Stalked

Lucy said, “I need to see the scrapbooks you found.”

Joe handed her two evidence bags, each with a scrapbook. She opened them up. The first was essentially a tribute to Camille Todd and media time line of her kidnapping, the investigation, and her subsequent murder. The second, ten times thicker and far less tidy, was a montage of clippings about everyone who had been on the Rachel McMahon investigation.

Except not everyone. Lucy began to take notes. Fast. Everything came together quickly in her head, pulling together what Sean had learned from Charlie Mead and what Suzanne had found in Kip Todd’s apartment.

“Lucy?” Sean asked.

She glanced up. Everyone was looking at her. How long had she been focused on the scrapbooks?

She smiled sheepishly and said, “I don’t have all the answers, and won’t until I talk to Kip or Alexis, but I know why they targeted Peter.”

Joe raised an eyebrow. “You got me. I can see that they were targeting him, but how can you tell motive?”

“Fifteen years ago, Kip Todd identified with Peter. If you look at the notations in the first scrapbook, he considers himself almost a brother to Peter. They both lost their beloved older sister. They both suffered. There was no hatred of Peter or the McMahons initially. In fact, I suspect that for a while the Todd family believed that whoever killed Rachel had killed Camille, only Camille’s body hadn’t been found.

“A year later, Camille’s body is found. It’s old news, not generating a lot of press. But the one-year anniversary of Rachel McMahon’s murder is suddenly big news. A weeklong series of articles, rehashing the swingers’ lifestyle, the investigation, the trial-where was the justice for Camille? It’s like no one cared what happened to her.”

“How old were Kip and Alexis?” Suzanne asked.

“Eleven and seventeen when she disappeared. There are some holes in the articles. For example, we don’t really know the circumstances of her kidnapping other than that she went to a public restroom at a public park and didn’t come back. Was she with her family? Her brother? Her sister? Guilt is a powerful and deadly motivator.”

DeLucca said, “I read the police reports. Cops interviewed every sex offender in a twenty-mile radius, everyone at the park that day.”

“And I have the FBI file. It’s even thinner,” Suzanne said. “No suspects. No substantive profile.”

“Who wrote it? Tony or Hans? They were both profiling back then, and both worked on the Rachel McMahon case.”

Suzanne looked. “Hans Vigo. But not until after her body was found. He wrote that the suspect was a pedophile who lived alone in a remote area. Manual labor, farming, or heavy machinery by trade. Worked alone, kept to himself, nondescript. Wouldn’t arouse suspicion. He likely had a dog and used the animal to lure his victims into a place where they could easily be taken. He would be of small stature but deceptively strong.”

Noah added, “He kept Camille until she started her menstrual cycle, then killed her.”

“There was a note added to the file two years ago,” Suzanne said.

“From Hans?”

“No, it’s an administrative note. Five years ago in Pennsylvania, a forty-nine-year-old man was shot and killed by police after the failed abduction of a ten-year-old girl. The note said that profilers deemed the suspect had a sixty-five percent chance of being Camille Todd’s killer. He’d been living in the neighboring town up until a year after Camille’s body had been found.”

“How many victims were attributed to him?”

“Confirmed two-bodies found on his property. Looking through unsolved cases, the BSU determined that five others were definitely his handiwork. Those families were notified. But there were seven victims who were likely but unconfirmed. Their families were not notified.”

Lucy said, “So the Todds never had closure. The parents divorced before Camille was abducted. Then Camille goes missing and they have no idea what happened to her. They had hope when Rachel went missing that the police would find her because they had to be connected-same age, same general area-but Rachel’s case turned into a media blitz, and when her case was solved everyone forgot about Camille.”

Joe took issue with that. “No one forgot. I’m a cop; I’ve never forgotten a missing kid. I look at their pictures every damn day.”

Lucy said, “I’m trying to get into how the Todds felt. How Kip and Alexis turned their confusion and grief into a conspiracy to murder.”

“What you’re saying,” Sean interjected, “is that they felt Camille was forgotten because Rachel’s case got all the attention.”

Lucy nodded, then continued, “Look at this second scrapbook. It wasn’t until after the autopsy that the record keeping became messy. When Kip originally started, he felt a kinship to Peter, until he found out that Camille had been alive the whole time. While Rachel was already dead, all the police and FBI were focused on finding her, not Camille. It doesn’t matter that there was more evidence and more witnesses to Rachel McMahon’s murder; they’re looking at the investigation from the outside.

“Dominic Theissen was the public face of the FBI. He’s the one who verbalized the seventy-two-hour window. The Todds think that the police gave up after seventy-two hours and presumed she was dead.”

Joe said, “In the police reports, it looks like they felt she might have drowned. The creek was running high and kids playing close to the banks have slipped and fallen in the past, washing to shore miles downstream.”

Lucy nodded. “With Rachel, everything appeared to have been done right, and with Camille, everything appeared to have been done wrong-from the Todds’ perspective. Officer Stokes, who later became a detective, had been the responding officer to both crime scenes. Theissen spoke for the FBI. Tony Presidio was the FBI case agent-because initially, they believed the cases were connected. But Tony stayed with the McMahon case all the way through. Camille became a cold case, passed on to another agent when Tony moved to D.C.”

“That doesn’t explain Hans,” Noah said.

“He wrote the profile.”

“How would they get that report?” Joe asked.

Noah responded, “Not difficult. It’s not a classified file. Alexis Sanchez may have accessed it from Quantico.”

“You don’t know?”

“It would have been in Tony’s files,” Lucy said. “I think that’s why she wanted the McMahon file-for the newspaper articles that talked about Camille’s kidnapping. She didn’t want Tony or me to make a connection to either her or Kip, now that the FBI had interviewed him.”

Suzanne said, “If Tony had connected Rosemary Weber’s murder to McMahon, he may have seen the Todd name in the files, and traced Kip Todd back to Camille. Kip wasn’t hiding.”

“But Alexis was, using her married name, lying about her marital status.”

“But why now?” Joe asked. “It’s been fifteen years.”

“It started ten years ago,” Sean said. “Two things happened. Peter moved back to New Jersey, and Rosemary Weber published Sex, Lies, and Family Secrets. Peter was harassed in high school.” He pulled out his laptop and showed the group files he’d downloaded. “Kip Todd was a junior when Peter was a freshman. Same high school. But Kip, who has a degree-not in literature like he told you but computer engineering-hacked into the school system and deleted all his files. When Patrick was in Newark he grabbed a physical copy of the yearbook. And there’s Kip. It’s the only record that he went to the school-if you call them and ask, there are no computerized files. And Patrick followed up-all physical copies were destroyed after they were digitized.”

“When did he do it?” Lucy asked.

“When Peter was in Syracuse,” Sean said. “At least, that’s my educated guess.”

Lucy suspected that Sean knew for certain but that he hadn’t found the information through legitimate channels. She worried that someday his hacking skills were going to get him in trouble, but she had to admit that they often came in handy.

Lucy said, “They lost track of him when he ran away. Kip graduated from high school. Peter got his GED, then he went to college a year early. Kip would have been in college at the same time, and since Peter hadn’t legally changed his name or hid his identity, he was easy to find.”

“And Alexis got close to him? To psychologically torture him?” Suzanne shook her head. “They’re sick.”