Snapped (20 page)

She looked away and seemed to decide something. “There is someone who probably wouldn’t mind, actually.” She looked at Allison and smiled weakly. “That’s not a bad idea.”

Sophie found Kelsey the next day in the subterranean suite of offices known to Delphi staffers as the Bones Unit.

“How’s the head?” Kelsey asked, glancing up from the skull she had perched on some sort of tripod.

It was a human skull, and Sophie stifled a shudder. She’d never quite gotten used to the fact that some of her best friends spent their days studying dead people.

“I feel fine,” Sophie reported. “All it really needed was an ice pack.”

Kelsey watched her skeptically, probably trying to read whether she was lying. And she was. Sophie’s head felt okay now, but the attack itself had shaken her much more than she wanted to admit.

Nevertheless, she’d come down to the bowels of the
lab to assure Kelsey that (a) she wasn’t seriously injured and (b) Kelsey’s ill-timed phone call wasn’t to blame for the mugging.

“So.” Sophie pulled up a stool near the worktable and mustered a smile. “What are you working on? Who’s this?”

“As of now, her name’s Jane Doe.” Kelsey put down the laser pointer she was using to take digital measurements. “A couple of cavers found her near a nature trail out in Menard County. Sheriff there asked me to get him the Big Four: race, sex, age, stature.”

“Will you be able to do it?”

“The skeleton’s incomplete, but I’ve got the skull and the pelvis, so that shouldn’t be a problem. The bigger challenge is getting an ID. I’ve got some ideas for him on that front, though.” Kelsey crossed her arms. “Anyway, enough about me. How’s your case coming?”

Which one?
Sophie wanted to ask, but she wasn’t sure how much Kelsey knew about her involvement with the university shooting.

“The store clerk looked at some photo books, may have identified someone,” Sophie said. “It sounded pretty tentative, but at least it’s a lead.”

“Did Jonah bring him in?”

“Jonah?”

“You two looked pretty chummy at the picnic tables the other day. I figured he was probably involved. Are you guys dating now?”

“Ha. Dating hasn’t been high on my list lately,” Sophie said, dodging the issue. “Anyway, he’s out of town. Allison Doyle’s on the case.”

“Never met her.” Kelsey stripped off her latex gloves and tossed them in a bin. “Hey, while you’re here, I
should tell you the rumor I heard about you when I was up in the director’s office this morning.”

“About
me
?”

“Yep.” Kelsey smiled. “The director’s admin is kind of a gossip queen, and according to
her
, you’re on the short list of candidates for the PR opening.”

“You’re kidding.”

“The director caught your interview and believes we’re wasting you on phones. He thinks someone with your, quote, ‘poise in front of a camera’ belongs in our public relations office.”

“Wow.” Sophie felt slightly stunned by the compliment. She hadn’t thought the director even knew she existed. “He’s probably just happy because I plugged the lab and it ended up on CNN.”

“Shrewd move, by the way. You may have just gotten yourself promoted.”

“I wasn’t doing it to get
promoted
. I think the police are missing something.”

“And you’re probably right.” Kelsey gave her a long look. “What did Jonah think? I’m guessing he wasn’t too happy about you sharing your accomplice sighting with the media?”

Sophie remembered the look on his face when he’d met her at the gym. “You guessed right. I think I may have ticked off the whole department.”

Kelsey waved her off. “I wouldn’t worry about it. They’re probably just embarrassed you caught something they missed. Jonah will probably be thanking you someday for having the guts to come forward.”

Sophie snorted. “I don’t know about
that
. Last time I saw him, he looked ready to wring my neck.”

•••

The 1976 Volkswagen Beetle arrived at the Delphi Center in a moving van, and Allison couldn’t help thinking that if the lawsuits didn’t bankrupt her department, the bill from this crime lab could certainly do the trick. She stood inside the large enclosed garage and watched as the driver of the van completed his delivery. The truck began to hiss and groan.

“What’s that sound?”

“Hydraulics,” said the tracer who was standing by to take the vehicle’s interior apart in search of evidence.

Allison looked at him to elaborate, but then looked away. With his athletic build, sun-bronzed skin, and faded baseball cap, Roland Delgado was quickly dispelling her notion of a lab geek. If not for his Tyvek coveralls, she would have thought he was a kayaking instructor, not a scientist.

“We like gravity to do the work,” he said as a ramp emerged from the cargo space, tilted down toward the floor. “The last thing we want is someone getting behind the wheel and contaminating the crime scene.”

More groaning as the Beetle emerged, attached to a winch that was slowly being let out. The truck spit out the Bug, Roland stepped forward to unhook the winch from the front bumper, and the platform receded like a giant metal tongue.

Allison stood on the sidelines as the tracer snapped on some surgical gloves and got to work. Task one: photographing the car from every angle, which he did with a small digital camera.

“Hey, you mind aiming that light for me?” He
glanced up at Allison as he opened the passenger’s-side door and crouched down.

This was the strangest garage Allison had ever seen. Besides having a floor that looked clean enough to double as an operating table, it had an abundance of lights—overhead lamps, portable lamps, handheld flashlights. Roland nodded at the standing spotlight closest to her, and she tilted it to shine inside the car.

“Not much of a neat freak,” Roland told her, bending over something on the floor with his tweezers. “I like this guy already.”

“You’re aware he shot twenty-eight people, right?”

The tracer deposited something Allison couldn’t see into a small paper bag.

“Yeah, but look at all the goodies he left behind. Soil, plant matter, synthetic fiber … The plant matter alone could keep us entertained for days.”

Okay, maybe he was more of a geek than she’d given him credit for.

“Whoa.”

Allison stepped closer and ducked her head. “What?”

He snapped a few pictures, then dug some extralong tweezers from his pocket and reached under the passenger seat. He pulled out a small gray wad.

“Chewing gum,” he announced with a smile. “Mia’s going to love this. She’s our DNA tracer. She can run an STR analysis and develop a profile.”

“Not bad,” Allison said. “And if our mystery man was smart enough to wear gloves but dumb enough to spit out his gum, I’ll take you out for a beer to celebrate.”

He lifted an eyebrow but didn’t look up. “I’ll hold you
to that beer. And you never know. Perps can do stupid things.”

“Won’t argue with that one.” Allison stepped closer again. “I once worked an apartment burglary where the guy used a flexible plastic card to get past the lock on a door. You know those phony credit cards you get in the mail?”

“Yeah?”

“They’re the best kind. Nice and thin. Anyway, this guy must not have had one handy because he used his driver’s license instead. Didn’t manage to get the door open, ended up dropping the thing in her apartment, and it was waiting right there when she came home from work.”

Roland snapped another picture. “So, if he didn’t get into the apartment, how do you know he was planning to burglarize it?”

“He hit the other apartments on her hall first.” She leaned closer, trying to see what had his attention. “What are you photographing?”

“McDonald’s wrapper. And a receipt.”

“Tell me it’s a credit-card purchase.”

“Sorry.”

He collected the bits of paper in separate bags, then moved around to the driver’s side, which was Allison’s primary area of interest. If Sophie Barrett’s claims had any merit, here’s where they’d be most likely to find evidence.

Roland arranged more lamps before crouching down and shaking his head. “Damn. Your fingerprint guy really went nuts in here. There’s powder everywhere.”

“He was trying to be thorough.”

“Next time, send it straight to the best.” He glanced up at her with warm brown eyes and a cocky smile that made her pulse pick up.

“I’ll remember that.” She shifted away from Roland and pretended to be examining the car instead of wondering what he looked like under those coveralls. She needed to get out more. She hadn’t been on a date in ages, and she was starting to get itchy around all the men she worked with.

The door behind her squeaked open and a lab-coated woman stepped into the room. She had reddish-blond hair and a smattering of freckles covering her nose.

“Mia, baby, you’re going to love me.”

“What have you got?” She came over to stand next to Allison, and they traded greetings.

“Some ABC gum, for starters.”

Allison looked at the woman. “ABC?”

“Already been chewed.” She smiled. “We like our acronyms around here.”

“Unfortunately, it’s pretty petrified and it came from the passenger side. I doubt it’s the guy you’re looking for.”

Mia donned a pair of surgical gloves and pulled a small glass vial from her pocket. Inside was a cotton swab.

“You finish the door yet?” she asked, walking over to Roland.

“Thought I’d save that for you.”

“How thoughtful.” She pulled out a small container of liquid, dampened the cotton swab, and began rubbing it in tiny circles along the top of the car door.

Allison eased closer, intrigued. “You’re looking for skin cells?”

“Skin cells, maybe traces of sweat.” She glanced up at Allison. “Anyone driving this little car probably rested an elbow on the door here. He may have worn gloves, but it was nearly a hundred degrees last Wednesday, and I’d be surprised if he was in long sleeves. If we’re lucky, we’ll get DNA.”

“And it looks like this is our lucky day.”

Allison and Mia both looked at Roland as he pulled the camera from his pocket and snapped a picture of the headrest.

“What is it?” Mia asked.

He traded the camera for tweezers. “A hair.” He gently tugged it loose from a crease in the headrest, then lifted it up for them to see.

“About six centimeters, brown.” He glanced at Allison. “Does your fingerprint tech have brown hair?”

“Black. He’s vietnamese.” Allison’s stomach tensed with excitement as she gazed at the strand.

Mia looked at Allison hopefully. “What about the shooter? What color was his hair?”

“He didn’t have any,” Allison said. “Head smooth as a cue ball.”

“It wasn’t random at all. I’d bet my badge on it,” Jonah told Ric over the phone. He drove past yet another set of golden arches and felt a pang in his stomach. After fourteen hours of driving, he was tired, cranky, and running on fumes. “It was damn near surgical. Ankles, hands, wrists. He shot up windows and statues. He wasn’t trying to kill students, he was trying to terrorize. I think the whole thing was staged.”

“Who was the target, then? Or was he aiming for all three?”

Jonah stared ahead and concentrated on keeping to his lane. Only a few more miles to go, but he could hardly hold his head up. He’d driven almost eighteen hundred miles over the past two days and had a shitty night’s sleep in a cheap motel in Columbus after wasting the remainder of yesterday looking for Himmel’s ex-wife. She was MIA.

The phone was silent, and he remembered Ric had asked him a question. Shit. The target.

“I don’t think it was Jodi Kincaid,” Jonah said. “He didn’t mean to kill her. It was a ricochet bullet. Confirmed it with Scott Black just the other day.”

“So he didn’t mean to kill the pregnant lady, but he had no problem killing a student and a professor. Good to know. The question is, why?”

“I’m still working on that.” Jonah sailed past another exit, ignoring the fast-food signs. He planned to raid whatever was in his pantry before falling into bed. “Allison’s helping me, too. She’s pulling together victimology reports on all three. If we can get to motive, we can get to who else might be involved, if anyone.”

“That’s sounding more and more likely. By the way, Noonan finally broke down and sent the car up to Delphi.”

“The VW?” Jonah couldn’t believe the chief had sprung for the cost. But considering the media uproar, he probably thought covering his ass was a good use of funds.

“They found a hair in the headrest of the driver’s seat,” Ric informed him. “Mia’s working on the DNA.”

It took Jonah’s fried brain an extra second to process the words. “Shit.”

“That’s what I was thinking.”

Himmel’s head had been shaved. Because he liked it that way? Because of chemotherapy? Jonah didn’t know yet. But a hair recovered from the headrest of Himmel’s car, assuming it wasn’t his, would be the first physical evidence of a possible accomplice.

A pause on the other end. Even in Jonah’s wiped-out state, he could tell there was something more on Ric’s mind.

“Whatever it is, fucking spit it out. I’m too tired to play guessing games.”

“This new info …” Ric paused, clearly uncomfortable with whatever it was he had to say. “It goes a long way toward proving this was a targeted murder. That conspiracy theory is looking more and more believable. You understand where this puts Sophie, don’t you?”

“Right in the fucking middle of our fucking investigation.”

“She’s a critical witness,” Ric said.

“She’s our only witness.”

“You hear what I’m saying, man?”

“Yeah.”

“Whatever you got going with her—”

“I got it. Jesus.”

“I’m pointing out the obvious, I know, but you sound pretty beat.”

“I am.”

“Get some sleep,” Ric advised. “I’ll catch up with you tomorrow.”

Jonah tossed the phone onto the passenger seat as the
burning in his gut intensified. It wasn’t just hunger. It was disappointment, too—the stinging kind. Because suddenly he knew he’d been counting on Sophie’s story falling apart. Not just counting on it, hoping for it, desperately, because somehow in his sleep-deprived, food-deprived, sex-deprived state, he’d decided she was fair game. He wanted her. Issues or not, head case or not, he wanted her and he’d decided to go after her. He’d decided to quit thinking about right and wrong and finally give in to the lust that had been gnawing away at him for months now.