Chapter 24

The Denton police impound lot was in an area of North Denton only slightly more populated than Prout Road. It was surrounded by a tall chain-link fence. A small booth at its entrance was occupied by an officer who let Josie and Noah through to the parking lot. They rolled past two rows of cars that had been impounded for various reasons until they came to the rear of the lot. The ERT's unofficial headquarters was located in a squat cinderblock building with a single navy-blue door. Attached to the building was a garage with two bays, their windows covered with white laminate for the sake of privacy. Josie and Noah went through the blue door, then through the small office at the front, and into a larger room of white cinderblock. Aluminum shelving lined one wall, filled with supplies for processing evidence. Hummel sat at a large stainless-steel table in the center of the room, typing on a laptop.

He greeted them with a smile and gestured for them to sit at the table. Once Josie and Noah were seated across from him, he spun the laptop around, revealing a fingerprint report. "Your suspect is Seth Lee."

Excitement sent a surge of energy through Josie's veins.

Noah pulled the computer closer, reading the report. "I can't remember the last time it was this easy."

Josie's shoulder bumped his as she leaned in to view the findings. "Oh, it's not easy. We still have to find him."

Hummel turned the laptop back toward him. "Dr. Feist told you about the awl?"

"Yes," said Josie.

"Never saw that before. First time for everything, I guess," he muttered as his fingers swiped over the touchpad. "This thing was a bitch to process. I had to collect the prints before I swabbed for DNA. Got a bunch of them by fuming it. Since the wood was varnished, non-porous."

He angled the screen so they could all see it. The awl appeared, its wooden handle covered in white fingerprints. Fuming involved placing the item into an airtight cyanoacrylate fuming chamber. Once locked inside, the item was exposed to what were essentially superglue vapors, which reacted to the traces of fatty and amino acids, sweat, and proteins in the prints. The chemical reaction caused the sticky white substance to appear along the ridges of the prints.

"I pulled three sets of prints from the awl handle. One is an unknown. No hits in AFIS. I also checked the NCMEC database. No matches there."

Josie hated to think that the child who had drawn the picture and plea for help might have handled the awl. Not every missing or abducted child has prints on file at the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children database.

"One matched to April Carlson and the last matched to Seth Lee. From where the Carlson's prints were found, it appears that she was holding the awl in place with her palm supporting it from underneath and her thumb and fingers wrapped around the handle. The unknown prints are on the underside and Seth Lee's prints are pretty much everywhere."

Josie suppressed a shiver, thinking of poor emaciated April Carlson, wasted down to nothing and still being stabbed so coldly and cruelly. This job involved an endless parade of the worst human depravity imaginable—and some unimaginable—but Josie never got used to the brutality or the savage cruelty some people inflicted on others. She just got better at stowing her feelings and moving forward with purpose.

Under the table, Noah's knee brushed against hers. As always, he could practically read her thoughts. "Enough for an arrest warrant."

"Circumstantially, sure," Josie said. "We can draw one up but for charges to hold we'd need more. Even if his DNA is found on the murder weapon, a good defense attorney can say it's because the awl was his and he used it for awl-related things. What we really need is to be able to put him at the scene. If we can find him and arrest him, we can try to get a statement from him that puts him there."

"Then we'll work on that. What else do you have for us, Hummel?"

Hummel clicked to a close-up of the awl's blood-soaked shaft, similar to the one Dr. Feist had shown them. "I was able to type some of the blood found on the blade. I wanted to try to confirm that April Carlson and Mira Summers were both stabbed with it. It gets a little complicated when you're dealing with a weapon that has the blood of two victims on it. Even though there are two of them, you only get one result. In this case, I would have expected the result to come out as Type AB—a combination of both their blood types—and it did. Getting you anything more than that in terms of typing would be too complicated for me but I sent the DNA swabs to the state lab for analysis, which should definitively confirm that both of them were stabbed by the same blade. But more importantly give us the DNA profile of Seth Lee."

He closed out the picture of the awl and brought up photos of Mira Summers's sedan, clicking through them quickly. Each one was a new tableau of blood spatter. Droplets on the floor and console. Smears on the sides of the seat. A partial handprint on the passenger's side seat belt. "As expected, I got two different blood types from the car. One a match to April Carlson, the other to Mira Summers. No surprises there."

"What was the killer doing while she was buckling April Carlson into the passenger's seat?" Josie mumbled.

Noah said, "Maybe he had already gone."

What kind of killer stabbed two women and then left them behind—one of them still alive—with the murder weapon? It made no sense. Unless, as Josie suspected, the killer was Seth Lee. Had his delusions caused him to flee for some reason?

Hummel turned the laptop screen back. "We collected tissue from beneath April's nails. We also took into evidence the clothes of both victims. April Carlson didn't have any shoes, but we took Mira Summers's boots into evidence. Everything has been swabbed and sent to the state lab for testing, but the results could take weeks."

Josie asked, "How about the clumps of hair found on April Carlson's clothes?"

Hummel closed his laptop. "Had to send those out, but I should hear something soon."

Noah leaned back in his chair, draping one arm across the back of Josie's, his fingers lightly grazing her shoulder. Even though his touch was light, it still eased some of her burgeoning anxiety. Sure, they could get an arrest warrant out on Seth Lee now while they continued to build their case, but they had to locate him.

They still had to find the child.

HELP

"The drawing," said Josie, the words coming out raspy. Noah's fingertips skimmed her shoulder again in reassurance.

Hummel nodded. "I was able to get a few sets of prints from that, most of them unknown. Nothing in the NCMEC database. It's a piece of paper, so who knows how many people have touched it. However, I was able to match one set—only one—and that was to Mira Summers."

Josie felt a jolt of surprise.

Noah turned to her. "Wasn't that drawing found in April Carlson's hand?"

Hummel answered before Josie could. "Yes, folded up in her fist. But her prints aren't on it. However, Mira Summers's prints are on every fold."

The fluttering was back, filling her stomach with an unsettling feeling. "She folded it up," Josie said. "And put it into April's fist."

Hummel shrugged. "I don't think we can prove that but it's certainly a possibility. A probability."

"That's interesting," said Josie. "Because when Gretchen and I interviewed Mira Summers, she told us there were no children in her life."