“I do,” Kate said. “But I have this nagging thought at the back of my head, and I don’t like it.”
“Since when is that new,” Lilliana said. “You brought all these cases up to the front. Give your head a rest. We have that meeting now, so let’s go.”
Slowly Kate got to her feet, threw back the rest of her coffee, grabbed her notepad and pen, and walked through the bullpen, past the coffeepot. Lo and behold, there was a little bit left. She quickly drained it into her cup and carried on.
As she sat down in the meeting room, she mulled over the fact that people from her supposed team were talking to her now, since Colby’s lecture. Some still had the same ol’ animosity. Back when she’d been a rookie—for a long time—as long as she did everything right, everybody who’d knocked her had eventually come to respect her. She thought she’d use the same tactic here, but, with her added experience, she no longer gave a shit about peer acceptance. And yet, if that were true, why the hell had these last few months been so hard on her?
When Colby walked in, he said, “You better have some news for me.” And he looked directly at Kate.
She gave him a wan smile. “Outside of the fact that the little girl is dead, appears to have a broken neck, she was also sickly, so we’re waiting on the autopsy report now,” she said. “I spoke with the parents. Obviously they’re devastated. They have no understanding, even at this point in time, that their little girl is gone,” she said quietly.
He nodded. “What about your buddy?”
“I thought these two were picking him up.” She turned to look at her other team members.
Colby turned his attention to Rodney and Owen. “Did you?”
“No,” he said, “short of having a warrant to go into his place, he is not answering.”
Colby shot his gaze back to her. “Will you have any better luck?”
Her eyebrows slowly rose. “I might,” she acknowledged, with a nod.
“So, Rodney, you are her sidekick.”
Rodney just nodded.
Colby turned his piercing gaze to Owen and Lilliana. “What about the other little boy?”
“He is in the hospital, sedated. He was sexually abused. A little bit of time will heal that physically—the mental, psychological, not likely. The parents are in the hospital with him.”
“Good, do we have any DNA, any forensics, anything on the boy?”
“They’re on it, but, so far, I haven’t heard or seen any report of it.”
He pivoted to Kate. “And you? Did you come up with anything regarding the other man who was approaching the child?”
She shook her head. “No, just an impression in my head. I haven’t got it down on paper.”
“Do you want to work with the sketch artist?”
“Nothing in my head for him to work with.”
“I could comment on that,” Rodney said from the front. Muttered titters came around room, and she just ignored them.
“People, at the end of the shift, I want something on my desk,” snapped Colby. “I want something concrete. If you need to grab some street clothes cops to help with interviews, do so, but we need answers, and we need them today.”
Everybody got up but her. Colby looked at her and asked, “What are you up to?”
“I’m going to set up my boards in the conference room. I brought them from home. Then I’m going to try and figure out why these cases were never solved.”
He just stared at her.
She shrugged. “I get that we didn’t have the links between them before. What I don’t get,” she said, “is that these dead children cases are still all unsolved.”
“Some of them are from a long time ago,” he reminded her. “Don’t criticize the teams who have gone before you. We didn’t have DNA from any potential suspects. We didn’t have countrywide digital connections to other PDs. You know that we have more pending cases to handle that do tend to overshadow the dead-end cold cases. We didn’t have a lot of what you have today. The question really is, how long will it take you to solve this now?”
“No clue,” she said, “but hopefully by next Monday.”