Chapter 50

FIFTY

“Are you kidding me, sweetheart?” Turner went perfectly still, which was weird since normally, he was in a perpetual state of motion. Then, with a groan, he took one of the two dollars in the jar on his desk and pushed it down into Josie’s, which was already full to bursting. “Let me try this again. Are you fucking kidding me?”

Gretchen angled her computer screen so they could all see the court dockets. The not guiltys seemed to go on forever. “Josie’s right.”

Noah rubbed at his jaw. His five o’clock shadow had appeared while they were on shift. That was how long they’d been chasing the Polaroid Killer. “I don’t remember this case.”

Josie stood and leaned across her desk, peering at the documents Gretchen had pulled up. “The trial concluded two years after the murders. You would have just joined the department.”

“How was this guy not convicted though?” asked Turner, picking up his basketball and squeezing it in his fist like a stress ball. “Two victims survived.”

Josie vaguely remembered the grumblings in the department after Bell got off. Back then, the men she worked with were more concerned about the fact that Bell’s acquittal made them all look stupid than with the reality that a mass murderer was walking the streets again. Only Peluso was well and truly stricken. She tried to call up the details of their conversations about the case or the news reports, but nothing came to her.

Taking her seat again, she opened her internet browser and searched for the case. A few minutes later, she had some answers. “Simon Cook testified at trial that he was upstairs in his bedroom when the stabbings occurred. He said he heard screams and ran downstairs where he found his entire family and Miranda O’Malley bleeding.”

“He didn’t see Bell?” asked Gretchen.

Josie kept reading. “He testified that when he entered the breakfast room, Bell was straddling Miranda, stabbing her. Felicity was near the doorway to the kitchen, making noises.” She had to stop for a moment, remembering the gurgling in the tiny girl’s throat.

Sensing her distress, Noah rolled his chair over and gently pushed her aside. He scrolled through the rest of the article she’d found. “Simon went on to testify that he picked up his little sister and fled toward the back door. Once inside the kitchen, he was stabbed from behind. On cross-examination, the defense attorney got him to admit that given his account and the position of the furniture in the breakfast room, there was no way he could have actually seen Bell’s face. Apparently, his initial statements to police were inconsistent with his trial testimony.

“The prosecution argued that the inconsistencies were minor especially given that his family had just been slaughtered and he had just been stabbed three times, but I guess it was too damaging to his credibility. Evidently, Bell’s defense was that someone else had been bothering Miranda, not him, and that he’d returned to the Cook house that day to check on her and found everyone stabbed. The ‘it wasn’t me’ defense. I guess between that and the inconsistencies in Simon’s testimony, it was enough to put reasonable doubt into the minds of the jurors.”

Turner gave a low whistle. “And they let Bell walk. Damn.”

Josie sighed. “Without the knife, which had Bell’s DNA on it, there wasn’t enough to convict.”

A few moments passed in silence while they absorbed the information. Turner spoke first. “So we’re looking for the kid, then. The brother. What’s his name? Simon Cook?”

Gretchen sat back in her chair, causing it to creak. “It deeply, deeply pains me to say this but I think you’re right.”

Turner grinned so wide he looked almost feral. “I don’t know what’s more satisfying, Palmer. That you agree with me or that I’ve caused you to be, what was that? ‘Deeply pained.’”

Before Gretchen could jab back at him, Noah said, “It makes sense. He’s getting revenge on the people whose mistakes allowed Bell to go free by making them go through what he went through—losing a family member to violence. The knife at each scene and the polaroids are direct references to the screw-up.”

“But why now?” Josie said. “It’s been fifteen years since the murders. A little less since the trial. Why wait all this time? What triggered this?”

“Maybe he was just working up the nerve,” Turner said. “Who cares? All that matters is that we find him. We got a picture of this kid?”

Josie found one in the Cook file that showed Simon’s face. It had been taken in the hospital when the police were documenting his injuries. In it, his sandy hair was cut close to his scalp. He had a round, chubby face. Josie remembered how heavy he’d been when she and Peluso turned him over. How surprised she was when she realized his weight hadn’t smothered his little sister. In the photo, his dark eyes were glassy. He looked almost high but then again, he was probably on a lot of pain medication while recovering from his wounds. She printed it and then hung it on the corkboard before taking a moment to study it again.

Turner said, “Look like anyone you’ve seen recently, Quinn?”

“No,” she admitted. She tried to imagine Simon Cook’s face fifteen years later. Had he lost weight? Had his features sharpened at all? Was his hair grown out?

Noah pushed his chair back to his own desk. “I’m going to find out where this kid is now—and his surviving sister. If we can find him, then we don’t need to figure out where the last polaroid was taken.”

It was the best lead they had. The best they’d had in days and yet, something told Josie that locating Simon Cook wasn’t going to be as easy as it seemed.

“See if you can find his grandmother, too,” Turner said. “Since she’s paying guys to let her steal cars for this asshole.”

The stairwell door whooshed open, sending all the crime scene photos pinned to the corkboard fluttering. Chief Chitwood strode in with Amber trailing behind him, her trusty tablet in hand. The two of them stopped next to the corkboard. “I need an update,” said the Chief. “We’re gonna have to put something together for the press or Kellan Neal’s going to start tearing us a new one on television at four, five, six, eleven and whenever the hell else WYEP airs their news. Not to mention he called the Mayor, so now I got her breathing down my damn neck. So let’s hear it, and make it good.”

Josie brought him up to speed on everything they’d figured out in the last several hours. As she spoke, Amber took rapid notes on her tablet. When she finished, the Chief said, “Yeah. All right. Find that Cook kid, then. I’ll hold off as long as I can on making any statements or releasing any information. But for godssake, do it fast.”

Someone’s cell phone rang. Everyone looked around. “Chief,” Amber said. “It’s you.”

“Oh, right.” He took his phone from his pocket and growled at it. “That’s the damn Mayor again. Amber, you’re with me. My office. Help me put this fire out.”

They disappeared into the Chief’s office, the door slamming shut behind them.

“You think this Cook kid took Bell out first?” asked Turner. “That’s what I would have done.”

Gretchen looked over at him, one brow severely arched. “You know that thing on your desk with the screen and the keyboard? It works. Try it out. Maybe you can find out what happened to Roger Bell and if he’s still alive.”

With a scowl, Turner placed his basketball onto his desk and pulled his keyboard toward him. Josie was surprised he even knew how to work the damn thing given how terrible his reports were and how long it took him to file them. Under his breath, he mumbled, “What are you gonna be doing?”

Gretchen plucked a dry-erase marker from her desk drawer and brandished it at him. “I’m going to try to figure out his next target.”

“His next target is already dead,” Turner said flatly.

“Not necessarily.” Gretchen strode over to the corkboard and spun it so that the other side, a dry-erase board, faced their desks. “He left the polaroid for the church four days before he killed Everly Rowe, even though we didn’t find it right away. There’s still a chance his next victim hasn’t been taken yet, which means there’s a chance we can find them before the killer strikes again.”