get something. So the probation officer might know more about it than we do.”
“Maybe, let’s see what we can dig out of these murder files. I wish they didn’t have just the basics,” she moaned.
“But it’s the basics that we normally need. When you start talking this kind of stuff, however, we need to go that much deeper.”