Deep Dark

by Laura Griffin

  “I’ll need her hardware,” she told him. “Computer, phone, tablet, whatever you have.”

  “I’m working on that, but we’ve got jurisdictional issues, for starters. And that’s if the victim’s computer is still around from two years ago. I know the cell phone is in evidence, but—”

  The door creaked open, and Ben stepped outside in his rumpled suit, smelling like old beer. He gave Reed a once-over before turning to Laney.

  “I’m taking off, Lane.”

  “Ben, this is Reed Novak with Austin PD. Reed, this is Ben Lawson.”

  They traded cool nods as Ben pulled the door shut. And then, in case things weren’t awkward enough, he planted a kiss on her forehead—no doubt his way of thanking her for sticking him on the couch last night.

  “Need a ride?” she asked tersely.

  He smiled. “Nah, I’m good.”

  She watched him walk down the sidewalk, then crossed her arms and turned to Reed. “You were saying about the phone?” she asked.

  “The phone’s still in evidence. I’m working on the rest.”

  “What about April’s phone?”

  “We never found it. We’ve been through her laptop, though, and we didn’t find any messages from people on the dating site. We know she had a profile over there, but looks like she only communicated through the site itself, and so far that hasn’t produced any leads.”

  “Where is it now? April’s laptop?”

  “Our computer guys have it.”

  “I want to see it.”

  His brow furrowed. “Why?”

  “Because I’ve got a hunch.”

  CHAPTER 8

  Laney had never actually been inside police headquarters. She’d pictured something loud and hectic, with cops rushing around and phones ringing on every desk. But Reed’s workplace was eerily quiet as they stepped off the elevator and she scanned the cubicles.

  “Is anyone here?”

  “At the moment, maybe not.” He glanced at her. “What do you think?”

  “It’s dead.”

  “This is the bullpen. Booking’s a little more lively.”

  He led her through a maze of desks awash in paperwork. Framed photographs competed for space with files and coffee cups. Cardigan sweaters were draped over several desk chairs. It could have been an accounting firm except for the mug shots pinned to many of the walls.

  Laney felt strange being here with him. She’d kissed him last night to let him know she was interested, and he’d definitely responded. But after seeing Ben at her house, he was all business again, as though their kiss had never happened. He was in detective mode, Mr. Polite. She definitely sensed his reluctance to get involved with her sexually. But all that just made her more determined to put herself in his way.

  He led her into a break room. “Coffee?” he asked, grabbing a mug.

  “I’m fine.” She glanced around the room, doing a double take as she noticed the boxes on the counter. “I thought that was just a myth.”

  “What?” He replaced the coffee pitcher.

  “You guys actually bring in doughnuts?”

  “I think it was someone’s birthday yesterday.”

  She stepped over to a bulletin board where the FBI’s top ten fugitives were on display.

  Reed walked over. “Recognize anyone?”

  “No.”

  “Good. Come on.”

  He stopped at a cubicle and started culling through papers in a wire basket. Laney stepped into his work space, burning with curiosity. It was stacked with ­paperwork and files, but she zeroed in on the few personal items—an autographed baseball and a pair of framed photographs. One picture showed a large group of people standing in front of a barn. A tall, wide-­shouldered man who looked remarkably like Reed stood at the edge of the group manning a huge barbecue pit made from an oil drum. He wore an apron with the words “Pit Boss” printed across the chest.

  “Your family?” She glanced over, and Reed was checking his email.

  “Yeah.”

  “There are a lot of you.”

  “Czech Catholic. We tend to multiply.”

  She counted nineteen people ranging in age from maybe five to seventy-five. They looked relaxed together, which said a lot. So many families didn’t.

  The second picture showed Reed on a boat with his arm hooked around the neck of a smiling man who was holding a speckled fish.

  “This your brother?”

  “My nephew. He’s at UT.” Reed glanced at her. “He’s about your age, too. You guys would get along.”

  She ignored the comment and turned her attention to a pile of police photos on the corner of his desk. The top one showed a patch of dirt that had been staked out with orange twine. Laney picked up the photo and read the date stamp. She realized it was a picture of the recovery site of Olivia Hollis’s bones.

  Reed was tapping out an email using a rapid-fire hunt-and-peck method.

  “What exactly are the connections?” she asked.

  “What’s that?” He stopped to see what she was looking at.

  “Between the cases. April and Olivia. I mean, the crimes seem different. Are there any other links besides Mix?”

  “Age of the victims. MO.” He resumed typing. “The lightbulbs, the cause of death.”

  “Lightbulbs?” She replaced the photo.

  “He unscrews a lightbulb beforehand to conceal his entry.”

  Laney went still. “He . . .” She swallowed. “You mean the outside lightbulb or—”

  “The porch light, yeah.” Reed closed out of his email and glanced up. “In both cases they’d been unscrewed. So we think he does it beforehand, then comes back and enters the home under cover of darkness.”

  Laney stared at him, suddenly cold all over.

  “What’s wrong?” he asked.

  “Nothing.”

  He led her from the cube, and they wound back through the labyrinth. Laney’s heart was pounding. Her palms felt sweaty. She trailed behind him, and her thoughts were sprinting in a dozen different directions.

  “Is that a common technique?” she asked his back.

  “What?”

  “Unscrewing a lightbulb.”

  “You see it from time to time. Sometimes they leave fingerprints, which is always helpful.” He glanced over his shoulder. “Not in this case, unfortunately. But with April we got lucky, because a neighbor remembers the bulb being out the day before the murder, and she called maintenance—which tells us he was there at least a day in advance, scoping things out. The DA’s going to like that, because it proves premeditation.”

  “But how do you know she didn’t just forget to turn on her porch light?”

  “Outdoor security lights are on a timer over there. So they automatically go on at night, unless they’re burned out or tampered with.” He stopped in front of a door. “Here we are.”

  She followed him into a large, windowless space with an abundance of putty-colored workstations and fluorescent lighting.

  “Paul Doher’s our computer analyst,” Reed said. “Paul, this is Delaney Knox.”

  She wiped her palms on her jeans as the man got to his feet. She tried to get her nerves under control. She couldn’t focus on lightbulbs right now—she had a job to do.

  “Nice to meet you, Delaney.”

  “It’s Laney.”

  The police techie was stout and balding and wore a short-sleeve button-down that reminded Laney of her high school chem teacher. He even had the armpit stains to match.

  “Reed here tells me you’d like a look at one of our notebook computers.”

  “The April Abrams case,” Reed said, glancing around. “I got your message that you finished with it?”

  Paul stepped over to a table where clear plastic evidence bags sat in a long row. Inside each bag w
as a laptop. Beside each was a smaller plastic bag containing a power cord.

  “Let’s see.” Paul consulted a clipboard, then walked over and picked up a thin silver laptop. “Here we go.” He handed it to Reed, who looked at Laney.

  “You want to work in here or—”

  “Wherever,” she said, glancing around at all the empty chairs and tabletops. “Here is fine.”

  She took a chair and pulled the computer from the bag, noting the gray smudges on it.

  “No interesting prints,” Reed said.

  She opened the laptop and took a deep breath. “Password?” She glanced at Paul.

  “You’ll never guess.”

  “One-two-three-four-five.”

  He smiled. “Close. It’s numbers and letters.”

  “April-one-two-three-four-five.”

  “You got it.”

  “You’re kidding,” Reed said.

  “It happens all the time,” Paul told him. “First rule of informational security, have a decent password. Second rule, make it different across platforms.”

  Laney swiftly got into the system. April’s desktop background showed an amateur photograph of a beach at sunset. The pair of feet in the foreground had rainbow-painted toenails.

  “We went through all her email and browsing activity,” Paul said. “Her last available visit to Mix was last November.”

  “Exactly when was the last visit?” Reed asked.

  “I believe the twelfth.”

  Laney’s stomach knotted. That was the week before she had warned April about the security breach. So she had listened.

  Sort of.

  Laney had advised her to pull her profile down, but she’d evidently ignored that.

  Laney perused the desktop. As she clicked open a file folder, she felt the men behind her leaning closer. She hated shoulder surfing.

  “Do you mind?” She glanced up at them.

  “Reed?”

  Everyone turned around at the voice. A slender, thirtyish woman with bottle-blond hair and huge boobs stood in the doorway.

  “I need you to take a look at something,” she said.

  Reed glanced at Laney. “You good here?”

  “Sure.”

  “I’ll be back in a few minutes.”

  Laney turned back to the screen and made an effort to ignore the remaining spectator. She didn’t like working with an audience.

  Paul was a computer analyst, which was a catchall title that in Laney’s experience could include everything from forensic computer analysis to troubleshooting software problems, depending on the budget of the police department. Laney was pretty sure this department had enough money for a designated investigator, but she didn’t want to make assumptions.

  “So the Delphi Center,” he said, and she got a waft of coffee breath. “I bet that’s a nice place to work.”

  She glanced up at him. He was fairly tan for a computer geek, and she pictured him in wraparound sunglasses on top of a bike. Austin had an abundance of techies who fancied themselves cyclists.

  “How long have you been there?” he asked.

  “A while,” she said vaguely.

  Laney tapped open a folder. It seemed to contain a mixture of business and personal files, pretty routine. She opened April’s email and had a quick look around, although she didn’t expect to find anything. The person she was looking for wouldn’t be careless enough to leave tracks there.

  “I assume they pay pretty well?”

  She glanced up.

  “Just asking. I hear it’s good money. Better than DPS, at least. And DPS pays better than Austin PD does, so . . .” In response to her stony look, he gave her a sheepish smile. “Sorry—I should let you get to work.”

  She returned her attention to the screen, and he wandered back to his chair. When she felt sure he was distracted, she clicked out of April’s email.

  She darted a glance over her shoulder, opened up a directory, and got down to business.

  • • •

  Veronica had the victim’s front door mounted on sawhorses in the evidence lab. It looked big and out of place, like an elephant in a petting zoo. For a moment, Reed just stared at it.

  “Take a look at what she found,” Jay said, pulling his attention to the microscope on the far side of the room.

  Reed stepped over and peered into the viewfinder. He hated this game, because he never knew what he was looking at.

  “What am I seeing here?”

  “Brass shavings,” Veronica said. “Ten-times magnification. They’re from the lock on the victim’s front door.”

  “You’re telling me someone picked her lock?”

  “Appears so.”

  “I thought we ruled that out.”

  “This was no ham-handed job with a screwdriver,” Veronica said. She walked up to a computer on the counter and started pecking around. “This involved some skill. It’s taken me hours just to analyze the evidence and piece together what happened.”

  Reed traded looks with Jay. Jay had mentioned that he’d been at the lab last night, but Reed had figured it was personal, not work-related. Veronica was pretty and single, and Jay had been talking about her for months.

  “What did you find out?” Reed asked her.

  “Are you familiar with how pin-and-tumbler locks work?” she asked.

  “More or less.”

  “Basically, inside the lock you have several pins of different lengths that keep the lock from opening without a key.” She pulled up a diagram on her computer. “When the correct key is used, the gap between the top pins and the bottom pins is aligned with the edge of the plug, which means the plug is able to rotate and—presto—the lock opens. In this case, I found evidence that someone used a pick gun.”

  Reed glanced up as Hall stepped into the room.

  “That from the April Abrams crime scene?” the lieutenant asked, looking at the door.

  Veronica looked surprised to see Hall here, but she quickly recovered. “That’s right.”

  “You said something about a pick gun?”

  “Yes, an electronic pick gun. It vibrates rapidly to separate the pairs of pins, and then the plug is able to rotate without a key. It’s fast, usually. And battery operated. It creates tiny marks on the metal, though, and leaves behind brass particles, which we found on the inside of the lock itself and scattered near the front door.”

  Hall glanced around at all the equipment, as if he was seeing it for the first time. Maybe he was. The lieutenant wasn’t known for being hands-on and tended to stay upstairs.

  “How much does a tool like that run?” Jay asked Veronica.

  “Anywhere from a hundred to five hundred dollars, depending how fancy you want it. Some are loud, like dental drills. The nicer ones are quieter and don’t leave as much evidence behind.”

  “And this one?” Reed asked.

  “I’d say medium. It left behind some brass shavings but not a lot. And it was probably quiet but not silent.”

  Jay looked at Reed. “Seems like a risk.”

  “You mean a risk that she’d hear him?”

  “Yeah. I mean, she probably did, right? She confronted him in the hallway.”

  “You’re overlooking something,” Veronica said, and by the look on her face, Reed could tell what she was thinking about.

  “He might have done it earlier,” Reed said.

  “Exactly.” She nodded at the door. “This tool didn’t leave a lot of damage. Even looking for it, we nearly missed it. So maybe the victim missed it, too.”

  Jay frowned. “You’re saying he was inside her apartment when she came home from work that day?”

  “He could have been hiding,” she said. “He could have been there for hours, waiting for her to go to sleep. Which, basically, is any woman’s worst nightmare.�
��

  Jay looked at Reed. “The more I know about this guy, the more I hate him.”

  “We need to talk to those furniture movers,” Reed said. “Maybe they saw something.”

  “Furniture movers?” Hall asked.

  “There was a furniture delivery in front of April’s unit on the day of the murder.”

  Hall nodded. “And what about the boyfriend? Ian Phelps. How’s it coming with him?”

  “His alibi checked out, so we’ve bumped him down the list for now. We’re working some other leads.”

  “Speaking of which . . .” Reed glanced at his watch. Laney had been at it twenty minutes. “I’ll see about that laptop.”

  He left Jay to handle Hall and went to check on Laney. As he took the elevator up, he got a sour feeling in his stomach.

  Veronica’s lie-in-wait theory bothered him. This case had been bad from the beginning, but with every new bit of evidence it got worse. They weren’t looking for some punk kid here. This was someone experienced. And smart. And deliberate.

  Reed crossed the bullpen and found Paul alone in the computer lab.

  “Where the hell did she go?” Reed asked.

  “Who, Laney? She left.”

  “When?”

  “Oh, I’d say . . .” He looked at the clock. “About five minutes ago? She had to check something at work, something important. Said to tell you she’d call you.”

  CHAPTER 9

  The sun was setting as Reed pulled up the winding road to the Delphi Center.

  “Damn,” Jay said as the building came into view.

  “Ever been here before?”

  “No.” He craned his neck to get a view through the gnarled oak trees. “Looks expensive.”

  “Private money. Some oil heiress donated her millions after her daughter was killed by a convicted sex offender. They specialize in DNA here.”

  A buzzard swooped over the road and landed in a thicket of junipers.

  “I thought it was mainly a body farm.” Jay looked at him.

  “That, too. They study human decomp, but the real money’s in DNA. All the private testing they do subsidizes the pro bono work, which is mostly running rape kits and cold-case evidence.”