Chapter 59

FIFTY-NINE

“Let me get this straight.” Turner trailed behind Josie, stepping over debris on the first floor of the abandoned textile mill near Denton East High School. “Isaac Hampton isn’t Simon Cook. He’s Roger Bell. The killer—of the Cook family, that is—and you think he’s also the Polaroid Killer.”

Josie sighed and tugged at the collar of her polo shirt. It was only marginally cooler inside the cavernous building, but she was still sweating. It was almost ninep.m. but the temperature hadn’t let up. So much for the long shower she’d taken after her dip in the pond. “How many times do I have to go over this with you before you understand it?” she asked irritably.

“I don’t know, swee— Quinn. I’m just saying that everything about this case is shady as hell. Hey, do you think this guy shit himself when the ERT came to his house to get elimination prints from him?”

“I don’t know.” Since the ERT was only looking to eliminate which prints belonged to the Hampton couple when they processed the stolen car, they hadn’t run them through AFIS, which would have immediately flagged Isaac Hampton’s prints as belonging to Roger Bell. Instead, Officer Chan, who’d just completed her Level II latent print certification, did the print comparisons herself. Then she’d taken the prints found in the car that didn’t match the Hamptons’ and run those through AFIS. It wasn’t against protocol not to use AFIS when processing elimination prints. Certainly, neither of the Hamptons had been suspect at that time so there was no reason to enter their prints into AFIS.

But hindsight was a bitch.

They had run Isaac Hampton’s prints through AFIS after the confrontation with Sheila and they matched to Roger Bell.

Turner kicked at a cluster of vines that had snaked in through one of the broken windows and crept across the dirty wooden floor. “He really got lucky that Chan didn’t use AFIS. Pretty risky to put himself in the crosshairs like that by stealing his own damn car, don’t you think?”

“I don’t think it mattered to him.” Josie aimed her flashlight at a pile of garbage. A rat scurried out from under it, racing away from her. “It would have made things more difficult for him to keep killing and playing this sick game he’s dragged us into, but I’m pretty sure his endgame was always for us to find out he was the Polaroid Killer.”

They stopped in front of a tall window. Most of its panes had been smashed out long ago. Outside, halogen lights blazed. Josie could see the ERT processing Isaac Hampton’s car. The one he’d left in this morning after revealing to his wife that he was the man who slaughtered her adopted daughter’s family. The same man a jury acquitted. Once Sheila had been taken back to the stationhouse, Turner had called the infotainment company associated with the Hamptons’ remaining vehicle and gotten them to give up its location—without a warrant. It had taken some time and a lot of needling on his part, but he’d finally succeeded.

It was the only reason Josie was letting him follow her around the mill for a second pass. That, and if she left him and Gretchen alone for any length of time, she was afraid of what would happen. Denton PD had arrived at the mill to find the car empty, save for Isaac Hampton’s cell phone which he’d smashed to bits. It had taken over an hour for the bevy of officers to clear the five-story building. Hampton, or Roger Bell, was not inside, nor was Juliet Bowen, but Josie had insisted on searching the premises again, though she couldn’t say why. All she knew was that finding Juliet was the priority and right now, they had nothing else to go on.

Gretchen and Noah were following other leads, including a search of the Hampton house. Sheila had granted them permission.

Glass crunched under Josie’s feet as she moved away from the window and deeper into the large room. She swept her flashlight over heaps of twisted metal, large rollers, and wooden pallets. Turner’s beam joined hers, pausing on the remnants of a tall metal apparatus that took up half the room and stretched almost to the ceiling. Shredded fabric hung from one of the metal bars. More rats skittered away from the light.

Turner made a noise of disgust. “How do you think Bell avoided leaving his prints in the other cars—Stella Townsend’s, that Downey guy’s, and the classic cars? Gloves? Bet his wife’s got a shit-ton of different disposable gloves.”

But the witness to Cleo Tate’s abduction hadn’t seen him wearing gloves, and he didn’t appear to have gloves on in the surveillance footage they’d pulled of him. “No,” said Josie. “Not gloves. The glue. That industrial-strength glue his wife was using for her prototypes. It would have only been temporary, but it would have prevented his prints from being left behind.”

Yet, the DNA samples Hummel had taken from each victim would surely be a match to Roger Bell. It was just a matter of time before the state lab returned results. The temporary alteration of his prints had only bought him time.

“Do you really think this broad—I mean, Sheila Hampton—had no idea what her hubby was up to?”

“It’s hard to say.” Josie stepped over a pile of broken beer bottles. “If she did, I doubt she’d admit it. I’m not sure we could prove it anyway. I think she knew that he was involved in something illegal because he asked her to pass that message along to me, but I don’t think she suspected him of murdering three Denton women in the last week.”

If Sheila Hampton was telling the truth, then Josie believed the shock of finding out her husband’s true identity had been enough to send her brain into survival mode. In those first hours after his revelation, she might not have been mentally and emotionally able to face the possibility that he was behind the recent murders.

Josie had done some of the initial questioning once they arrived at the stationhouse—before she went home to bathe. Sheila Hampton had admitted Isaac could easily have come and gone from the house without her realizing it since they slept in separate bedrooms, and he rarely came out of his except to eat. The tension in the household was high, given their daughter’s death and the fact that Sheila suspected him of cheating on her.

In terms of her work equipment, the most recent prototypes she’d created hadn’t been disturbed or gone missing, but she claimed that in the garage were several boxes of safety equipment from previous jobs. She kept everything in case she needed it later. According to her, it drove Isaac crazy that she didn’t just throw the boxes away, especially after she left to take the job in New York City.

Turner stopped to study some graffiti lining one of the cinderblock walls. “You think this Sheila could be the grandmother that paid Edgar Garcia for access to the old cars?”

“Brennan ran a photo of Sheila over to Garcia. He said it’s not her.” Sheila hadn’t been able to identify anyone they knew who might fit the bill of a grandmotherly type. Her husband had always told her he had no living family. A quick background check on Roger Bell confirmed this was true.

Josie found the stairwell door and motioned Turner toward it. With a heavy sigh, he trudged up the steps after her, taking his sweet time. His voice faded as he fell behind. “What exactly are we looking for again?”

“Not sure,” Josie called over her shoulder. “I’ll know it when I see it.”

“You’ve got to be kidding me,” came his distant mutter.

“Turner, hurry up!”

He didn’t answer. She wouldn’t put it past him to have gone back downstairs to wait for her. Cursing under her breath, she kept climbing to the next floor.

As she reached the landing, concrete crumbled beneath her boots. Her body pitched forward at first, her forearms slamming painfully against the floor. The flashlight rolled out of her hand, plunging everything into near-total darkness. Light bounced above and below but it wasn’t enough for her to get her bearings. Her feet scrabbled for purchase. Just as she managed to pull herself upright, more of the ground beneath her gave way. Flailing, her center of gravity shifted. Her upper body tipped back. The metal railing disintegrated in her hand as she tried to stop herself from toppling. For a heartbeat, she teetered, suspended in the air. There was no time to call out, to get her bearings, to react at all. Her stomach dropped as she tumbled into blackness.