Page 74 of The Fragile Ones
Eventually, she felt brave enough to switch on the light. One of the bulbs flickered for a moment, but then ignited for another day. Katie stared at the investigation board covered with lists of what they knew and didn’t know, photos of suspects and victims, and various maps.
You know all about him. You can reach out and touch him.
She couldn’t get Darren Rodriguez’s voice out of her head. What did he mean by that? Was he trying to let her know that the killer was someone she had already met? The killer was close by? Rodriguez clearly had some psychological issues, but he seemed lucid in the parking lot and like he knew exactly what was going on. He knew all too well that he would soon become lost in the system and he wanted to make sure that Katie knew he was innocent. But was he?
Katie couldn’t ignore it, but was also smart enough not to pin her whole investigation on it. She decided to add his words to the list on the board and see where it all fit together.
Sitting down at her desk, she felt the weight of the world pressing down on her shoulders. There she stayed for ten minutes, her hands on her forehead, resting her eyes, trying to relax. And suddenly it came to her: if Megan was number 372 of a group that branded children for whatever reason, there had to be other cases. Katie opened her laptop and began to sift through the police database with keywords and locations for child murders and branding or tattoos. She had begun a search as soon as they discovered the branding, but didn’t have much luck. Now she was determined to find out more information.
As she waited for some of her searches to complete, she noticed a neat stack of papers clamped together with a heavy black fastener. Denise must have left these for her to read through. It was a list of people she had gathered from the neighborhood app for Rock Creek. She had printed out conversations, posts, maps and anything she thought might be useful to Katie’s search. There were also some photos of the townspeople. Katie began to read through it all, amazed at what people divulged to strangers in an open forum—mostly gossip about who was sleeping with whom, and complaints about what horrible color someone had painted their house.
The door opened and McGaven stepped inside, a look of relief washing across his face.
“It’s okay, Gav, I’m not so delicate that I’m going to break any time soon.”
“I didn’t think that.”
“Really, I’m okay. It wasn’t the way I imagined spending my day, but I’m okay.”
McGaven sat down. “It never is.”
Her computer had stopped searching and delivered a list of potentially linked cases with a ping.
“What are you working on?” he asked, as he looked at the newest statements written on the board. “You know all about him. You can reach out and touch him…I don’t remember Rodriguez saying that.”
“The officer told me that he said that on the transport, and Rodriguez said it to me just before he killed himself.”
“Do you think he was playing some sick game?”
“I don’t know for sure, but I think he was telling the truth. Just like I think he was definitely afraid of Whitney Mayfield.” Katie read over the lists of cases on her screen of information that wasn’t available before. “Check this out. There was a case of a young girl, eight, Darla Denton, who was found murdered, strangled, in Rock Creek about eight years ago. And she had numbers branded on her scalp.”
“Not the same numbers.”
“It doesn’t say. But we didn’t have this information before—why?”
“Why didn’t Chief Osborne tell us about this case? Why wasn’t it initially entered into the database?” he said.
“And over in Huntington County, there were two girls, Ella Dixon and Mary Steinberg, around the same time, about seven years ago. Both strangled and both numbered.” Katie was astonished. What else didn’t they know?
“This is quite unbelievable and a huge discovery,” he said. “Anything else?”
“No, that’s all could find. I don’t quite have your research skills. Request copies of those cases ASAP. And any others you find.”
“I’ll search for similar cases in surrounding counties.” He immediately got to work.
“And while you’re at it, this scavenger hunt to find Whitney Mayfield is driving me nuts. All we have are blurry photos and vague descriptions of him. We need current photos.”
“On it. I know what I’m going to be doing the next few hours.”
“Gav,” she said.
“I was going to say why do I get stuck doing all this computer stuff—but I realized I love digging for more information…”
“Gav.”
“…You never really know what you’re going to find.”
“Gav, you can’t ignore me.”
