Chapter 45

FORTY-FIVE

“Hugh Weaver was a drunk.” Noah shaded his eyes, watching as the ERT loaded a second car onto the police department’s flatbed tow truck. “He didn’t retire. He was asked to resign.”

Josie took a step backward, into the shade of the only tree on Schock’s Auto Repair’s back lot. Under it was a stone wall where Gretchen and Turner sat with three feet between them, sweaty and haggard. Turner had taken off his jacket and tossed it onto the wall beside him. It was nearing dinnertime and the ERT still had one more car to impound. Josie needed coffee, food, and more sleep. She wasn’t the only one. The day’s developments had them all on edge.

Turner fanned his face as the flatbed belched exhaust in their direction. “Hey, Palmer. You ever meet this Weaver guy?”

She didn’t glance his way. “Before my time.”

“Quinn?”

Josie hefted herself onto the wall beside Gretchen. Overhead, a blue jay swooped from branch to branch, shrieking. “I met him a few times. He was one of the crime scene techs. Noah’s right. Every time I ever saw him, he reeked of alcohol.”

Gretchen tilted her chin, watching the angry bird. “Was he active at the same time as Kellan Neal and James Lampson?”

“Yes,” said Josie.

“But he wasn’t part of the whole human trafficking thing?” Turner rifled inside his jacket pockets for his phone and began scrolling. “That’s why he’s in a nursing home and not in prison?”

Noah waved at the tow truck driver as he pulled away. “The only thing Hugh Weaver cared about was his next drink. If he was aware of the trafficking ring, no one could prove it. He wasn’t implicated.”

Josie mentally worked through the names of the men whose progeny had been killed as well as the years they were active working for the city. Kellan Neal, James Lampson, and now, Hugh Weaver. They overlapped by several years. They’d probably been involved in several cases together—Lampson as a detective, Weaver as one of the crime scene techs and Neal preparing them both to testify in court. Why these three? Lampson was corrupt. Weaver was incompetent and unprofessional, but Neal was beyond reproach, which meant these murders weren’t about punishing bad actors.

What the hell was it about?

Noah stepped under the tree with them, using his forearm to wipe the sweat from his brow. “Gretchen, where did you get with those records searches?”

“The request I made to the DA’s office for cases that involved both Neal and Lampson that were overturned after Lampson went to prison is still pending. In terms of stabbing cases that were not overturned involving both Lampson and Neal, I made a list. I emailed it to you guys this morning before Quinn called about Harper’s Peak.”

Josie and Noah each took out their phones. They’d been so busy, Josie hadn’t even checked her email. Now she pulled up the list, taking a few minutes to scroll through it. Nothing sparked her memory, but most of the cases were over ten years old. She would have been on patrol. The extent of her involvement on any of those cases would have been limited to canvassing or guarding the perimeter of a scene—if she had any involvement at all. Some were from before she’d even started on the force.

Turner tossed his phone on top of his jacket and stood up, eyeing the blue jay screeching directly over his head. “But now we’ve got Weaver.”

“I can narrow that list down more by adding him to the search parameters but it will take a while,” Gretchen said.

“What the hell else do we have to do?” Turner complained. “Soon, there will be another name to add to our list, right? We’ve got another polaroid. This guy ain’t stopping. Shit, he’s probably two murders ahead of us already, so how in the hell could you narrow down any case? What if you find one involving the three guys we’ve already got and at the next scene, we find a victim related to someone who didn’t work on that case? Then we’re right back where we started.”

She hated that he was probably right. Perhaps their most promising lead in Everly Rowe’s murder were her and her son’s cell phones, but they had been quickly located under an azalea bush near the church. The killer had taken them so that Jared couldn’t use either of them to call for help. Not that he would have been able to do so, pinned under the pulpit. The geofence had turned up nothing. As usual.

“Hey,” Turner continued. “Did anyone check with Remy Tate to see where he was last night?”

“Home in bed,” Noah said. “Or so he claims. I sent Dougherty over to his place earlier.”

After the last interview with Remy Tate, during which Noah broke the news that Stella had been murdered, he’d given consent for them to pull the GPS report from his car. It hadn’t put him at the scenes where Cleo or Stella were found. He had also agreed to a search of his house. Nothing had been found to link him to Stella’s murder although by then, he would have had plenty of time to dispose of any evidence.

“He’s a dead end,” Josie said. Giving up on the list, she opened her gallery and swiped to the photo of the new polaroid. She’d been racking her brain trying to figure out which of their cases that had been most widely covered in the press involved treetops or climbing trees. It was absurd. Was this guy just having fun at their expense now?

The blue jay hopped along the branch directly over Turner’s jacket. A second later, a fat splatter of excrement landed on it. Gretchen howled with laughter.

“Son of a bitch!” Turner yelled.

Jumping up, Gretchen clapped her hands together. “On that high note, I’m going back to the stationhouse to search for stabbing cases in which Neal, Lampson, and now Weaver were all involved.”

Turner was too intent on trying to wipe the shit from the shoulder of his jacket with a tissue he pulled from his pocket to notice her leaving. “That’s piss, paint, glue and now bird shit all in one week.”

Noah smirked, a rare show of amusement at Turner’s expense, but quickly shuttered his expression when Turner plopped back onto the wall, shoulders slumped in defeat. “I know, I know,” he mumbled. “Not important. Where were we? I guess it’s too early for autopsy results, even for the doc. She’s fast.” The note of admiration in his voice while talking about Anya made Josie slightly queasy but a lecture about staying away from her was for another day.

“We won’t know anything until tomorrow at the soonest.” Noah walked over and sat beside Josie. “But I’m sure the findings will be in keeping with his MO. No sexual assault. Head injury. Multiple stab wounds. We’re also waiting on Hummel to process Greg Downey’s stolen car. He’s going to run prints from that, the church, and the phones.”

“He’s not gonna find anything,” Turner said. “This guy doesn’t leave prints, remember?”

“No prints,” Josie murmured. It still bothered her that the killer had managed not to leave prints anywhere. Hummel had pulled plenty of unknown sets of prints in the Cleo Tate and Stella Townsend cases but there was no single set of unknowns that appeared at both scenes. Yet, DNA had been left at the scenes. She didn’t believe for a second that the killer hadn’t managed to leave his own DNA behind. Locard’s Exchange Principle dictated that he had to have left something at the scenes. It was a fundamental concept in forensic science. Every time a person made contact with another person, place, or thing, an exchange of physical materials took place. In terms of crime scenes, that meant that a criminal always left something behind.

“You know what else has been bothering me?” she said.

Turner found a loose pebble along the stone wall and tossed it up at the blue jay still lurking overhead. Luckily, his aim with pebbles was as good as his aim with foam basketballs. It went wide. The bird squawked again. “Enlighten us, swee— Quinn.”

“There’s no blood trail. All the blood from the stabbings is contained to where the victims are found.”

“But if you stabbed someone as savagely as this guy did,” Noah said, “you’d be covered in blood.”

“Yes,” Josie said.

“We should have found drops somewhere, at the very least,” Turner said. “So what? Is he wearing some kind of suit? Like the ones we use at crime scenes? That would be ironic.”

But it wasn’t out of the question. It wasn’t only law enforcement that wore them. Workers who did mold remediation or handled fiberglass wore them, just like painters and people who worked in food processing. They weren’t that hard to come by. Maybe that’s what was in his cross-body bag. “But what does he do with them once he leaves the scene?”

“Burns them,” Turner offered. He waved a hand at the lot full of cars. “Do they have a burn pit here? A barrel or something?”

“No,” said Noah, standing as the police flatbed returned to the lot.

Even if the killer wore Tyvek suits when he did the actual stabbings, there was no way he hadn’t left DNA behind on his victims before that. It was the middle of July. The heat and humidity were off the charts. Josie had no doubt that, at the very least, he’d left sweat behind. The DNA samples Hummel had collected surely contained the genetic material of the killer. If he wasn’t in the DNA database, then it wouldn’t help them identify or locate him but it would be on record. Why bother to avoid leaving fingerprints if your DNA was going to give you away sooner or later?

Unless he wasn’t savvy enough to realize this. That seemed unlikely given all the planning that had gone into these killings. Josie was going round and round and getting nowhere.

A loud, high-pitched alarm sounded as the flatbed backed up to the final car. Soon they’d be back in the air-conditioned stationhouse. Josie thought about the three crime scenes. By the end of the evening, the photos of all three victims would be pinned to the corkboard in the great room. Not that Josie needed reminders. The scenes were still vivid in her mind. Like the killer’s polaroids, their bodies told a story. Cleo clutching the edge of the boat, trying to climb out. Stella reaching for the edge of the helipad, trying to crawl away. Everly flat on her back, one arm flung outward, as if she was trying to grab something, but she’d been too badly stabbed to even turn on her side. A bloodied chef’s knife lay at each one of their feet.

A few feet away, she heard the rapid tapping of Turner’s fingers on his leg. “What are you working on, Quinn?”

“Nothing. Everything is a dead end right now.” It was a waiting game. Processing evidence took time, and with three murders in a week, their in-house ERT was already overwhelmed. The state lab was perpetually backed up. They’d receive their expedited requests for DNA results sooner than normal but not soon enough.

Noah left them to confer with the tow truck driver.

“Come on, Quinn,” Turner goaded. “You’re the superstar around here. What’s next?”

She shrugged. Her body begged for coffee. “Release the stills we have of the suspect from the parking lot at Stella Townsend’s apartment complex and Griffin Hall to the press. You can’t see his face well, but someone might recognize him.”

Turner smiled. “I’ll man the tip line.”

“So you can stay in the air conditioning? I don’t think so.”

Josie heard him chuckle as he gathered his jacket and phone. “Fine. Let’s get back to the stationhouse and see what kind of list Palmer’s got for us now.”