Page 75 of Little Girls Sleeping
McGaven glanced at his watch. “I need to go home and get some things done before shift.”
“Go, everyone, go. I’m not a princess in my castle here, you know,” Katie laughed. “Now I have a security system, like Cisco wasn’t already enough.”
The dog barked.
“There should be something back at the lab for your case,” Blackburn said. “You can drop by tomorrow afternoon and I’ll make sure I have it all ready for you.”
“Okay,” she said.
She watched as the men left; both of them seemed reluctant to go. She assumed her uncle had made them swear to make sure the house was as safe as any high-security prison.
After waving goodbye, she decided to set the alarm. It was just her and Cisco again. And as much as the dog loved the two men, he seemed content to be with just Katie.
Sitting down on the couch with a notebook on her lap, she decided to run the case from the beginning. It would be too easy to assume that the information she needed hadn’t materialized yet. Too high-minded. In fact, she thought there were too many clues, too much information, and too many statements, which made a muddled mess. She couldn’t see through it clearly. Her cop instincts fired a warning shot over her head, urging her to figure out what she was missing.
Cisco grumbled and scooted himself closer to her, putting his head on her lap.
“Cisco, I can’t write when your head is in the way.”
The dog sighed and moved a couple of inches.
She listed everything that had happened from the first day she began searching for Chelsea. As with the battlefield, her memories of defining moments came alive with distinct smells and visions. This time it was the gravesite.
The hand-made coffins.
The positioning of the girls, perfectly posed.
The teddy bears.
The professionally tied bows.
No trace evidence.
Behavioral evidence?
There was a lack of viable evidence for a roadmap to the killer. In the way an obsessive-compulsive personality type would approach the case, she ran the investigation backwards to the beginning—and vice versa. She saw the faces of the three little girls in their final resting positions, the hanging body of Terrance Price, her patrol car blown up, the barn inferno, the warning messages—and still nothing clicked.
Why was the killer making it personal?
Why would he direct the messages just at her and not Detective Templeton as well?
She ran through the evidence from the forensic lab and double-checked her emails and Templeton’s reports. She formulated some questions for John Blackburn tomorrow, but wasn’t hopeful that they would render anything substantial.
Combing through interviews and reports, she concluded the physical evidence that stood out most was the coffin and the teddy bears. The behavioral evidence was the method and motivation.
She kept pushing the evidence and re-reading the notes.
Soon her focus crashed as her vision faded, and she fell asleep.
Thirty-Nine
Katie watched the image on the computer monitor as it was magnified four hundred times. The pictures of interest looked like nothing more than burned-away timber pieces with spiky features. The results from the scanning electron microscope revealed that the impression evidence from her front door couldn’t help identify the tool used. The frame and lock were too badly damaged, as if someone had intentionally made a mess so that it couldn’t be traced.
She sighed and realized that the evidence from her house wasn’t going to lead to any type of breakthrough.
“I know I could have just told you in a report, but I wanted you to see the actual results in case you have any questions,” said Blackburn as he studied her.
She frowned and felt her stomach drop in disappointment, not because the evidence was unusable, but because the entire case weighed even heavier on her conscience. She dreaded the eventual news that there was another body posed somewhere for the police to discover. The Matthews girl still hadn’t been found and the third girl hadn’t been identified yet.
