Page 59 of Cruel Debts
I dug deeper to see if Keehn had left any digital notes on the case, and came up with nothing.
Damn.
Leave it up to Tank to take all his notes physically. If he had steno notepads, those could be in his personal effects, or in the trash, or in the evidence lockers, or hell, in some sort of fucking storage unit far, far away from here.
I'd have to call Mistwood and have him pull strings from afar. I needed to find out if this case had anything to do with his disappearance.
It was the last one his name was attached to before his own file was opened.
An hour later,I had an alias, a purpose, and an excuse.
And the lady at the evidence lockup here was giving me an appreciative eye as I flashed a fake badge and told her I was here on orders from Port Wylde PD to pick up some evidence from a cold case that pertained to a case my partner and I were working.
"Here you are, sweetie," she said softly, batting her eyelashes at me like there was a chance I'd take her out of here and far away to the big city. "You sure this one's all you need?"
"Ah, yeah, partner and I are looking into a string of cases that Detective McCoy had his hands on before he left this office." I scratched the back of my neck as she opened the box and worked her way through the checklist attached to the side.
Her lips turned down in a frown. "Huh. That's strange." She shuffled through the box again, and my heart sank.
Something that was supposed to be in there wasn't. I'd bet money on it.
"Something wrong?" I played stupid. Never wanna seem too smart when you're in unfamiliar territory. Playing dumb saved my life on more than one occasion.
"Ah, the DNA sample we got from her parents is missing. As is a high school ID. They're on the checklist, but nobody's signed them out, and they're not in this box."
My suspicions grew. "Any chance they might've been misplaced?" I knew the answer was no, but I had to ask.
"Not on my watch." Her look was harsh and unfriendly now, and I realized I'd overstepped. In Port Wylde, there were shifts, several men assigned to the job of guarding evidence. Here, there was likely one woman, and this was her dragon's lair of shit. "Nothing leaves here without my knowing, and without a signature."
Clearly, that wasn't the case.
"Was there ever a time around the time this was checked in that you might've been sick? Or took a vacation?—"
"Now, you listen here, young man. I don't do anything, I don't go anywhere, and I'm healthy as a horse. The last person to put hands on this box was your Detective McCoy, and unless he snuck it out while I was signing, which I highly doubt, then they should be here."
Or they were never there to begin with.
"Well, I appreciate your help," I said, stuffing my hand in the box to pull out the steno pad. "This is actually all I need from this box. Where do you want me to sign?"
A few minutes later, she'd also hooked me up with a list of cases Keehn had examined evidence for, running back ayear before this one. After tapping back into my computer, the pattern was clear.
Keehn had been working cold cases. Not just any cold cases, either.
They were all missing persons. The victims were all young girls and women in their early twenties, athletic build, stunning looks. The same kind of girls that had been going missing in Khula City and Port Wylde for years now, too.
The kind that get trafficked.
I spent the next hour thumbing through his damn journal of chicken scratch, trying to find something helpful. Another hour after that taking notes.
I felt like that guy in the meme with the whiteboard behind him who looked like he'd been up for 48 hours straight, his hair sticking out in all directions, red string going from one pin to the next to show the connections.
It's all connected.
Aint't that the truth.
The missing girl was picked up, presumably, in the same time frame as the girl befoer her—midday, when she should have been with friends. She'd been snatched, and her purse abandoned in a nearby drainage ditch for two locals to come across while dredging the drains at the end of the road. Her trail dried up so quick it was like it was invisible, and nobody knew or saw or heard anything.
Except for one guy who'd claimed he saw her get into a nondescript white van with plates from out of town.
