“I’d be happy to, what’s his name? I’ll go ahead and contact him and have both of you brought down to the station for questioning.”
Dead silence came from the other end of the phone. “Why are you doing this?” he ranted.
“I just said that I needed to speak to your wife. So you give me the information, or I’ll get a warrant, and I’ll come and search your house.”
“You can’t do that.”
“Come to the station. Produce your wife, healthy and willing to be here, and we’ll talk. Otherwise I’ll treat your wife as a hostage and come with a SWAT team.” And, with that, she hung up, winced. “A bit too much, huh?”
“Not too much,” Rodney said. “When you think about it, if she’s being held against her will, and nobody will let her talk to you, then it’s a situation where she needs rescuing to some degree.”
“Something is going on,” Lilliana said, “and, yeah, it involves Simon, so I’m inclined to agree with him here.”
“Hey, maybe this Pamela ties in the annual deaths in that area with the additional recent ones. I don’t know,” Kate snapped. “This lack of cooperation—from Brandon, from the faculty dean, now with Pamela’s family—it’s just so frustrating. But why would it have anything to do with these kids at the university?”
“Yeah? What about that Brandon kid?” Lilliana asked.
“Nothing new. I’m still waiting on the forensics reports on the two females.” Just then an email popped up, abeepsignaling her. “And here they are now. So, for Paula, there is no forensic evidence in particular, other than the bump on her head. Two kinds of blood were found on the carpet in the dorm room, verifying that was the crime scene—which we already knew—and tons of fingerprints were found. It’s a student residence, so that is to be expected, and they have lots of parties. DNA from multiple people in the bedding as well.” She winced at that. “So, who the hell knows if any of that leads us anywhere?”
“And what about the other one, whose blood is also on the carpet? Candy, is it?” Lilliana asked.
“Candy’s case has one distinction. The same projectile at the side of the head, like with Sally, but also drugs were in her system.”
“Drugs, that’s new,” Rodney said.
Kate nodded. “Recreational? It looks like quite a cocktail.” She frowned.
“So they really did party,” Lilliana stated.
“Alcohol too.” Kate sighed at that.
“Would she have even been capable of riding a bike?” Rodney asked.
“I don’t know.” Kate picked up the phone and contacted Dr. Smidge.
When he answered, he was cranky and fed up. “You better not have any more victims.”
“No, but I do have questions.”
“I don’t have any answers.”
She smiled. “I’m looking at the cocktail of drugs and alcohol that you found in Candy’s system. Would she have been capable of riding a bike?”
“Maybe, but not too far. She probably could have managed, if she got balanced and had some help. She could have gone for a fair bit, considering. It’s amazing what the human body and the human mind can do.”
“Would she have ridden out in the middle of traffic like that?”
“That’s also quite possible, though—at the time of Candy’s death, which would have been a few hours after Paula’s TOD of about four a.m.—I don’t know how much traffic there even would have been.”
“If she was down there at that intersection and rode out into the middle of it, then it’s quite possible she rode straight into a car, like somebody heading to work in the morning, not expecting to see a cyclist pull out in front of them.”
“It’s possible. I found some damage from a collision, but it’s not bad.”
“Would the drugs have killed her?”
“It’s hard to say. It was definitely a cocktail.”
“Are we thinking she took it willingly?” Kate asked.