Page 16 of Shadow Sabotage
It made it impossible to concentrate.
I looked up from my computer and gave her a pointed expression. “You don’t have to sit in here, you know. You’re welcome to go work at your own desk.”
She ran her hands up and down her thighs. “Sure. What do you want me to do?”
I stared at her, realizing she had absolutely no idea where to start. I leaned back and put my hands behind my head, narrowing my eyes at her. “Is this your first investigation?”
“Of course not,” she said, bristling.
I cocked my head and gave her a skeptical look .
“Well, it’s my firsthomicideinvestigation,” she admitted. “But I’ve investigated, you know, other things…”
“Reading Nancy Drew as a kid doesn’t count.”
She bristled again—but the flush on her face told me I was right.
Annoyance tugged. Sheriff McGrath should have assigned one of the others. He’d admitted she was their newest deputy, and it was clear she was also the least professional. I didn’t have time to hold her hand and teach her where to start.
On the other hand, if he hadn’t assigned her, I’d likely have been stuck working with Sergeant Collins. He would have stuck to me like glue with continual compliments and attempts to make me feel like we were buddies. I also didn’t fully trust him—he’d taken credit for identifying that bracelet at Katelyn’s even though everyone else I’d talked to said it was Wendy James and Deputy Hawkins who’d made that connection.
Hawkins was probably the better of the two—if I could get her out of my hair.
“I know you think this is Katelyn, but until we hear from the medical examiner, we need to consider all possibilities,” I said. “I need you to identify other potential victims. Your background is SAR. Check for unresolved SAR cases in that area or ones where the search radius was close enough to the campground that the victim could have legitimately made it there.”
“There aren’t any,” she said. “At least not from the last ten years.”
“You have them all memorized?” I asked, skeptical.
“Yeah.”
When I didn’t say anything, she sighed. “Don’t you remember every one of your cold cases?”
Those shadows filled her eyes again. There was pain there. Guilt and frustration for the people she hadn’t brought home.
I understood that. Respected it.
“Point taken,” I said, giving her a nod. “Check for older ones. Just in case. When you’re done with that, compile a listof missing persons within a two-hundred-mile radius. Narrow it down to females age twelve to thirty, height of five four to five seven. See if any of those reports mention a charm bracelet.”
“Got it.” She stood up, looking as relieved to get out of my office as I was to get her out of there.
While Deputy Hawkinsworked to create a list of possible victims for us, I kept my focus on Katelyn Brown. It would take time to get an official ID. The bones had been scattered, showing markings from where predator animals had scavenged and feasted. Only a few scraps of clothing had remained. None of them matched what she had been wearing when she left town, and there was no wallet or ID found at the scene to make things easy. We would have to wait for DNA to be extracted from bone or get a positive match on dental records.
Both of those things took time, no matter how many strings I pulled to get to the head of the line. And I’d pulled every string I had.
Our best clue was the bracelet.
I studied the photos of it that Wendy’s assistant had taken at the scene and compared them to the photographs of Katelyn. The same charms, in the exact same order.
It wasn’t proof, but there was no way it was a coincidence.
A few hours later, when I was deep into Katelyn’s social media presence, I got a call from the crime lab.
“Are you about to make my day?” I asked.
The cheerful voice on the other end laughed. “I’m not a miracle worker. But we’re working on the DNA. I don’t even want to know what you had to do in order to get pushed to the front of the line.”
I grinned. “All I did was ask nicely.”
