room painstakingly reviewing all three autopsy reports for any odd detail or stray piece of evidence that might offer them another direction in which to look.
But there didn’t appear to be anything other than the differences they’d already noted. Until Carina saw something odd in the personal effects record.
“It says that only one earring was found with both Becca and Jodi.”
“Is that unusual?”
“I can see how an earring might fall out, especially with a body that has been manhandled, but
“Maybe the killer kept an earring as a souvenir,” Nick guessed.
“It’s the only thing that makes sense.”
“It’s good news. It connects him with his victims.”
Patrick walked into the room. “What does?” he asked.
“Angie was missing a navel ring. Becca and Jodi were each missing one earring.”
“That’s creepy,” Patrick said.
“You can say that again. So what brings you down here?”
“Good news, bad news,” Patrick said.
“What else is new,” Carina grumbled. “Give me the good news first.”
“I have proof that Scout used a Sand Shack public computer.”
Carina grinned. “Really? When?”
“Several times over the last three months, usually in the late afternoon during the week.”
“Only three months?”
“That’s all MyJournal has archived.”
“But the time frame suggests that he’s a college student,” Nick said. “He comes by in the late afternoon.”
“Nothing he said using the Shack computer system was incriminating. Most of it was viewing MyJournal pages and surfing the Internet. But I have every private message or public post he made through that server on a grid to see if we can find a pattern or anything that identifies him.”
“We need to talk to the employees again,” Carina said. “Someone might recognize a general description. What about the library?”
“I went there, showed the librarian Kyle Burns’s photo like you asked, and she put on thick glasses and was noncommittal. The woman can’t see more than two feet in front of her is my guess.”
Patrick sat down and slid the files across to Carina. “You think it might be the manager?”
“I don’t know. He loosely fits Dillon’s profile. Under thirty, college student, underachiever.”
“How is he an underachiever? He works full-time and goes to school.”
Carina rifled through papers until she pulled Kyle Burns’s transcript. “I had one of the uniforms pull his transcript. He was in and out of college for three years. His grades are good, not great. His advisor put a note in his file that he aspired to do great things with his life, but didn’t have the focus to stick with any one thing. His strength is management because he’s neat, organized, and disciplined.”
Nick nodded. “Our killer is organized, but I wouldn’t call him disciplined.”
“Still, Burns fits. He lives alone in a small duplex near the university. He has the light brown hair the half-blind librarian noticed. He has access to the Shack public computers. I think we need to interview all the employees again while Burns is off-site.”
“He doesn’t work Sundays,” Nick said.
“So we go there and talk to the employees, then track everyone else down at their homes. I have the files here. We were focusing on friends of Angie, so we only talked to the employees who regularly worked the same shifts as Angie. Now we need to dig deeper. We have a connection with the Shack and the killer-assuming Dillon is right and Scout is who we’re looking for. We focus there.”
“One more thing popped,” Patrick said. He put a printout in front of him. “This is a private message to an Elizabeth Rimes that he sent through the MyJournal server using the library Internet connection. He talks about his cat Felix being hit by a car.”
“And he told Becca that someone shot his cat.”
“When we pulled down messages from the Shack from the last three months, and reviewed all public comments posted by Scout that are stored indefinitely, he’s told several female MyJournal members over the last year that his cat had been killed. Died of cancer, hit by a car, drowned by his roommate.”
“For sympathy,” Nick said.
Patrick concurred. “Women are suckers for a good cat sob story.”
“Oh, stop that,” Carina said. “They sympathized because they didn’t think anyone would lie about something like that. It’s the old ‘help me find my lost puppy’ trick that pedophiles use to lure kids away.”
“Now where?” Nick asked. “Do we have an ISP?”
Patrick sighed, sat down. “Not yet. We know that Scout was in both the Shack and the library. We can get a warrant to search a house or business if we can get a name that goes with the profile-Dillon already convinced the DA of his reasoning, and he’s ready to take the stand on it if questioned. But because the MyJournal site is a free Web page, no one has to give truthful information. We have an e-mail address and it goes to a free e-mail account that is open, but it’s been inactive since Scout registered with MyJournal two years ago.”
Carina stood and walked over to the map. Red pins showed where the victims were abducted, blue pins where their bodies were found. “Angie was last seen more than ten miles from where her body was found, but Jodi and Becca’s bodies were found where they were last seen. Why?”
“He’s taunting us?” Patrick suggested. “He doesn’t care that they’re found.”
“Maybe it’s convenience,” Nick said. “Or he has a personal connection to the places.”
“We know he’s been to the Sand Shack, which is less than a mile from where Angie was found.” Carina placed a green pin on the Shack. “And the library.” She put a pin at the library, right next to the blue and red pins where Becca was abducted and found. “Nick, what’s Kyle’s address?”
He read from the report. “45670 Rupert Street.”
She found it on the map, put a yellow pin there. “Burns lives smack dab in the middle.”
“There were no drugs in Angie’s system, which suggests that she trusted whoever kidnapped her. She didn’t make a fuss, she seemed to voluntarily leave her house,” Nick said.
“And Becca he physically subdued. She was petite, much easier to control than Angie,” Carina said. “Do you think we have enough to ask for a warrant?”
“On Burns? Nowhere near enough,” Patrick said.
“But it makes sense, right?” Carina frowned at the map.
“Logically it makes sense, but you’re making a lot of leaps in reasoning and filling in blanks with theories, not evidence. We need something solid to tie Burns to the crimes.”
Carina knew Patrick was right. “I can still get the tail. Watch him until we gather enough evidence. And tomorrow, when he’s home, maybe we can stop by for another talk. See if he lets us come in, take a look around.”
“If he lets you in, you’re good to go. What does Jim have right now?”
“Nothing yet, but he’s working on it,” Carina said.
They sat in silence, reviewing the logs, when Patrick suddenly exclaimed, “I have an idea!”
“Give it to me,” Carina said. “I’ll take anything at this point.”
“What if we set Scout up?”
“How?”
“He has an e-mail alert through the MyJournal system that let’s him know whenever certain Web pages are updated. One page is that Elizabeth Rimes I told you about. We send an e-mail ostensibly from her to Scout with a redirect to my account.”
“For what purpose?”
“To get him into a chat room. To keep him in one place until we can locate him. If he’s logged on as Scout, I can find him within an hour.”
“I like it. I really like it.”
“Thank you, sis. I aim to please.”
