by Jenn Vakey
There were also pictures scattered along the shelves. The first one she grabbed was of a couple in their early forties standing in front of a vibrantly blue ocean. The woman was wearing a beautiful white sundress that was dancing in the breeze. Her auburn hair was lying in loose curls around her warm, friendly face. The man was tall, and had the same dirty blonde hair as Ben. In a way, she was glad they were no longer around. No parents should have to go through such an ordeal.
She sat the picture back down and reached for the next. Something about it made Rilynne’s chest tighten.
“Who is this?” Rilynne handed the picture to Matthews, who had just walked back in the room. It was of a man in his mid thirties, sitting up in a hospital bed. Though he looked very sick, his skin was quite pale and his hair was gone, he had a warm smile that seemed familiar. “That is Justin Davis, Ben’s brother,” Matthews answered, handing the picture back.
“What happened to him?” she asked, not taking her eyes off the picture. Something about it made her feel sick, but couldn’t figure out what it was.
“He had cancer. They found a tumor in one of his legs. He fought hard, but passed a little over a year ago.” It hit Rilynne like a ton of bricks. She wanted to just put the picture down and walk away, but knew she had to continue. “Was his leg amputated?”
Matthews put the box he was holding down on the table, and stared at Rilynne. “No, he went through chemotherapy, but refused to let them take his leg. By the time he finally agreed, it was too late; he was too weak for the surgery. What are you thinking?”
Rilynne sat the picture back down. “Shaved head, leg amputation, and-” she grabbed a picture of Ben and Justin at the beach, “-a right nipple piercing.” She stared at Detective Matthews, not wanting to admit to herself that what she was thinking could be true.
“There has got to be some other explanation,” Matthews said. “I have known Ben Davis for ten years, even before he started working for the department. He is one of the most kind-hearted people you will ever meet. There is no way that he could be capable of such heinous acts.”
Rilynne gathered the pictures off the shelves. “Trust me,” she replied. “I don’t want it to true any more than you do. But it’s too much of a coincidence. We have to look into it."
* * *
“We need everyone in the conference room,” Rilynne said to Wilcome when they walked into the office. He took one look at the expression on both her and Detective Matthews face and nodded.
“Everyone in here now,” he said loudly. “Where are Johnson and Davidson?”
“I think they went out for a smoke,” Steele said taking his seat.
“Call them and get them up here now,” Wilcome told him. When they walked in a few minutes later, Wilcome took his seat and gave the floor to Rilynne.
It took a few moments before she could make herself speak. “We just left Ben Davis’s apartment, and found some stuff that we felt needed to be looked into.” She could tell by the look on Detective Matthews face that he did not want to be included in this, but he did not correct her.
“Ben lost his brother Justin shortly before the killings started,” she paused to gather her strength. “Justin Davis had a tumor in his leg that claimed his life when he refused to let them amputate. He also lost his hair due to chemotherapy, and had his right nipple pierced. These match the alterations the perpetrator made to the victims.”
After getting the last of it out, she couldn’t seem to make herself speak again. She was glad when Detective Wilcome stood up and she could sink quietly into her chair.
“We all know Ben Davis very well, and most of you knew his brother Justin. I’m assuming that I speak for everyone in this room when I say that it’s hard to believe he could have anything to do with this,” he said almost in a soothing manner. “But we all know that it’s something we will have to look into with an open mind.”
Rilynne felt horrible when she looked around at the somber expressions around the table. I can’t believe this is happening, she told herself.
“Where do we start?” Detective Johnson asked.
“The same place as always. I want Ben’s financial statements pulled. First we will see if we can place him somewhere else during the known abduction times. Start with Derek Hartley’s since we have a very small window.”
“He was there,” Rilynne interrupted. “He was in the building just before the abduction. He helped me get Nicole Benson back to her apartment, then walked me to my door.”
Wilcome rubbed his hands on his face, and made a sound that was close to a growl. “See if we can find him leaving on the ATM footage before the abduction time,” he said to Detective Butcher. “Everyone else, start looking into the pervious victims. He goes to a lot of forensic conferences, so see if any of those conflicted with the times the victims were taken or held. Matthews, I want the rental history on the cabin now.” He slammed his notebook down on the table and walked out of the room without another word.
Rilynne grabbed the phonebook and headed back to her desk. “What are you doing?” asked Matthews. She flipped through looking for the page she wanted, and reached for her phone. “He said he had an appointment to get his car fixed this morning. If he actually scheduled an appointment, it would mean that he was planning to go in. That would mean he was actually taken this morning, and didn’t just leave. Why would he make an appointment if he didn’t intend to keep it?” She knew it was a stretch, and the lack of optimism on Matthews face said that he agreed.
Ben had the knowledge to schedule an appointment just to cover his tracks. But she knew she had to try.
When she reached the end of the page, her heart sank. “I called every mechanic in the book, and no one had an appointment scheduled for Ben this morning,” she said to Wilcome.
Wilcome groaned again. “That does not make things look any better for him,” he said. “We are having his car towed back in. I will have them look at it to see if there are any mechanical issues. Did he say what was wrong with it?”
“Um, yeah. He said he thought the clutch was going out,” she replied.
He placed his hand gently on her shoulder before walking back to his desk.
Rilynne sat back and listened to everyone around her. The detectives had split up the charges on Ben’s statements, and were calling the merchants to see if they had an exact time for the charges. It still didn’t seem real to her. Just four hours before, she had found the note on her door telling them Ben had been taken by the serial killer; now everything they had found was saying Ben was the serial killer.
“Do you have anything?” she asked Tylers as he hung up his phone. “Nothing that helps Ben,” he sighed. “This gas charge actually puts him in near the fourth victim when he was abducted. And his forensic conferences were never during the time a victim had been taken.”
“Great,” she said sarcastically. She walked back to her desk, trying to think of anything that could possibly clear him, but nothing came.
“Evans, Skinner,” Wilcome called out. “Meet the crime scene techs down at the garage to go through Ben’s car. Oh, and as far as anyone outside this office is concerned, Ben is just a victim until we know otherwise.”
The elevator ride down seemed to take forever. Rilynne could not tell if she was eager to look at the car, or dreading it. The forensics team had already started when Rilynne and Skinner arrived.
“What have you found?” he asked.
“We found several prints on the inside and the doors. The car was still locked when the tow truck arrived, and everything inside appears to have been untouched,” the tech said. Rilynne had never seen her before, but she was not in the mood to make introductions. “We are collecting all of the hair off of the seats, though, just to make sure. Is there anything specifically you wanted us to look at?” she asked.
“Get a sample of the carpet fiber,” Rilynne blurted out. The tech looked confused, but she complied. She had been right about one thing; the car did not look like anythin
g out of the ordinary had happened in it. “Can you also check the tire treads? We will want to know everywhere his car has been lately. And go through the trunk; see if there is any sign of blood.”
“Have you found anything wrong with the car?” Skinner asked the mechanic.
“What is it I’m looking for?” he asked, rolling out from under the car.
“He said he thought the clutch was going out,” Rilynne said. “Do you see any sign of that?”
He rolled back under the car, and after twenty minutes of tinkering, came back out. “I don’t see anything wrong with the clutch, but I’m going to have to pull the transmission to get a better look. It could take me a few hours. I will let you know as soon as I have an answer.”
Rilynne and Detective Skinner followed the crime scene techs as they left the garage.
She was not surprised to see Kristin Greene in the office when they stepped through the door. “Hello Madam District Attorney,” she said.
“Good to see you Detective Evans,” she replied politely. “Were you able to find out anything from Mr. Davis’s car?”
Rilynne was glad when Skinner answered for her. “The mechanic has not found anything wrong with the clutch yet. He should have a final answer for us in a few hours. The lab is running all of the prints and the hair samples from the car, but it does not look like anyone other than Ben Davis was in the car this morning.”
“Is there anything in the car that would point to him as being the perpetrator?” she asked bluntly.
“We are having the carpet fibers run. They are also checking the tires to see if to soil samples match the ones collected at the cabin,” Rilynne said.
“Would Ben Davis have been able to access the keys to enter Derek Hartley’s apartment, or yours?” she asked.
“Derek Hartley’s keys were logged into the evidence room, and were not checked out by anyone,” Detective Wilcome explained. “From what we have gathered, he would not have had access to any other known copies. What about your key Evans?”
“I have always had my keys on me,” she said. “He would not have been able to take them without me knowing.” She knew very well that Ben did not need a key to get through a door, but she was not going to offer it up to them. There was already so much evidence building against him; she didn’t need to add anything else.
District Attorney Greene pulled up the chair next to Rilynne. “Okay, level with me. You have become close to Ben Davis. Is there anything you have noticed about him that could lead you to believe on any level that he could do this?”
Rilynne fought her instinct to give an immediate no, and thought back. “Ben seemed upset when the news reports came out that Derek Hartley was alive. I’m sure it was just because he was left out of the loop, though,” she said.
“Trust me, Detective Evans,” the district attorney said. “There is nothing that I want more than to clear Ben Davis.”
Rilynne looked down trying to understand her statement. District Attorney Greene didn’t seem to need to look at her expression to sense her confusion. “If Mr. Davis is charge with being a serial killer, every case he has been involved in can be called back into question. Ben Davis is one of the top forensic specialists in the country, and has worked on some of the toughest cases to come across my desk. I don’t want to see those criminals back on the street.”
“From a profilers perspective, Ben has been very active in the case. As he ran the majority of the forensic tests, it would have been easy for him to cover any traces that led to him,” Rilynne felt sick. “He has asked several times for updates on the case, and could have known that we had narrowed our search to people involved with the cases.” She paused, wondering if she should continue. “He made an impromptu visit to my apartment just prior to his abduction, which would guarantee that it was discovered immediately.”
“Staging yourself as a victim would be a great way to remove oneself from the list of suspects,” said the district attorney.
“Ben Davis wasn’t even on our radar before he was abducted,” Detective Wilcome pointed out. “He would have known once we started looking into his disappearance we would be able to tie him into things. That is where it doesn’t make sense. If he were trying to get away, he would have covered his tracks. He has the expertise to know exactly how to do it.”
“Ben told me he thought that the perpetrator got his pleasure from shocking people,” Rilynne recalled. “That is why he always stages the bodies the way he does. Hiding them where they are sure to be found accidentally. What bigger shock could you receive than to realize a trusted colleague is actually behind it all?” Rilynne knew the feeling all to well.
“I finally got this in from the owners of the cabin.” Matthews walked back in the room holding up a small stack of papers. “It is the rental history for the last five years on the property.”
Rilynne took the list and started flipping through the pages. She had only made it a few pages in before her head dropped and the list fell to the table in front of her. “Justin Davis rented the cabin over a dozen times in the years leading up to his death,” she heard Matthews tell the others.
“Why wasn’t Ben on the list of people who had access to all of the victims?” District Attorney Greene asked. He had been cut from the list after they could not find a tie to two of the victims’ cases. Rilynne pulled the files for those cases and sat down next to Wilcome and the district attorney.
“We couldn’t find any connection to him on these two,” she said. Wilcome looked over the files and picked up the phone. “This is Detective Wilcome. I need Nicole Benson and Daniel Summers up here now,” he said.
Within two minutes of hanging up, both of the crime scene investigators walked into the conference room. “I need to know if Ben Davis had any access to these cases. Even if he just reviewed your findings, or glanced at the case file,” he told them.
“I think I talked to him about this one,” Nicole said, looking completely taken aback. “I wasn’t sure exactly how to pull the prints off of the fabric and asked his advice. And I think he might have review my portion of the report on that one before I submitted it.”
Rilynne wanted to sink even lower in her chair. She had hoped they would both confirm that he had not been involved and Ben had no knowledge of those two victims. That would at least leave a little bit of hope that he was not the killer they were looking for. By the look on Detective Wilcome’s face, he had been hoping the same.
As the two crime techs got up to walk out of the room, Nicole turned back around to face the group. “You can’t seriously think Ben had anything to do with the murders. He is the victim here, not the perpetrator. You should be out there trying to find him instead of trying to pin things on him,” she said furiously. She took one last look around the room and left without waiting for a response.
“When will we have the DNA results back on the bedpan?” asked the district attorney, ignoring Nicole’s outburst.
“Hopefully by tomorrow, but probably not for a couple days,” Wilcome answered, leaning back in his chair. “I had to have another sample collected and run, because Ben submitted the first test.”
If the blood did not match his, it would show that it could not have been him. She had seen it; she saw Derek Hartley hiding the bedpan as his captor approached him. They knew he had escaped soon after that, which meant he would have had to incapacitate the perpetrator to give himself enough time to get away.
Then something else crossed her mind, and it made her feel like she had been punched in the gut. Within hours of having that vision, Ben had showed up with a head wound. She had asked him about it, but he had refused to tell her where it had come from.
“He had been hit in the head by something around the time Hartley escaped,” she said before she could stop herself. She looked from Detective Wilcome to District Attorney Greene, half hoping they had not heard her. She knew instantly that they had.
“What do you mean?” Wilcome asked, leaning forward. Ben had left the
room as soon as Rilynne had pointed out the cut and bruise. With his long hair, not many people would have noticed it in passing.
“I asked him what happened,” she explained. “He never did tell me. He had a cut about an inch long near his hairline, and a large bruise running down past his eye. It looked like he had been hit by something hard.” This can’t be true, she thought to herself. She knew deep down, though, there were too many connections for it to be simply coincidence.
Rilynne did not get up to follow Detective Wilcome and the district attorney when they walked out. She couldn’t understand how she could have spent so much time with Ben, and not see it was him. “It just doesn’t make sense,” she said aloud to herself. “There has to be something I’m missing. There is no way that I would have missed something like this. Not again.”
* * *
“This still doesn’t prove anything,” she said, looking at the report. “This has to be the most common color used in cars. Heck, I have the same in my car.” The carpet fibers from Ben’s car came back as an exact match to the fiber found on the first victim.
“It is circumstantial,” Wilcome said. “But when it’s combined with everything else, it only makes the case against Ben stronger.”
“What about the scent test?” Rilynne asked.
Detective Wilcome looked at her bemused.
“The, um… environmental factors test that was being run on the original fiber,” she replied. “You know when someone smokes in a car, the scent lingers in the carpet fibers for a while before dissipating. Ben was running a test on the original fiber to see if there was anything that had been absorbed into it.”
“Even if the test says that it’s not a match to Ben’s car, it will never stand up in court,” Detective Wilcome explained. “Maybe if someone else had run the test, but since it was Ben, it could be argued that he tampered with the sample to clear himself.”
