He lifted his head and looked at her, looked at the photos. “The mark?”
She nodded.
“Ask. It’s a good idea. Should have done that right off.”
She nodded, walked to her desk, and sat down. Dennis, at ICE, answered the phone on the first ring. She quickly explained who she was and why she was calling.
“So, you have a dead pedophile you think might be connected somehow to a bunch of dead children with a strange mark on the wrist?”
“Yes. But most of these are cold cases,” she said. “It occurred to me that maybe the marks have something to do with a sex ring. Or a sex trafficking site, club, or whatever these assholes call themselves these days.”
“Can you send me a copy of the images?”
“We’ve got the same base image,” she said, “with a couple minor differences. Some have additional lines on the side.” She quickly got his email address and sent a few files over to him, while they talked.
“If you open the first one,” she said, “that’s from fifteen years ago. The second one is from eight years ago, and the third is from the dead convicted pedophile we found Saturday,” she said.
He brought up the images on his end. “Interesting.”
“Interesting why?” she asked.
“Because it’s so faint,” he said. “It’s almost as if it’s some secret marker. Deliberately made so it’s hard to see.”
“That’s what I was thinking,” she said in a dry tone. “Something they would know but nobody else. So faint it would get missed in the autopsy.”
“I can take a look,” he said. “We generally focus on facial recognition, scars, body deformities, things like that. If this was bold with heavy black markings, we’d have noted it. As it is, it’s very faint.”
“I know,” she said, “but I just thought—”
“It’s a good thought,” he said, “a good find. I’ll get back to you.” And, with that, he was gone.
Rodney looked over at Kate. “And?”
“He’d never seen them before,” she said. “He’ll get back to me.”
“There really could be a possible connection.”
“Who else can access a ring like that?” she wondered out loud. “Is there some online chat room or somewhere these psychos go?”
“Lots of them,” Rodney said. “The dark web is full of that shit.”
“I want to go to Ken’s place. Forensics should be through with it.” She hopped to her feet, looked over at Rodney, and asked, “You up for it?”
He grabbed his jacket and said, “Always up for a road trip.”
“It’s not all that far away from here,” she said, “maybe fifteen minutes.”
“I’ll drive,” he said. Within minutes they were outside and in his car.
As they pulled up in front of the townhome, she whistled. “He wasn’t terribly broke if he was living here.”
“He was subleasing. The cops have been through the place already, as have we. You didn’t get to go through it, did you?”
“No,” she said. “Does forensics have the laptop?”
“They do.”
She walked inside the townhome and stopped in the living room and stared. “It’s so perfectly neat.”