A Trace of Crime

They hadn’t found anything unusual on the walk to the school and didn’t come across any obvious signs of struggle. There were no odd tire marks near the spot where Mrs. Rainey had found Jessica’s stuff. Keri had stopped at every house nearby to determine if any residents had street-facing video cameras that might be of use. None did.

When they got to the school, Ray was already there talking to the principal, who promised to send out an email blast to all school parents asking for any information they might have. The security officer had all the surveillance footage from the day queued up so Keri suggested Ray stick around and view it while she got Mrs. Rainey back home and returned to the office to call all the potential leads.

To Carolyn Rainey, it must have simply looked like two partners effectively multi-tasking. And to a degree, it was. But the thought of sitting awkwardly in the passenger seat as Ray drove her back to West LA division was something she wasn’t up for right now.

So instead, they got a Lyft back to the Rainey house and Keri continued to the station from there. That’s where she’d spent the last half hour calling all Jessica’s friends and classmates. No one had anything unusual to share. Three friends all remembered her leaving school on her bike and waving to them as she left the parking lot. Everything seemed fine.

She called both the boys Jessica had crushes on in recent weeks and while both knew who she was, neither seemed to know her well or even be aware of how she felt. Keri wasn’t shocked at that. She remembered that at that age, she’d filled up whole notebooks with the names of boys she liked, without ever actually speaking to them.

She spoke to, or left messages with, all of Jessica’s teachers, her softball coach, her math tutor, and even the head of the neighborhood watch group. No one she reached knew anything.

She called Ray, who picked up on the first ring.

“Sands.”

“I’ve got nothing here,” she said, deciding to focus solely on the matter at hand. “No one saw anything out of the ordinary. Her friends say everything seemed fine when she left school. I’m still waiting for some calls back but I’m not optimistic. You having better luck?”

“Not so far. The video camera range only extends to the end of the school’s block in each direction. I can see her saying goodbye to her friends, just as you describe, then biking off. Nothing happens while she’s visible. I’m having the guard queue up footage from earlier in the week to see if there was anyone loitering around on prior days. It might be a while.”

Unspoken in that last line was the assumption he wouldn’t be returning to the station anytime soon. She pretended not to notice.

“I think we should post the Amber Alert,” she said. “It’s six p.m. now. So it’s been three hours since her mom called nine-one-one. We don’t have any evidence suggesting this is anything other than an abduction. If she was taken right after school, between two forty-five and three p.m., she could be as far as Palm Springs or San Diego by now. We need to get as many eyes on this as possible.”

“Agreed,” Ray said. “Can you honcho that so I can keep reviewing this footage?”

“Of course. Are you coming back to the station afterward?”

“I don’t know,” he answered noncommittally. “Depends on what I find.”

“Okay, well, keep me posted,” she said.

“Will do,” he replied and hung up without saying goodbye.

Keri ordered herself not to focus on the perceived slight and put her attention into preparing the Amber Alert and getting it out. As she was finishing up, she saw her boss, Lieutenant Cole Hillman, walking toward his office.

He was wearing his usual uniform of slacks, sport coat, loose tie, and short-sleeved dress shirt that he couldn’t keep tucked in because of his ample girth. He was a little over fifty but the job had aged him so that there were deep lines in his forehead and at the corners of his eyes. His salt-and-pepper hair was more salt than pepper these days.

She thought he was going to come over to her desk and demand a status update but he never even looked in her direction. That was fine with her, as she wanted to check with the CSU folks to see of they’d found any prints.

After she submitted the Amber Alert, Keri walked though station bullpen, which was unusually quiet for this time of night, and down the hall. She knocked on the CSU door and poked her head in without waiting for permission.

“Any luck on the Jessica Rainey case?”

The clerk, a twenty-something girl with dark hair and glasses, looked up from the magazine she’d been reading. Keri didn’t recognize her. The CSU clerk job was a grind and had a lot of turnover. She typed the name in the database.

“Nothing from the backpack or bike,” the girl said. “They’re still checking a few prints from the phone but the way they were talking, it didn’t sound promising.”

“Can you please have them let Detective Keri Locke know as soon as they’re done, regardless of the result? Even if there are no usable prints, I need to check that phone.”

“You got it, Detective,” she said, burying her nose back in the magazine before Keri had even closed the door.

Standing alone in the quiet hallway, Keri took a deep breath and realized there was nothing else for her to do. Ray was checking the school surveillance footage. She had put out the Amber Alert. The CSU report was pending and she couldn’t look at Jessica’s phone until they were done with it. She’d either spoken to or was waiting to hear back from everyone she had called.

She leaned against the wall and closed her eyes, allowing her brain to relax for the first time in hours. But as soon as she did, unwelcome thoughts flooded in.

She saw the image of Ray’s face, hurt and confused. She saw a black van with her daughter inside rounding a corner into darkness. She saw the eyes of the Collector as she squeezed his neck, draining the life out of the man who’d abducted her daughter over five years ago, even as he was already dying from a head wound. She saw grainy footage of a man known only as the Black Widower as he shot another man in the head, took Evie from the man’s van, and shoved her into the trunk of his own car before disappearing forever.

Her eyes snapped open and she saw that she was facing the evidence room. She’d been in there many times in recent weeks, poring over photos from Brian “The Collector” Wickwire’s apartment.

The actual evidence was held at Downtown Division because his apartment was in their jurisdiction. They had consented to let the West LA police photographer take pictures of everything as long as it stayed in the evidence room. As she had killed the man, Keri wasn’t in a position to argue with them.

But she hadn’t gone through the photos in several days and now something about them was eating at her. There was an itch at the edge of her brain that she just couldn’t scratch, some kind of connection she knew was hiding just out of the corner of her consciousness. She walked into the room.

The evidence clerk wasn’t surprised to see her and slid the sign-in sheet toward her without a word. She checked in, then went straight to the row with the box of photos. She didn’t need the reference data as she knew exactly what row and shelf it was. She grabbed the box from the shelf and lugged it to one of the tables in the back.

She sat down, turned on the desk lamp, and spread all the photos out in her front of her. She’d looked at them dozens of times before. Every book Wickwire owned was catalogued and photographed, as was every piece of clothing and each item from his kitchen shelves. This man was believed to be involved in the abduction and sale of as many as fifty children over the years and the detectives from Downtown Division were leaving no stone unturned.

But Keri sensed that what was teasing her wasn’t in any of those photos she’d studied previously. It was something she’d only registered in passing before. Something had been jogged in her mind when she stood in the hall minutes before, letting all her painful memories wash over her.

What is it? What’s the connection you’re trying to make?

And then she saw it. In the background of a picture of the Collector’s desk was a series of nature photos. They were all 5 x 7 images lined up in a row. There was a frog on a rock. Beside it was picture of a jackrabbit with its ears pricked up. And next to that was a beaver working on a dam. A woodpecker was in mid-peck. A salmon caught on film as it leapt from a stream. And next to it was the image of a spider on a patch of dirt – a black widow.

Black widow. Black Widower. Is there something to that?

It might have just been a coincidence. Obviously the Downtown detectives didn’t think much of the photos as they hadn’t even been catalogued as evidence. But Keri knew that the Collector liked to keep coded records.

In fact, that’s how she’d found the addresses where Evie and multiple other abductees were being kept. The Collector had hidden them in plain sight, in an alpha-numeric code on a bunch of seemingly innocuous postcards in his desk drawer.

Keri knew that the Collector and the Black Widower shared a connection: they had both been hired at various points by the attorney Jackson Cave.

Did their paths cross at some point, maybe on a job? Was this Wickwire’s way of keeping the contact information of a fellow sinner for hire, in case they ever needed to team up?

Keri felt a certainty wash over her, one that usually only came when she’d uncovered a crucial clue in a case. She was certain that if she could access that photo, she would find something useful about it.

The only problem was that it was in Brian Wickwire’s apartment, which was still cordoned off by the Downtown police. The last time she’d tried to get in, two weeks ago, there was crime scene tape all around it and two cops stationed in front of the building to deter any looky-loos.

Keri was just beginning to consider how she might navigate that challenge when her phone rang. It was Ray.

“Hey,” she said hesitantly.

“Can you come back to the Rainey place right now?” he asked, skipping the pleasantries.

“Of course. What’s up?”

“They just got a ransom note.”

CHAPTER FOUR