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Kay stopped mid-question, noticing Mrs. Jerrell’s gesture of invitation. She looked around the small bedroom, wondering where Jenna would’ve hidden a diary. Not the desk drawers; too obvious. Nevertheless, she pulled them open and ran her hands underneath, searching for an object that might’ve been taped out of sight.
Nothing.
Elliot started looking inside the closet, opening shoeboxes and running his hands through the larger pockets of winter coats, while Kay stared at the bed. She kneeled beside it and looked underneath. The mattress platform was a wooden frame with three-inch-wide beams running across. Shining her flashlight, she checked the underside of the mattress one inch at a time. About halfway down, she noticed a darker area, rectangular, with irregular edges.
Jenna had cut a hole into the mattress.
“I got something.” Kay put on fresh gloves and reached under the bed, trying to get to the hole. Elliot grabbed the mattress by the edges and lifted it up, exposing the cut. The edges of a small notebook were visible inside the mattress, together with the end of a red bookmark ribbon. Careful not to injure herself against the edges of the springs or damage the diary, Kay extracted the small notebook one inch at a time. Maybe it contained the answers she’d been looking for. Or, at least, a lead—something to point them in the right direction to uncover what had happened to Jenna last April.
The diary was green, with an intricate gold-foil floral design embossed on the hardcover, and a magnetic clasp that held it closed. Based on the discoloration of the page edges, Jenna had filled about half of it. Kay released the clasp, and the diary opened where a dry rose, the petals now a weathered, faded pink, had been pressed between the pages.
A rose, trapped between neatly written pages in endless cursive, the quintessence of teenage love. For a moment, Kay was tempted to take a seat on the worn-out carpet and start reading, but it had to wait.
Mrs. Jerrell stared at the little object as if it was from another world. “May I, um, please?—it’s from my daughter.” A stifled sob shattered her breath.
Kay took her hand and squeezed it. “I promise I’ll return this to you. It’s evidence, and we have to study it as quickly as possible. That can’t happen until it has been dusted for prints.”
Elliot opened an evidence pouch, and she slid the diary in there, then folded the flap and sealed it.
Seemingly resigned, Mrs. Jerrell stood in the bedroom’s doorway, desolate, speechless, watching them walk away. From the living room, Kay stopped and asked, raising the evidence-sealed diary in the air, “Who would’ve known about this?”
Mrs. Jerrell wiped a tear from her eye. “Ididn’t even know about it. I—I wouldn’t know.” She shook her head and clasped her hands together tightly. “Maybe Mackenzie or Alana, her best friends. They were close… before April, at least, they used to be.”
TWENTY-SEVEN
FLAWED
They didn’t drive more than a mile or so toward Mackenzie Trenton’s home, when a text message from Doc Whitmore made Elliot hit the brakes and flip a U-turn with the sirens on to keep oncoming traffic out of the way. Weaving quickly through the afternoon rush, he didn’t leave Kay too much time to think about the diary. She’d planned to read a few pages before interviewing Mackenzie Trenton, to have some idea where Jenna’s mind was at, maybe get some insight into her relationships with her best friends.
“Thanks for saving me in there,” she said as soon as Elliot turned off the siren, her cheeks flushed. She’d never needed rescuing before; the feeling was new to her and a bit overwhelming. She’d frozen when Mrs. Jerrell had asked about the suspect’s name. Frozen, her, with all her experience. Unbelievable.
Elliot didn’t reply immediately. He just flashed a quick smile, a kind and supportive one. “Working this case is gonna feel like trying to bag flies, if you’re thinking of containing people’s reactions when they hear the perp’s name. You can’t. They’re gonna shoot their mouths off so much they’ll make you wonder if they ate bullets for breakfast. But that’s people, and you know it. They gossip.”
She chuckled, lowering her gaze, feeling vulnerable. She was the psychology PhD, yet she needed some sense talked into her by her down-to-earth partner. He was right, even if he didn’t know the entire story. She couldn’t let herself be intimidated by her own fears again. Before the dust was to settle on the Gavin Sharp name again, there was bound to be some rough-water sailing, questions she wouldn’t expect, idle gossip, speculation, and misdirection.
She could handle it. She had to.
“Thanks, partner,” she replied. “Now, let’s see how the ME reacts to it, shall we? Call it a test run.”
“Yes, ma’am,” Elliot replied, pulling in front of the medical examiner’s building.
Inside, the stainless-steel exam tables were empty, and the powerful ceiling lights were off. Dr. Whitmore and one of his assistants worked quietly, a well-oiled machine swapping samples and operating lab equipment smoothly. The ME was taking the slides lined up on the tray without lifting his eyes from the microscope’s ocular, while his assistant prepared them skillfully and quickly, taking dictation notes on a clipboard with the results.
Kay stopped by the ME and smiled in lieu of a greeting, then handed the evidence pouch holding Jenna’s diary to the doctor. “Could you have this dusted for prints really quickly, please? We’re in a rush.”
Doc Whitmore beckoned his assistant, a young brunette wearing a faded pink lab coat. She abandoned the clipboard on the table and took the pouch with visible curiosity, unsealed it, then extracted the content carefully, setting it on a clean lab table on wheels. Kay watched her hands as they moved quickly, spinning the fingerprint powder brush with precise gestures of her long, thin fingers clad in blue latex gloves. It its wake, black powder settled on the diary’s covers and spine, revealing swirls, arches, and loops she then lifted with clear adhesive tape.
Kay turned to look at Doc Whitmore. “Any DNA results yet?”
The ME gestured toward a computer that searched through records silently, only the faint whirring noise of its hard drive giving it away. “I just loaded the first sample into the system. The other DNA samples are still grinding in the sequencer. It will take a while.”
“What if I tell you whom to run it against? Would that speed things up?”
“Yes,” he replied enthusiastically, “but only the CODIS search part, not the sequencing. If I have them identified in CODIS, it will take a minute or two.”
“Yeah, he’s in CODIS all right,” she replied. Elliot looked at her encouragingly. “His name is Gavin Sharp.”
“Who?” Doc Whitmore asked, looking at Kay above his thick-rimmed glasses with a stern expression on his face.
