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But why? What happened?
I spotted a glint of silver from the corner of my eye, tucked between the wardrobe and dresser. I got down on my knees and pulled out a cell phone. Matt appeared at my side when I called him. “Is it unlocked?” he asked.
I swiped and was relieved to see the home screen appear. Sammy hadn’t locked her phone. That made this much easier.
I went straight to the recent messages. There were a couple from her dad asking what she wanted for family dinner on Sunday and another one from Marco asking if she wanted to watch a movie when he got back from his mom’s house—that message had been left unanswered.
Underneath Marco was another message from someone named Leon. I tapped it, and the short thread popped up on the screen.
“She invited him over,” I said, reading through the explicitly flirty text messages. “It goes back a few weeks, too. Before Lionel died.”
Matt read the messages a couple of times, digesting them. ”It looks like Leo said he’s going to be in town for today. He told her to make sure the roommate wasn’t home because he wanted to get loud with her.”
“It doesn’t tell us how they met.”
“An app?” Matthew asked.
I exited out of the messages and looked for any kind of dating apps, finding nothing. “We’re going to have to give this to Anya. She’s Stonewall’s technical forensic expert—she should be able to tell us if there’s anything else on here that we should know about. She should even be able to track this number, although I’m assuming it’s a burner. The Pegasus clearly isn’t that dumb.” I took the phone back and dropped it in a ziplock bag. This text chain with “Leo” could very well be the break we needed. The other victims didn’t appear to have any kind of messaging trail with the potential killer, which meant Sammy may have just left us the key to solving this case.
There was still a mountain of questions that needed answering. We continued to search through the home, spreading out into the rest of the rooms. I took extra care while I was looking in Marco’s room. It was a disastrous space with clothes strewn about on lamps and old bags of potato chips left on the nightstand as if they were timeless display pieces. The smell of musty socks and mothballs didn’t drown out the stench that crept in from the neighboring room.
Ultimately, we didn’t find anything else. Once again, the Pegasus had struck and left nonexistent tracks in his wake.
“Let’s go,” Matt said, frustration crinkling the space between his thick eyebrows. “I want to make a few calls.”
“Same.” I had to agree. Pieces of the puzzle were still missing, and they didn’t appear to be anywhere in the house.
As we exited the property and crossed back over the crime scene tape, we were greeted by a chorus of reporters, all of them salivating for any kind of information on what had happened inside the house. Neither Matt or I spoke, keeping our expressions as still as stone. Whoever tipped off the media about Sammy’s murder deserved to step on about a hundred LEGOs while barefoot. It was inevitable but still frustrating. Sometimes, the media helped in serial killer cases by increasing awareness and keeping everyone’s eyes open, but most times, it just gave the killer a head start at running.
We slipped back into the comforting silence of Matt’s car, although the haunting sound of camera clicks still echoed in my ears. They mixed with the phantom shouts for help from the last moments of a dying girl.
Too late. We were too fucking late.
16
MATTHEW HALE
TWO WEEKS LATER
It was all hands on deck at Stonewall Investigations. The conference room had been converted into a control room of sorts, where two workstations had been set up and a few whiteboards were hung. There was one wall dedicated to the suspects where two photos were pinned: Colton Majors with his cockeyed smiling mugshot and Marco Rojas’s slightly blurry college ID. Under each column, I had written alibis along with possible motives and psychological profiles. Both of them had links with Sammy and Lionel, but they also shared connections with the last three victims. Not incredibly strong connections, more like passing acquaintances or school relationships, but any kind of thread in this case was a useful one.
Four other detectives sat at the long table in the center of the pale yellow room. Austin Romero sat across from me, shifting through a pile of police reports from a city in Wisconsin, where a similar murder may have occurred before the Pegasus shifted their sights to Blue Creek. Next to him was Ryan Diaz, sporting a fresh tan after he was called back early from a vacation he took with his fiancé. He click-clacked away on his laptop, focused on sifting through the social media trails of both our top suspects. The sweet smell of coffee and pastries wafted from the small table set up underneath the wide window, a view of the snowcapped White Mountains framed perfectly in the center.
