Page 65 of The Wolves Come at Night
“Roll, okay? Let me play profiler for a minute.”
She smiled and nodded. “Okay.”
“So Osborne is torn apart over his girlfriend giving him the boot. Maybe he was already unstable, but this pushes him over the edge. He stalks a college freshman, hacks the app he knows she uses, programs the coordinates, lures her and his girlfriend to the top of the mountain, stages a fight with his girlfriend then shoots her, tries and fails to chase down the second target. He leaves the girlfriend’s body out in the open and doesn’t come back to put it in the graveyard he’s been using for several years. The following day, he kidnaps the witness, stashes her away, and hurries back to his house to commit suicide.” He shrugged. “Seems far-fetched.”
“My point exactly. Too complicated, too many holes, too many illogical points. His laptop didn’t show anything suspicious, and the journals, while upsetting, felt like the yearnings of a jilted lover, not a homicidal maniac. Was he upset? Did he make threats? Yes. And we can’t for a moment discount them. That’s how schools get shot up, when we pretend not to see the madness staring us in the face.
“But the creeps I’ve dealt with in the past have such an edge to them. Someone who’s been curating a burial ground for ten years? That’s a special kind of pathology. No. Osborne isn’t our serial killer. Did he kill his girlfriend? Probably, especially because we know he shot a weapon because of the GSR on his hand, but I’m not 100 percent on that either.”
O’Roarke was nodding. “Agreed. Assuming, though, murder-suicide, let’s set Wray and Osborne aside for the moment. A stranger stalker, someone who is trying to get his hands on Carson Conway, learns all her habits, sets her up with the app, brings her to his graveyard so he can kill her, and damn bad luck, another couple is there at that exact spot having a homicidal fight. Your target freaks and runs. Now you have to lay low for a day and then snatch her off the street instead of having the privacy to kill her and bury her as you’d planned. Chances are, you know we’ve found your burial ground and you’re on the run, too.”
“Also possible, more likely, though still wildly coincidental.”
He played with the cord again, looking closely at the end of it.
“What’s missing from this scene? You’ve seen the evidence logs, I assume.”
“Yeah. Nothing terribly exciting. A laptop, that’s already been cleared by my lieutenant’s team. The notebooks, none of which, from what I’ve seen, say he’s suicidal or planning to murder his girlfriend. He’s pretty pissed off at her, but it feels passionate, not desperate. Though who knows, if he’d been planning it for a while, maybe he just didn’t record all his thoughts. Also, don’t forget the paper of the notebooks doesn’t match the suicide note.”
“Right. But there’s nothing about this.”
He yanked the cord from the wall and tossed it to her. She caught it midair.
“A phone cord?”
“Look closer.”
She did, running it through her hands until she got to the very end. It was a branded cord, from a major retailer. She looked up to see O’Roarke with a huge grin on his face and the file listing the evidence removed from the house open on the counter, a big forefinger stabbing the center of it.
“There’s no mention of any sort of voice-activated home assistant. But that cord that goes to a smart speaker. I’m sure of it.”
“Which means…”
“Someone took it before you got here.”
“Again with the assumptions. It could be to an eReader. Or a phone.”
“It could. There are plenty of universal cords. But this is a charger for a specific smart speaker. I know because I have the same one, and it doesn’t charge any other of my devices because it’s a different voltage and connector. There isn’t a smart speaker on our evidence list.”
She thought about this for a minute.
“Okay. Assuming he owned one, and that cord isn’t something the contractors left behind—remember, this place has been under renovation—you think that maybe, if Justin Osborne was killed instead of dying by suicide, the killer took it with him, knowing he could have been recorded?”
“Criminals aren’t always that smart, but it’s not outside the bounds of reason. And these devices have been known to record accidentally. It’s a shot in the dark, yeah. But it’s something.”
“Okay,” Taylor said, setting the cord on the counter. It was just nutty enough to be a possible lead. “This is going to take some legwork. And paper. This company isn’t going to hand over audio recordings for us to comb through. The hoops we have to jump through because of the expectation of privacy are mitigated because the owner is dead—assuming we can find the records that prove he was the owner of this phantom device—but you’re still going to have to convince a judge to give you a warrant for the records, and that’s only if you can prove there was one registered to this address.”
“I can do that. It might be a challenge, but I’ve got a feeling there’s something here.” He grinned again. “My light wolf is howling.”
“It’s yours, then. Run with it. I’m open to most anything right now.”
She glanced at her watch. “I gotta go grab up one of my detectives to work the graveyard IDs. Can I drop you back at the task force HQ?”
“That would be great. Fingers crossed I can get this moving quickly.”
“Fingers crossed it gives us something to go on,” she replied. “Good work, O’Roarke. We might make a profiler out of you yet.”
Thirty-Four
