“They checked the city street cams, right?” Kate asked.
Her sergeant nodded. “As is our standard procedure.”
“I know,” she said, “but sometimes the basics can get missed.” Nobody laughed at her or made any comment because, in the case of a missing child, they’d rather double up on the work and request something twice, rather than assume and have a lead get missed.
“He’s only seven,” Colby said.
“Prime age,” she murmured.
He shot her a hard look and then nodded in agreement. “We have a lot of city cops still looking,” he said, “but we need to focus onourconcurrent cases. You never know where the next tip will come from. Meanwhile an entire department is working on finding Leonard.”
She winced at that. “And that just means he could end up as one of mine.”
“What about that mark on the wrist? Did you track it down?” Colby asked her.
“I’m working on Ken’s history now, every known associate, and whoever he was in jail with. A couple people he got close to in the prison system. I want to talk to them.” She hesitated, then asked, “Can we bring in a profiler? Someone to help us build a profile on our future suspect in these related cases?”
He looked at her for a moment, frowned, then shrugged. “If you think it would further the Leonard case, but remember these others are cold cases and not yet linked to Leonard’s disappearance.”
“They are all connected,” she said coolly. “One of the predators is now dead and is lying in the morgue, so it’s hardly a cold case. Plus, our little girl bore the same mark.”
Colby immediately nodded. “And that becomes our priority now. Contact Dr. Yolynda Brown. She’s one of the PD’s consultants on serial killers. She also specializes in child cases.” He looked at the others. “What about the other cases?”
“We have the husband with his wife stabbed to the wall,” he said. “And that odd 9-1-1 call.”
Colby slid his gaze back to Kate.
She shrugged. “I asked Simon, and he said he didn’t have anything to do with it.”
“Do you believe him?”
She frowned, replaying the conversation in her mind. “You know what? He didn’t come right out and say he didn’t do it,” she said, “so maybe not. He’s definitely been a little cagey at times, as in all over the map.”
“Did you tell the team about the safe?” Rodney asked her.
“The combination to the dead perv’s safe did come from Simon, and I asked him about that. He said he had no idea where I was or what I was doing, but those numbers flashed in his mind associated with me, so he texted them to me.”
Owen jumped up and said, “Seriously?”
She twisted in her seat, looked back at her team member. “Yes. I was standing in front of the safe with Rodney, talking about how to crack it and what we could do to get somebody in to look at it, when, out of the blue, I received a text. I looked down and saw the numbers. I tried them and opened the safe.”
“And you hadn’t told him where you were?”
She shook her head slowly. “I hadn’t talked to him all day.”
“Interesting,” Owen said. “And kind of disturbing.”
“In many ways,” Kate said. “Like I said, I did ask him about it afterward, and all he said was that he felt compelled to provide me with those numbers, but he didn’t know why.”
“We do have a lot of videos to go through now,” Rodney added.
“Forensics has them all at present,” she said. “Although they sent the first group back already. Some of these go back fifteen to twenty years,” she said quietly. “There’ll be nothing on those videos that we want to see.”
“But we have to,” Owen said, his voice equally quiet. “Because we don’t know what else we might find. Even if it’s only to narrow down a location of where he may have held these children, because there’s absolutely no indication that they were at Ken’s home.”
“No, he probably has a hidden location. I’m also wondering if he has a connection with other pedophiles,” she said. “Then again there were those black marks on the walls at a child’s height, so maybe Ken kept them there, then moved them.”
“Possible. Online, definitely,” Rodney said. “These guys tend to cluster.”