“No,” she said. “I haven’t found anything on that one. I’m still waiting on the autopsy report, and the coroner is still waiting on the drug test to come back.”
“In other words, we’re nowhere,” he said. I’m sure the Integrated Child Exploitation Unit will want to be kept in the loop, even if we find out something else was going on with the boy’s disappearance. Although it might be a bit early to contact ICE yet.”
“Personally,” she said, “that seems to be where we were right from the beginning, when Jason first went missing.”
“Not necessarily,” he said. “We have one open-and-shut murder case. Now lock it down.”
She nodded, not having any other reason—except for the 9-1-1 call—and took care of the rest of the paperwork and sent it off. Just as she stood and turned around to get coffee, somebody grabbed the pot ahead of her. She frowned, following the hand to find Colby. She watched as he filled his cup. Then he looked at her and said, “Where’s your cup?”
She pointed; he filled it up. “Now at least you’re getting one.”
“Why don’t we just get one of those massive coffeemakers,” she said, “and then we won’t run out so fast.”
“Or,” he said, “we should just get one of those little pod systems, where you can make a cup every time.”
“Then we just fill the dump with more waste,” she said.
“Didn’t realize you were such a conservationist.”
“We’re killing the planet,” she said, “and I try not to go too crazy but, jeez, one coffee filter, one pack of coffee, it should do more than four cups of coffee.”
“It does,” he said. “You forget eight of us are here and our analyst, Reese. Of course she helps the other teams, as well as do our assistants.”
“That just supports the argument that we need a big commercial unit.” Glancing at his face, she added, “I wish we’d hear from the coroner on Jason’s case.”
“What about the family?”
“They’ve been informed,” she said quietly. Those jobs were the worst. “And they, of course, have no idea what’s happened, nor if that location where he was found was important.”
“Nothing? Not an inkling on that location?”
“False Creek is an area they know of,” she said. “Definitely a wealthy community but they’re at the lower end of that margin,” she said. “As expected, they’re devastated, but they didn’t have anything new to offer.”
“Of course not,” he said, “they never do. He’s been missing what, six months?”
“Six months, two days, and three hours,” she said, her tone even lower.
His sharp glance landed on her face and bounced off again. “He is a priority,” he said. “I don’t need to remind you of that.” He turned and walked into his office.
No, he didn’t need to remind her. Any child’s case, particularly this one—a missing boy, who shows up dead and in the condition he was in, six months after he’s been kidnapped—definitely wouldn’t be a secondary case. But, so far, they didn’t have anything. She kept hoping the Forensics Division might find something, anything. At this point all they had was the passerby who saw the little body floating in the water. She’d interviewed that witness herself.
The only good news was, the child hadn’t been in the water very long. They cased all the cameras in the vicinity, but they hadn’t captured any sign of how the child arrived. Of course, about a one-quarter-mile-long section wasn’t covered by any cameras. Had the killer known no cameras were there? Maybe her team should be looking at somebody who worked the area or for the city workers who had access to the cameras.
Thinking about that, she walked back to her desk, carrying her coffee, and sat down at her computer, doing searches for the traffic cams. Logging into the site that she finally had permission to get into, she checked the city cameras heading into that area an hour before the boy was found. There was some seriously heavy traffic, which made no sense, being a weekday.
If it had been a Friday night, yes, but Thursday night? It seemed like there was even more. She ran the date through another Google page to see if something had been going on in Vancouver. And, of course, there was. It was one of the seasonal games. That would explain some of it but not necessarily all the traffic.
Still, she went through the traffic that headed in that direction, but, because the boy was small, he could have been in a back seat; he could have been in a trunk; he could have been in a truck with a topper, and he could have been in a van. Jason was small enough that he could have been in a duffel bag. She searched every vehicle, noting she had just so many options. Too many to narrow it down. The last deceased male child to be found was in Richmond, a hell of a long way from his home.
Were they related? She brought up that case—a little boy named Tam Wong. He’d been missing for six weeks, before his body was found, showing signs of malnutrition and abuse. Jason had been found nude but wrapped in an overlarge jacket. Oddly enough Tam had been found in a similar scenario; he had been nude except for somebody else’s too-big pants. A zap strap on the feet and a belt around the top held him inside. That alone made these two cases connected.
Looking at that and jotting down notes, she searched through other cases of dead children, looking for mismatched or oversize clothing for the victim or no clothing at all. She came up with a couple others who were possible. One was from six years ago, and another was from four years ago. She frowned because that would be every two years, although the timeline between the last two would have shortened that up. And the oddity in that was a little girl had gone missing four years ago. She’d been four, four and a half, at the time that she’d disappeared, but her body had never been found. So why the hell had it come up on her search? She noted that a pile of clothing had been recovered. It had been her clothing, plus an additional dress that had been too large for her.
“Weird,” she murmured.
She printed off that page and the other ones that she had, gathering the case numbers so she could pull the physical files. She much preferred a hard copy, even though everything was digital these days. She could have asked Reese, their analyst, to pull the material, but she didn’t want to at this point. It could end up being nothing, and everyone was swamped already. It was faster to search in digital but easier on her eyes to review the information in printed copy. She had compiled quite a case file list. She wanted a place to put them all up, but this room didn’t have adequate wall space for it. She frowned, as she connected four more cases similar to Jason’s—one from fifteen years ago and one from eight years ago—and now she had eight.
She got up with the list of case numbers and walked to Colby’s office. He looked up and said, “I hope you’ve got a really big problem that will save me from going to these meetings this afternoon. Maybe a terrorist cell just blew up? Or a serial killer? Have we got a hijacking? Something?”