“Brown.”
Anya was blond, and Leif Cole was light brown and gray. “Light brown? Dark brown?”
“Medium. Unprocessed. But that’s all I know until Quantico gets back to us. I rushed it, but the response time really depends on what’s on the schedule before it.”
“Thanks, Steve.”
Ted asked, “Any word on the missing duck?”
“No,” Nora said. “Fish and Game is supposed to let me know if they find it.”
Jason Camp, resident computer expert, stepped into the room. “Nora, sorry for interrupting, but I got something off Larkin’s computer.”
“Good news?”
“Depends on how you look at it. Butcher-Payne’s security logs are wiped, but I can tell that someone accessed password-protected files on Sunday afternoon, only a few minutes before the data was corrupted. But I think I figured out why they wiped the drive. Emails.”
“Something in the emails the killer didn’t want us to know? Why not just take the laptop?”
Jason beamed. “That I know. LoJack.”
“The computer was LoJack-protected?”
“Yep.”
Nora frowned. “Why didn’t Duke trace it on Monday when he was looking for Larkin?”
“He didn’t know. I just got off the phone with him, and he said the laptop wasn’t Rogan-Caruso property.”
Nora got the facts straight in her head. “So the killer realized the computer had tracking equipment and took the information right there. Maybe threatened Larkin, or maybe hacked into it after he was killed.”
“That I don’t know, but I can tell you that I can’t get the emails back.”
“So why do I need to know this? You still have nothing.”
“I have the ISP.”
“How does that help us?”
“The ISP for Russ Larkin is Rogan-Caruso. They have their own server. It’s how their security system replicates itself.”
“But wouldn’t that compromise security if it was used for Internet access?”
“No-the replication is just information, not actual monitoring. It’s like syncing your iPod, but only one way. I talked to Jayne Morgan, the computer chick over there, and she’s going to pull all emails to and from Larkin for the past two weeks. It’s going to take a bit because they’re compressed and archived, but she said she’d have them for me today.”
“If you learn anything-”
“You’ll be the first to know.” Jason left.
Nora finally felt that she was making forward progress in this investigation.
“Pete, can you dig deeper into Russ Larkin? Rachel was working on it, but she’s sidetracked with Maggie O’Dell. Specifically, any connections with the three students who died or O’Dell. Maybe we’re missing something. A relative, a friend, something that connects Larkin to one of them.”
She glanced at her notes.
“Ted, can you check and see if the autopsy report is in from Reno? If not, call Sara and ask her to follow up with the coroner. Also trace evidence in Larkin’s car.”
Ted wrote everything down. “Got it.”
Pete asked, “What about the three college students? We need backgrounds on them.”
She’d asked Duke to run the background checks, as well as an FBI staff analyst. “Already being done,” she said. She wondered where Duke was. When they’d parted this morning, he’d said he would meet her here. It was already after ten.
As if on cue, the door opened and Dean Hooper walked in, Duke right behind him. Duke winked at her, just out of Hooper’s line of vision. Nora glanced at her squad. Had Pete and the others seen that? She tried to control the blush rising up her neck to her cheeks. She glanced down at the table and shuffled her papers.
“Thanks, guys,” she said, dismissing the team. “Let me know if you’re having any problems.”
Hooper said a few words to each agent as they left, and when it was just him, Duke, and Nora, he said, “I just got off the phone with Dr. Vigo. He reviewed a sample of Anya’s journals and concluded that she wrote the first three BLF letters, but definitely not the last one. Style, word choices, tone-everything was different.” That confirmed their assessment from yesterday regarding the fourth letter, but also gave them more physical evidence tying the dead students to the fires.
“I need a sample of Maggie O’Dell’s writing,” Nora said. “Maybe she has an article published in the newspaper or we can talk to her professors and get an essay she wrote. Rachel is on her way to the college now, I’ll-”
Hooper interrupted, “We already have it. It was in the evidence Steve sent yesterday.”
“He didn’t tell me-”
“He didn’t know. It was a handwritten letter folded into Ms. Ballard’s journal that began ‘Dear Anya’ and signed ‘M.’ Whoever wrote that letter, Dr. Vigo says wrote the fourth BLF letter. And moreover, whoever wrote that letter also wrote the suicide note. And it definitely wasn’t Anya Ballard.”
“Is the letter ‘M’ wrote important?”
“Possibly.” He handed her a copy of the letter. “We dusted the original for prints. We have a few partials from two different individuals, but they’re pretty degraded. Quantico is working on enhancing them, but it’ll take time.”
Nora read the letter. It was undated, but based on the content it was given to Anya around the time Maggie left Rose College last December.
“M” had crossed out that last line, but Nora noticed that while the text started out small and tight, it grew bigger and tilted more to the right-retaining the same tightness but with sharper points and more pressure on the pen. The letter continued with smaller script, but still with the heavy-pressured rightward slant.
“She’s certifiable,” Duke said.
“Maybe,” Nora muttered.
“What’s wrong?” Hooper said. “Does something stand out in the letter?”
“First,” she said, “her sister. We need to find her sister. Maybe that’s where Maggie’s hiding out. Rachel’s at
