Chapter 31

THIRTY-ONE

Gulf Shores, Alabama

Monday, September 23

9:26 a.m.

"How would Elyse have survived losing that much blood to then kill Samuel Thornton?" The detective had a point. The forensic results were conclusive. The pool of blood left behind Saturday morning in the vacation house belonged to Elyse. No question.

"I'm not sure the attack at the vacation house preceded Thornton's murder. It's possible she killed him, cleaned up after herself then was assaulted." Leigh's gut didn't like that scenario. It didn't quite seem to fit. "But, more likely, she was injured during a struggle and managed to make it home to bleed all over the floor."

"Or Wesley Portman really did murder his wife." There was that winning personality. One Detective Moore used to ensure she came out on top in the department. The most cases closed, the fastest results, the extra mile. For a woman like that, the simplest answer was the best answer.

But there were a lot of reasons to take your own life. Killing someone might be one of them. Unfortunately, they might never know why Wesley Portman decided death was preferable to staying alive for his daughter. For now, all Leigh could focus on was the problem at hand.

Fingerprints couldn't be faked.

At least not like TV wanted viewers to believe.

Leigh watched from a few feet away as a gloved Gulf Shores PD forensic investigator applied dark powder over the broken safety wire of the second story balcony. White scratches on the deck below indicated someone—Elyse?—had dragged the outdoor dining table beneath this very balcony. The safety wire could've broken under a weight it wasn't designed for. Perhaps even a desperate woman looking for answers.

Detective Moore hovered over the tech's shoulder. "What do you have?"

"If there are any prints, they'll show up on the adhesive." The tech set what looked like an overused, frizzy paintbrush back into his toolkit while holding the wire with one hand and laying a sticky film over the dusted area with the other.

She found herself holding her breath. Waiting for the exact right answer they needed.

The adhesive peeled back at the tech's insistence. Coming away with something smudged and unreadable. "The surface of the metal wire is too porous to get a clean print. I'm not sure the computer will be able to process the image, but if there's DNA on the film, we'll need a sample to compare."

"Let's compare it to the samples you've taken from the Portman scene," Leigh said. "See if we get anything interesting."

"You got it." The tech added a protective backing to the adhesive and stored it in his toolkit. Along with several other samples from around the beach house.

She almost turned away. Almost admitted defeat. Until she looked at the rest of the guardrail. "If you were climbing this railing and one of the safety wires broke under your weight, you'd grab for something sturdier. Like the middle bar."

"Or the top of the guardrail," Detective Moore said. "Print the rest of the guardrail. Let me know if you get anything usable."

"Yes, ma'am." The tech grabbed for his brush again.

Leigh moved back into the house. Took in the second living room with its beachy color palette and like-new furniture. It was over the top and beautiful and nothing like she'd expected from a suspected murderer. As far as she could tell, Samuel Thornton had kept a steady job. There were no divorces or serious breakups in his history to trigger a behavior change. His name hadn't come up on the sex offender registry, and he'd had no run-ins with law enforcement in recent years. No childhood mutilation on record, suspensions from school, or accusations of sexual assault. He seemed to be a normal guy living paycheck to paycheck like the rest of America. "I don't get it. Samuel Thornton works construction, and his taxes don't show any significant changes in his income in the past seven years. Do we have any idea how he was able to afford a place like this?"

"Inheritance." Detective Moore moved into one of the bedrooms, careful of where she stepped so as not to disturb any of the beds or Thornton's possessions. "I requested legal records after Elyse's claim he'd assaulted her last week. The place used to be owned by Thornton's foster dad. Guy died a few years back. Heart attack. He was only in his sixties. Long divorced from his wife. The couple had fostered and adopted Samuel when he was twelve. Saved him from a bad situation from what I understand."

Leigh was sure she could fill in the blanks from there. "Abuse?"

"Of all kinds," Detective Moore said. "His mother was never arrested and charged. She was good at hiding the bruises, but social services determined Samuel would be safer in the system rather than her house. Mom died a little while ago. Dad was never in the picture. The obituary didn't give much detail, but I found there was a sister too. Got pulled from the house around the same time as Samuel and separated from her brother. I'll have to find her to give the next of kin notice."

Abuse—of any nature—had the potential to mark a person for life. In memory, in emotional blocks, in behavior. Research showed a 30 percent likelihood of an abuse victim becoming an abuser. A cycle that could rarely be broken. Reasons varied across cultures, gender, and circumstances. But it sounded as though Samuel Thornton and his sister had escaped. They'd had a chance to start over. To move on. But the death of a parental figure—or hearing of his birth mother's death—could have been the catalyst to start the cycle over again. "I'd like to take a look at what social services put together on him and the sister."

"I'll have the assessments sent to your email." Detective Moore positioned herself in the doorway of the main bathroom. Where Samuel Thornton had kept a curated collection of toiletries, two towels on the bar beside the shower, and little to show for a life lived. Or had Elyse cleaned up here too? The detective snapped latex gloves over her hands and dumped the contents of a toiletry bag onto the countertop. Deodorant, toothpaste, a toothbrush. It would all be bagged as the crime scene crew worked their way through the house. "Who lives out of a toiletry bag in their own home?"

"Someone used to moving from foster home to foster home. Or someone very aware of his mark on the world." Or on a crime scene. A hint of the same cleaner persisted, but not as intense as downstairs. Concentrated to one area. The countertop. If Elyse was the one cleaning up behind herself, she'd come into this bathroom. She'd studied everything they were looking at right now. What did she find?

Leigh memorized the pattern of hard water stains on the glass-walled shower in a one-inch by one-inch area. No one else would bother or see the pattern at all, but her private obsession to make sense of chaos kept her from distractions. "We've been looking for something to connect Poppy Slater, Ruby Davis, and Saige Fuentes to the same abductor. Potentially the man in the photo from the night they'd gotten drunk together last summer. What if Elyse succeeded?"

"You mean the hair she hid away in her medicine cabinet?" the detective asked. "How would she have known it was Ruby's, and why wouldn't she have turned it over to the police?"

"Would you if you'd been in her position?" Leigh crouched in front of the shower, trying to pick out those telltale signs of use. Because no matter how hard she scrubbed her own shower, there were still stains she just couldn't get rid of in the white shower pan. "You said you talked Samuel Thornton out of pressing charges against her that day she turned up to accuse him of assaulting her. But did you assure her you believed her? That you were going to do everything you could to help her?"

"I told her to go home. To get some rest as her doctor had recommended for a concussion." There was a low tone of regret in that answer, but Leigh wouldn't chase it down.

Leigh shoved to stand, pulling at the sutures across her midsection. The discomfort got the better of her right then. For a split second, she'd been herself. Whole. How quickly the tide had changed. Opening the glass door, she twisted the shower handle and let water collect at the bottom of the pan. "How long has Samuel Thornton lived here?"

"I don't know. Four, five years, maybe. Ever since his foster father died," Detective Moore said. "Why?"

The water started backing up around the drain, and Leigh stepped aside to give her partner a perfect view. "How often do you think he's cleaned the drains in his showers?"

An excited electricity brightened the detective's eyes. "I'll get a screwdriver."

In minutes, the detective returned with tools in hand. She handed off a flathead screwdriver and let Leigh take the lead. The screw centered in the middle of the wide-holed drain gave up the ghost within a few turns, but she had to pry the metal from the shower floor. A good sign Samuel Thornton had not, in fact, paid much attention to his plumbing needs. "I'll need a snake to collect anything down here."

One slid into her peripheral vision. Bright orange, flimsy plastic with horizontal teeth to catch a multitude of hair blockage. She inserted the snake down the drain and pressed it against the edge of the pipe. Then pulled. "If I wasn't so determined to prove Samuel Thornton had something to do with your niece's disappearance, I might throw up."

A mess of hair and buildup clung to the snake, and she instantly maneuvered the entire collection into an evidence bag Detective Moore had waiting outside the shower.

"Some of this hair is longer and darker than Samuel Thornton's." The detective made sure to get every strand within the plastic confines and sealed it tight to deliver to the forensic techs. "It's going to take some time to sort it all out, but maybe we'll finally get some answers."

Leigh left the drain unscrewed from the shower pan in case the crime scene techs needed to source the evidence. "This isn't the only bathroom, is it?"

"One of three." The detective showed off two more bright orange extensions of barbed plastic. "Would you believe me if I told you I found these snakes underneath the kitchen sink? Samuel Thornton may have supplied us with the very tools we needed to prove he killed these girls."

If only they could prove he had something to do with Elyse's disappearance. She'd seen how far killers went to keep themselves out of prison firsthand. And if Elyse had gotten too close to exposing Samuel Thornton as the predator he was… It would've only been a matter of time before she'd paid the price. "I'm pretty sure that's what they call ironic."

They moved on to the next bathroom, snaking the drain, and the next. Neither produced much in the way of evidence other than a few strands of mid-length blond. Seemed Samuel Thornton had a preference for which shower he used, and if the department had DNA samples to compare—such as those taken off the bodies of two teenaged girls—forensics could confirm something both Leigh and Detective Moore already suspected: Their dead man had abducted, raped, and killed two young women in the past year, with a potential third still missing.

"Call your coroner and tell him we're on our way." Leigh hefted the evidence bag from the first shower drain, trying to visibly match each strand to their list of victims. "I think we're about to find out if Saige Fuentes is one of Samuel Thornton's victims, Detective."