Captured in Death, page 26
“I told you I wouldn’t let her look through pictures of cops.”
Kenzie cleared her throat. Yes, he had been very clear about that point. Kenzie couldn’t say that she had somehow misunderstood. Campbell had not wanted to throw a bunch of cops under the bus. Hadn’t wanted her to pick out someone who was completely innocent and identify him as a killer.
But they’d already had reason to suspect Saul. It wasn’t just blindly choosing a bunch of police officers and letting her pick anyone she pleased to say that it was the dirty cop.
“I thought since we already figured it was Saul, it wouldn’t hurt to get a confirmation.” Kenzie looked at Zachary. “You told him that was why I needed the picture, didn’t you?”
Zachary didn’t answer.
Campbell looked at Zachary. “Oh, this is on you too, is it? You’re the one who found the picture for her.”
“Yes.”
Kenzie was just getting caught up on what had happened. She had thought that Sergeant Campbell had given the picture of Saul to Zachary, but he had not. Zachary had done what he did best—searched out the needed information—and had given it to Kenzie without checking with Campbell first. And Campbell would not have approved Kenzie using it for that purpose.
“Oh… I’m sorry. I thought that you had given it to Zachary when I asked for a picture to send to Emily. I… should have known you wouldn’t want me to send it to her.”
“You’ve tainted this witness. You’ve shown her a picture of one person, and named that person as a suspect, and it will now be firmly entrenched in her mind as the person she saw kill Mercer. If that was actually what happened and not just something she made up.”
Kenzie rubbed her forehead. “I didn’t realize.”
“You know we have rules about showing pictures to witnesses. Photo lineups. Not tipping off a witness that you are looking at a certain person.”
“Yes.” Kenzie looked down at her phone. She couldn’t very well take it back now. Emily had seen what she had seen. If she testified against Saul in court, if they could arrest him for the murder and get her up on the stand, she would be forced to say that she had been shown a single picture. And the identification would get thrown out. “She was pretty vehement.”
She turned the phone and showed it to Zachary, but not to Campbell. Campbell wouldn’t care. It wouldn’t convince him that Kenzie had done the right thing. And she hadn’t. Not if she had screwed up that identification so badly. And she was supposed to be a professional, the person getting promoted to assistant medical examiner.
Or maybe she wouldn’t. Maybe she would just be fired.
Zachary looked at Emily’s message and chuckled. He swiped down the rest of the conversation, his eyes going quickly over their words.
“Stars?” he asked.
“I don’t know what it means. I thought maybe the starred words in their conversation would make a message, but it doesn’t make sense.”
“What’s that?” Campbell asked.
“Emily says that Rhys keeps putting stars in his messages. But she doesn’t know why. It isn’t something he usually does.”
“Maybe it means that he is not the one sending the messages. Or that he is not the one with the phone in his hands.”
Kenzie shook her head slowly. “Emily was sure that it was Rhys she was messaging with. He was sending her the kind of messages that Rhys does. He has a… unique messaging style.”
“So I recall,” Campbell agreed. He thought about it. “But Rhys could be telling Saul what to write in the messages, but the punctuation, the starred words, are Saul’s own additions.”
“How would Rhys tell him what to put?”
“He could…” Campbell’s forehead wrinkled as he thought it through. “He could be writing it down. Or he could have another phone and is typing his own messages, and then Saul is retyping them on the phone he controls. Making sure that Rhys can’t send a secret message.”
“Why would he do that? And if he did, then why would he add something that might tip Emily off to the fact that it isn’t Rhys typing?”
“That doesn’t seem very likely, does it? Unless he copied the stars from what Rhys typed on his own phone.”
“And then we’re back to why are the stars there?”
“And we know that Rhys isn’t typing on his own phone,” Zachary said, “since it is turned off. So Saul would have had to get two new phones, one for Rhys to type to him on and one for him to contact Emily with. More money, more complications, and the possibility that Rhys could be doing something with one phone while Saul is doing something with the other. He’d have to have eyes on Rhys’s phone all the time to make sure he wasn’t sending any secret messages. He’d have to be looking at his own phone and Rhys’s all the time.”
Kenzie nodded at this. It made sense. She didn’t think that there were two phones. And even if there were, Rhys was the one who had put the stars into the messages. They had to mean something.
“You remember when Gloria took him?” Zachary asked Kenzie. “He sent me messages to give us information about his location. Even when he could have just said, ‘the fishing cabin Grandpa took us to,’ he didn’t. His problem isn’t just with being unable to say things out loud. I don’t believe that he even thinks in words. He thinks in images. Or in concepts. And the more stressed he is, the harder it will be to convert those concepts into words.”
“And this time, it is even harder, because he’s got someone looking over his shoulder and reading all of those messages to make sure that he doesn’t say anything that would tip us off.”
Zachary nodded his agreement.
“So this is a picture,” Kenzie said, closing her eyes. “He’s sending two messages at once. What Saul tells him to, and a picture.”
57
Rhys watched bad cop out of the corner of his eye as the man paced back and forth across the cold, spare room like a tiger in a cage at the zoo. Back and forth, back and forth, getting more and more agitated. Rhys had thought that he would settle down once he was in contact with Emily but, rather than being reassured that she was no longer in Roxboro and hadn’t talked to anyone, he was acting like everything was falling apart.
He watched Rhys like a hawk. There was no opportunity for him to send an extra message to Emily, turn on location sharing, or install another app. All he could do was to send the messages bad cop told him to write and to try to keep everything from blowing up. He didn’t want bad cop going after Emily. He wanted to keep them apart and to try to calm things down. If Emily was still in Burlington, that was good.
He thought that she would message Kenzie. They had been in contact, and Rhys figured that once Emily knew he was in trouble, she would reach out to Kenzie and maybe to Zachary.
“Tell her she has to meet me,” bad cop growled at Rhys.
He shrugged and spread his hands out a little, as much as the handcuffs would allow him to. He had already sent that message to Emily more than once. Sending it again would not help anything.
“Do it!” the cop snapped, smacking Rhys across the back of the neck and head.
Rhys jumped. It didn’t hurt that much, but his heart raced even faster, and it was all he could do not to jump up from the table and find someplace to hide.
There was nowhere to hide. But that’s what his body and brain wanted him to do. His instincts were so strong that it was hard to keep himself pasted to the chair. He tried to look calm, like he wasn’t bothered at all by the cop or anything he did, but he was sure that every thought was probably written on his face. He wasn’t good at hiding his emotions. Not when that was often the only tool he had to communicate.
He popped up the gifs and jumped from one category to another, looking through the app’s frequently used gifs to try to home in on related ones that would express what he wanted. He wished he had his own phone and photo stream. But they weren’t available. The only thing the cop would let him install was his messaging app, so that he would be able to send Emily the messages the cop insisted he send.
“Come on,” bad cop growled, watching over Rhys’s shoulder. “Tell her she has to meet. She doesn’t have any choice. The only way I will let you go is if she meets with me. Shows me her phone. Shows me that she’s gotten rid of all of the pictures. Then she can run away wherever she wants to.”
Rhys doubted that the cop would let Emily go anywhere. He already knew he had made a mistake letting her go the first time. Not realizing that she had taken a picture and would send it out to others. She had been in shock. All she could do was go home and go to bed. That was what Emily had told him. She had been too panicked to do anything but snap a couple of pictures of the man she had seen killed and get out of there. It wasn’t until she awoke from her first hibernation that she’d sent them out to friends. And then she’d gone back to sleep again, staying in bed for days like she had the flu.
Rhys understood. He knew that mind-numbing feeling that had pressed against his consciousness. That desire to withdraw. The letting go. It was easier to be gone than to face the pain and the panic. Even now, as he searched for a gif to send to Emily, he was fighting hard to stay present. He worked through the exercise Kenzie had suggested. Five things you see. Five things you hear. Five things you smell.
He finally found a gif that he thought worked, a meme from one of the TV shows he used to watch as a kid, with text across it. “Meet me halfway.”
“Not ‘halfway,’ ” bad cop growled, slapping Rhys’s hand back before he could press Send. He grabbed the phone to delete the image and went back to the gifs Rhys had been looking at.
“This one,” he pointed.
Rhys wrinkled his nose. A dancing black girl from some talent show franchise Rhys had never watched, with “Meet me” across the bottom. The band name? The song name?
Emily would know that Rhys hadn’t picked it out.
He went ahead and sent it anyway. It wasn’t like she didn’t know the cop was there, reading every message, telling him what to send.
No meeting, Emily texted back.
“She meets with you or I’m going to start cutting off fingers,” bad cop threatened, his voice going high and strained, like someone had run over his foot. “Or better yet, I’m going to shoot your kneecaps off!” He raised his gun and pointed it first at one of Rhys’s knees and then the other. “Tell her!”
Rhys pointed at the pile of guns and boxes of ammunition that bad cop had stacked on one of the kitchen counters.
“What?” the cop demanded.
Rhys raised the phone with both hands, pointing it at the guns and miming taking a picture.
“You want to send her a picture of my artillery? Go ahead. Send it to her. Tell her I’ll use whatever I have to. She is going to come to me, one way or the other.”
Rhys frowned. Palms up, he moved his hands back and forth. Here?
Bad cop scowled and didn’t come up with an answer. Rhys didn’t know how he thought Emily would get out there to meet with him. She would need a map. And a car. She couldn’t just take the bus out into the middle of nowhere. She couldn’t get a ride share that would take her all the way out there, where she might have an accomplice lying in wait to rob the guy. She would need a car she had control of and the GPS coordinates.
While the cop thought about that, Rhys composed a message, snapping a photo first of the pile of weapons, and then of his own knees, showing through frayed holes in his blue jeans. Grandma hated that he wore jeans with holes in them. Rhys hated that his knees were so thin and knobby. He wanted to be big and strong like Stanley Green. Like the wrestlers he saw on TV. Massive bodies. No one would push him around then. No one would grab him by the arm and drag him off like he was a little kid.
He tried not to think about how Emily would feel when she saw the threat. How she already felt knowing that the guy she had liked in the gang had been killed. Sick with guilt. Horrified that such a thing had happened while she looked on.
He knew that feeling. That sick, gut-wrenching, mind-numbing feeling. A sinking, heavy, crushing feeling. He felt it all the time when he thought about Grandpa Clarence and what had happened that day, something that he had been unable to stop. Something that could happen again to someone else he loved.
Predators lurked everywhere. Not just outside the house in the shadows, like on TV. But inside. Inside the house. Inside the family. People he knew and loved could do terrible things to each other and to him. People could die while he stood by and watched and did nothing to stop it.
He hoped that Emily would not break down and agree to meet. Unless he and Emily could work out a way between them to set bad cop up. To keep him from being able to hurt Emily. Or anyone else. If they could do that, it was worth whatever pain Rhys had to suffer to get there. If he could just prevent anyone else from getting hurt.
He scrolled through the gifs, trying to think of how they could do it.
58
Kenzie’s phone started buzzing and buzzing, several messages coming in right on top of each other. She pulled herself away from the argument with Campbell and Zachary to look at her phone. Her heart beat fast, worried about what was going on. Why had Emily suddenly ramped up the messages? Kenzie half expected her phone to ring with a call from the girl before she had a chance to read the messages. She could see as she checked her notifications screen and switched to the texting app that a couple of the messages were graphics.
Campbell and Zachary went quiet, waiting to find out what Kenzie had received.
The last message from Emily was a shrieking line of OMGs, big and bold and repeated all the way across the screen. Kenzie swallowed hard and scrolled up to see the earlier messages.
The first message was calm. DD keeps saying he wants to meet and I say no.
Then, a scream emoji, followed by the pictures. They were photographs rather than popular gifs.
A counter stacked with guns and ammunition boxes.
Two skinny brown knees protruding through frayed holes in blue jeans. A selfie. Someone seated at a kitchen table. Apparently, the same semi-rustic room as the guns were in. Both showed matching furnishings.
DD gonna kneecap R if I dont meet!
Kenzie felt ill. She was glad she was already sitting down, because she didn’t think she could have remained on her feet. She felt the blood drain from her face, leaving her dizzy, white sparkles obscuring her vision here and there.
“Kenzie?” Zachary rushed to her side. He sat beside her and put his arm around her, leaning over to look at her phone. Kenzie held it toward him, not looking him in the face.
Zachary swore. “He’s got guns. Plenty of guns, and he’s threatening to harm Rhys if Emily won’t meet.”
Campbell leaned over for a look. He raised his voice to speak to one of the other cops. “How close are we to getting the location of that phone?”
A detective across the room, with his phone to his ear, covered the front mic and shook his head at Campbell.
“That’s not her phone number. It’s part of a block of numbers reserved by an app for people who want to send messages anonymously. We’re trying to find out from the company who has purchased it, and to get their information, but they won’t comply without a subpoena. Same song from Ms. Kirsch’s phone provider. We’re working on it from both directions.”
“They know that there is a minor in danger?”
“They don’t care.”
Campbell growled. “Forward me those pictures,” he told Kenzie. “We’ll see if we can get any information from them.”
“Most messaging apps strip the EXIF data,” Zachary told him.
Campbell shook his head. “Not all of them. Some of the most popular ones are still unprotected. If they have location data embedded, we can find out in two minutes.”
Much faster than they could get the information from the phone or app companies. Kenzie forwarded the two pictures to Campbell, hoping that it would help. She enlarged them on her screen.
“Does that look like somewhere in town to you? Or in Burlington?” she asked Zachary.
He studied it, frowning. “Outdated finishings and fixtures. If it’s in town, it’s in a very old area.” He zoomed in on the corner of the window, caught in the picture of the guns. It blurred before Kenzie could see anything significant, but she wasn’t sure what he was looking at. Zachary panned over the ugly tile backsplash with orange bunches of flowers on it, along the wall to the edge of the fridge.
“What do you see?” Kenzie asked impatiently.
He zoomed out more and pointed to the plugin. “There’s a two-pronged plugin. No ground.”
“That’s old. How long has it been since you could wire a house like that?”
“In the city?” Zachary shook his head. “I’d have to look it up. It’s been decades.”
“In the city?” Kenzie repeated. “Then they’re not in the city.”
“Maybe not,” Zachary agreed.
“The stars. The stars he keeps throwing into his messages.”
“You can’t see stars like that in the city!” Zachary instantly saw where Kenzie was going. “It’s incredible when you get out of the city, away from all the streetlights, and can see the stars. Rhys is a city boy. Other than those fishing trips with his grandpa, when was the last time he was out of the city like that?”
Kenzie laughed, shaking her head. “He couldn’t very well put pictures of trees or a cabin in his messages. Saul would have known he was trying to give hints about his location.”
“Campbell,” Zachary interrupted Campbell, who was talking to one of the tech guys. About whether there was any location metadata attached to the pictures, Kenzie assumed. “He’s in a rural area. Away from the city. Do you know if he owns any land outside the city? A grandparent’s place? Something way out in the sticks?”
