Snapped

by Laura Griffin

  Allison gazed down at the picture, which still smelled like fixative. It was done in colored chalk on gray paper and looked as lifelike as a photograph. How had someone drawn this from a corpse, particularly one with the back of his skull blown out? She studied the image, transfixed by the bald man and his icy blue gaze. What sort of thoughts had been going through his mind as he squinted through his scope and took aim at a pregnant woman?

  “Doyle? You with me?”

  “Sir?” She glanced up at Reynolds.

  “I said you’re our liaison with the campus on this thing. You’re here because you’ve got all the contacts over there, and we’re hoping you’ll get some cooperation. I want you to shop this picture around, see if you can get a name. Talk to every security guard, every maintenance worker, every resident adviser you can find. This guy was able to access the roof, which tells me he has some kind of inside connection.”

  “We don’t think he’s an employee,” the campus security chief said defensively. “I combed through our last five years’ worth of personnel records myself. But it’s hard to tell for sure because of the shaved head. Maybe that’s a disguise. Or maybe he worked for us in the distant past.”

  “Either way,” Reynolds said, “he gained access to that roof somehow, which means he knows his way around, which means someone should know him.” He looked at Allison. “Maybe you’ll get an ID off the picture before we get a hit with the prints or the guns. Use your contacts over there—anyone and everyone you can think of who might have seen this guy.”

  Chief Noonan gathered up his files and tapped them against the conference table, signaling an end to the meeting.

  “That’s it, people,” Noonan said. “We need an ID, and we need it fast. I’ve got angry parents ringing our phones off the hook. I’ve got lawyers threatening lawsuits against the town and the school. I’ve got news crews on every corner yapping about the Summer School Massacre.” He stood up and looked straight at Allison. “And I’ve got a press conference at four o’clock. Don’t make me go in there empty-handed.”

  Jonah hiked up the steps to the Delphi Center and took a moment to look around. The brown, freeze-dried lawn he remembered from January had been replaced by a carpet of lush green, and the building’s marble columns gleamed in the noon sun. If you forgot about the fact that the lab sat in the middle of a body farm, it wasn’t a bad place to work, really.

  “You been back here since winter?” Jonah asked Ric as they walked in. Compared to the ninety-plus temperature outside, the lobby felt like a meat locker.

  “Not officially. I’ve dropped by to see Mia a few times.”

  Mia Voss was Ric’s girlfriend. She also happened to be one of the top DNA tracers at the lab. Strained budgets and local politics prevented SMPD from calling on her for all but the most important cases—their evidence usually went to the state crime lab in Austin, where it languished for months or years before being tested. The sad fact was, most police departments didn’t have the money to make use of all the fancy technology available now. Even when DNA was available from a bloody murder weapon, a rape kit, it typically gathered dust in some evidence room until the case was headed to trial, if it ever went.

  But nothing about this case was typical, starting with the fact that every aspect of it was being picked apart on CNN.

  Jonah approached the reception desk, where detectives usually encountered a dazzling smile that made the drive out here worth it. But Sophie wasn’t around today, and Jonah’s half-hour road trip was rewarded with a sour look.

  “IDs?” a woman asked, holding out a hand.

  The sound of hammering drifted from down the hall as they flashed their credentials and waited for her to enter them into the system. Jonah made a point to befriend gatekeepers—even grumpy ones—so he gave her a smile.

  “A little remodeling?”

  She rolled her eyes. “New evidence room. They’re doubling the storage space.”

  “Sounds nice.”

  “I’ve had a headache all morning.”

  She handed over visitors’ badges, and they went their separate ways—Ric to the evidence room and then up to fingerprinting, while Jonah paid a visit to ballistics down in the basement.

  As the elevator made its grumbling descent, he thought about Sophie. He’d been looking forward to seeing her here, but it was probably good she was off. She needed the rest, and he definitely needed to focus. He had a clear objective in front of him, and if there was one thing Sophie had a talent for, it was distracting him. He followed a long, windowless hallway to the firearms lab, where he found Delphi’s head ballistics expert shooting a handgun into a steel tank. Jonah tapped his knuckles on the glass window and Scott Black walked over to let him in.

  “I was just about to call you.”

  Jonah nodded at the nickel-plated pistol in his hand. “Nice piece.”

  “A little flashy for me. Belongs to a gangbanger out of Houston.”

  “You get those numbers yet?”

  “Made some headway on that Remington. Come take a look.”

  Scott led him to a long counter where the rifle was sitting atop a piece of butcher paper. The barrel looked wet.

  “Is that oil?” Jonah asked.

  “I’m using the magnaflux method. You know it?”

  “No.”

  “Basically, the idea is that when a gun is pressure-stamped with a serial number, the metal is indented with the number, but the material underneath the number also undergoes a change. So, you can file off the numbers, but it’s still possible to restore them.” Scott pointed to the very faint numbers on the left side of the barrel. “In this case, I applied a magnetic force to the gun, then sprayed it with an oil that has iron particles suspended in it. The particles collect in the places where the metal is disordered, which reveals the number. We got a pretty good read here. Our guy’s running the number through some databases right now.”

  “What about the handgun?”

  “That’s a little trickier.” Scott leaned against the counter. “The first method didn’t work. Looks like your shooter, or someone, really got after those serial numbers. Most people just file until the numbers aren’t visible, but in this case, someone shaved off a lot of metal.”

  “Think it’s a hot gun?”

  “Could be. I can probably still get the numbers for you, but I’m going to have to move to a method that’s what we call ‘destructive.’ Chemical etching. You guys done collecting prints and taking pictures of it?”

  “We have what we need,” Jonah said.

  “Then I recommend this procedure, but I’m going to need official approval.”

  “You got it.”

  Making this ID was top priority, and Jonah was authorized to do damn near anything to get the shooter’s name. He signed off on the test and headed upstairs to see Mia.

  As the Delphi Center’s crown jewel, the DNA section occupied a lofty place on the building’s top floor. The glass corridor leading to Mia’s office offered sweeping views of the Texas Hill Country. It was a nice place to work. Beat the hell out of Jonah’s cubicle. Still, he would never trade places with a lab rat, even a crime-fighting one. He got way too much satisfaction from slapping on the cuffs.

  Mia stepped out of her office and spotted him. “Oh, hey.” She smiled. “I heard you guys were here.”

  She was in her typical lab coat, which Jonah was pretty sure she wore to balance out her ponytail and freckles. But even the coat and the official-looking clipboard in her hand didn’t make her look a day over thirty.

  “Ric’s downstairs,” he told her.

  “He just called.” She checked her watch. “I’d go down and say hi, but I’m late for a staff meeting. Walk with me?”

  They retraced his steps toward the conference room near the elevator.

  “If you talked to Ric, then you know a blood sample just came in that’s about to get bumped to the front of your line,” Jonah said.

  “The university shooter.” Mia shook her
head. “I still can’t believe it. I’m just sick that you guys were up there with him.” She gave Jonah a grim look. “Thank you for taking him out.”

  “He took himself out.”

  “Well, you helped. Anyway, I’m surprised his prints didn’t come back.”

  “Could be this is his first rodeo.”

  “I’ll get to the sample as soon as possible. But if he’s never been arrested, odds are slim we’ll get a hit with the Offender Index.”

  “I was thinking he could be in the Forensic Index,” Jonah said. “Maybe we can link him to an old crime scene, then I’ll call up the detective somewhere and see if they’ve got a suspect list. If someone’s local or has a connection to the college, it could lead to an ID.”

  “Good thought.” Mia stopped in front of the conference room. “I’ll start on it right after this meeting.”

  “Actually—”

  “Aha.” She pulled the clipboard to her chest. “Now I see why I’m getting the personal visit. You want me to drop everything now.”

  “This is important,” he said, without a scrap of regret about torpedoing her day.

  But Mia looked unmoved. “They’re all important.”

  Jonah turned and gazed out the window. He nodded beyond the rolling green hills, in the direction of Austin. “You heard of the Charles Whitman shooting back in ’66? One of the first mass murders in U.S. history—the original school shooting.”

  She nodded. “He killed seventeen people.”

  “Before he climbed to the top of that clock tower, he paid a visit to his mother and bashed her skull in. Then he went home and stabbed his wife through the heart while she slept in their bed.” Jonah paused to let his words sink in. “The sooner we get an ID on this guy, the sooner we get a handle on what we’re dealing with.”

  Mia cast an anxious look at the conference room, where it sounded as though her meeting had already started. “Point taken,” she said as the elevator dinged and some lab-coated people stepped off. “Here, I’ll ride down with you.”

  Mia went to retrieve the blood sample, and Jonah returned to the reception desk. Ric wasn’t there yet, and Sophie’s fill-in was busy playing solitaire on her computer.

  Jonah noticed the purple iPod at her elbow. He’d seen it last night. He wandered over to one of the lobby’s side doors and peered through the glass at the cluster of picnic tables beneath a leafy pecan tree. Ninety degrees in the shade today. Not much of a picnic spot, although somebody seemed to think so.

  Jonah muttered a curse. He pushed open the door and went out to see Sophie.

  Sophie focused on the picturesque landscape and thought once again that she really should take up yoga. Maybe if she learned to breathe better and twist herself into a pretzel, she’d have another tool in the arsenal she used to battle her tension headaches. She took another chomp of the Hershey bar she’d bought for lunch. She’d tried aspirin, classical music, and now chocolate, but nothing seemed to be able to get rid of the pounding that had been dogging her since eight A.M.

  “Thought you were off today.”

  She turned to see Jonah stepping into the shade of her pecan tree.

  “Why would you think that?” Sophie adjusted her blouse and took inventory of her appearance. She was having a decent hair day, but her skin was dewy with sweat. And she didn’t kid herself about what a night of tossing and turning had done to her eyes.

  “Little Miss Sunshine’s taken over your desk.” Jonah stepped closer. For an instant his gaze darted to her cleavage. “I figured you called in sick.”

  Sophie stuffed the rest of the candy bar in her purse and swung her legs over the picnic bench, taking care not to flash him. “That’s Diane. She covers my lunch shift.” She glanced at the door behind him. “You here alone?”

  “Ric and I drove out to deliver evidence.”

  Sophie’s stomach knotted at the reminder of the case. As if she’d managed to forget it for a single minute since she’d woken up this morning.

  “Mind?” He nodded at the bench.

  “No.”

  He took a seat beside her and leaned his elbows back on the table. “Hot out here for a picnic.”

  She cast another glance at the building. She should get back, but she was dreading it. She distracted herself by checking out the man next to her. Jonah was huge—six-four, probably 230. A solid 230, not the doughy kind. Today he wore his typical detective’s uniform of button-down shirt and dark slacks with his badge pinned to his hip, just beside his gun.

  Sophie looked away. Every time she got around Jonah, she felt a warm wave of security. Maybe it was his size. Maybe it was the badge and gun, although she knew plenty of other cops, and none of them had this effect on her. She needed to tread carefully here. Security went hand in hand with dependence, and dependence on a man was not on her agenda.

  Jonah nudged her elbow. “So, I meant to ask you. What were you doing on campus yesterday?”

  She gazed out over the hills. “Oh, you know. Just passing through.”

  She felt him watching her.

  “I’ll find out,” he said. “You may as well tell me.”

  He would find out. He was a thorough detective, liked to pin down the details.

  She sighed. “I was enrolling in a class, all right? What’s the big deal?”

  “I don’t know. You tell me.”

  She looked at the hills again. “I’ve been taking some public relations courses.”

  “Why is that a secret?”

  “It’s not, I just … I don’t know. I haven’t really told anyone.”

  “PR, huh? You looking to go corporate?”

  She had a different goal in mind, but she didn’t feel like discussing it with him at the moment. She didn’t feel like discussing any of this.

  “I thought you liked working here.”

  “I do.”

  He looked at her expectantly.

  “I just don’t want to answer phones all my life. Not exactly a dream job.”

  “I thought your dream was to be a singer and this receptionist thing was just paying the bills.”

  Sophie looked away. That was definitely something she didn’t want to discuss today. Her dreams of being a professional musician had ended the night she’d been attacked in a parking lot just before a gig. The incident had caused a seismic shift in her life, one she didn’t really care to chat about on her lunch break.

  She checked her watch. “I need to get back to my desk.”

  They stood up. She tossed an empty soft drink can in the trash, and Jonah fell into step beside her on the path to the building.

  She glanced up at him. “Any breaks in the case this morning?”

  “Not exactly.” Now it was his turn to sound defensive.

  “You still don’t know who he is,” she stated.

  “We’re expecting Mia to help with that.”

  “You’re resorting to DNA?” She stopped and gaped at him. “What about his fingerprints, his guns, his wallet?”

  He gazed down at her with a guarded look, and she realized he’d tried all those things, obviously.

  “DNA could take days. Weeks.” A bubble of panic rose in her throat, and she didn’t know why. “Isn’t there some faster way to find out his name?”

  He watched her carefully with those hazel eyes, which were much too observant. “Why’s it so important to you?”

  “Of course it’s important! Don’t you want to know who he is?”

  “Was. And yeah, I do, because it’s my case. What’s it to you, though?”

  She started to say something, then stopped. She wasn’t sure why she needed a name for the man who’d put her in his crosshairs yesterday. But she did. She needed it.

  “I don’t know.” She blew out a sigh. “I want to understand, that’s all. I need to make sense of it.”

  “Some things don’t make sense, Sophie. Some things just happen.”

  She looked up at him and felt her throat tighten. He was right, she knew. Knowing
the killer’s name and his background and seeing his life dissected on the news wouldn’t change anything. It wouldn’t bring twenty-year-old Eric Emrick back to life, or that professor, or give Becca Kincaid back her mother.

  Jonah opened the door, and a cool gust of air washed over them. Sophie stepped inside, ending the conversation before her emotions came spilling out. Her headache was back in full force now, chocolate bar be damned. She strode to her desk, which Diane had abandoned promptly at one o’clock per her usual routine. The bleating phone was drowned out by the high-pitched saw down the hall, but the vertical row of flashing lights told Sophie she had half a dozen callers demanding her attention.

  She snatched up the headset, took a deep breath, and closed her eyes. Calm. Friendly. Efficient. Her voice was many people’s first impression of the Delphi Center, and she liked them to picture her sitting serenely in the lobby, directing incoming communications. When she did her job right, callers to the lab didn’t have to know about absentee employees, or upheaval from construction projects, or petty office politics—all of which could undermine the center’s credibility. Image was important.

  Sophie waited for a break in the noise before fielding the calls, one by one. Jonah stood at her elbow, observing her every move.

  “You’ve got a knack for that,” he said when she finished. “If I tried to do it, I’d probably hang up on half of them and piss off the rest.”

  She smiled. “I’ve been told I give good phone.”

  His just looked at her, and another call came in.

  “So, did you need something?” she asked. “Because I have to get back to work—”

  Pop.

  Sophie flinched and glanced anxiously down the hall. The nail gun continued, and she bit her lip.

  Jonah followed her gaze toward the construction noise. Then he looked back at her. “You know, no one’s going to think less of you if you take some time off.”