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She shook her head. “I asked more than once, but he said this guy—he definitely said it was a man—wouldn’t think twice about killing someone who thwarted him, and he had to be careful so he didn’t tip his hand. Oh!” She sat up straight. “It’s someone who is only here in the summers. I can’t believe I forgot that!”
“Did Neil tell you that?” Ryder asked.
“Not exactly, but at that breakfast he said he had five months to get his ducks in a row beforehereturned. He was specifically talking about the killer. That made me think it was someone on the island only for the summer. Unfortunately, that’s half the people here.”
“This is all helpful, Jessica. Thank you for coming to talk to us,” Ryder said.
Kara was looking at her phone. “Was that kid in Bellingham eighteen-year-old Billy Clark? A football player who had a full ride to University of Oregon and died in a car crash?”
“That’s him. How did you know?”
“Google is my best friend.”
Ryder stared at all the information in front of him, then glanced up at the whiteboard, on which he had written the names of the five individuals Neil had been researching. He’d easily found the information about Missy Douglas, the woman who went missing on Round Mountain, when he searched for it.
“Someone stole Neil’s research,” Kara said.
“It appears that way, but there were no prints in the house except for those of Neil and his biweekly housekeeper,” Ryder said.
“Gloves. And I’m thinking the heater was intentionally messed with, not an accidental leak. Maybe the killer expected the house to blow up and take everything with it, or he thought there might have been evidence he missed.”
“Carbon monoxide is flammable,” Ryder said, “but it wouldn’t spontaneously ignite. There would need to be a spark, a flame, something to set it off.” He paused. “Why not take everything? Why leave the files about Jason and Brian?”
“Because Neil had not been quiet about looking into those specific deaths, and perhaps the killer felt if he took everything, it would be suspicious? It’s a theory. It could even be that theWater Lilyexplosion is connected to one of the other three crimes, not Mott and Stevens. We don’t know for certain that the five deaths Neil was looking into were all murders, or all the same suspect. In his investigation, he could have stumbled onto another crime, another killer.”
Ryder turned back to Neil’s computer. “Our data division ran a full undelete on Neil’s hard drive and sent me the emails last night and a detailed report this morning. But the emails are spotty—we don’t have them all. It appears he only used his computer for email and research. They weren’t able to re-create browsing history after fourteen days. But—” Ryder walked over to a second desk he was using where he had a series of emails printed out “—I found an exchange between Neil and the medical examiner who autopsied Billy Clark. Neil and the ME had arranged a time to meet—they would have met the week before he was killed, but there are no follow-ups on that, and I don’t know what they discussed. I asked Jim to find out, since he has been working closely with the mainland. Neil also bookmarked every article about Billy Clark and had emailed Billy’s father several times, asking for information about his college recruitment and his stats in high school. The kid was a wide receiver, gifted, a once-in-a-generation player, according to people who know about football, which Neil did.”
“The question we need to be asking,” Kara said, “is what do these five people have in common? What did Neil see that connected them, and how does the killer connect to them? Based on this, it seems Neil believed that these five people may all have been killed by the same person.”
“There’s one more email I need to follow up on,” Ryder said. “Neil had reached out to the campus police at the University of Washington and asked if there was anyone on staff who had been there thirteen years ago. He gave his number and specifically said he was retired FBI, looking into a cold case. There’s a response from the police administrator acknowledging receipt and telling him that someone would call him. There was no follow-up by email, but Neil’s phone records indicate multiple phone calls to and from a university number at the beginning of this year and again two weeks ago.”
“It’s worth finding out what he asked and what they told him. And you might want to talk to the shrink about this—because you know what my gut says? If someone went through all the trouble of making evidence disappear from Neil’s house, he goes to the top of my target list.”
“But what about the second bomb?” asked Ryder. “Why would he set it?”
“IfNeil was the target, the second bomb was a diversion to distract us and point a direct finger to IP. The guard? Wrong place, wrong time. We weren’t seriously looking at IP until the second bomb. We were looking at the victims. We were looking in the right place and the killer knew it.” She frowned.
“What are you thinking?”
“Nothing.”
“Your face doesn’t look like it’s nothing.”
“Small town,” she muttered.
“I don’t understand.”
“We’ve been all over Friday Harbor, asking questions, interviewing witnesses, and the killer must have overheard or suspected or observed what our focus was.” She looked around the room they were in. All their theories and evidence were posted for anyone to see. “We lock this room at night, but anyone who works for the sheriff—janitors, staff, deputies—would be able to get in pretty easy, right?”
“I suppose.”
“Tell Matt to get a lock on this door and only we have the key. I need to look into something.”
“What?”
“I don’t know,” she admitted. It was something in the back of her head. “I have to work through some things.”
One thing she’d noticed right away was that the local cops here were friends with everyone. Sheriff John Rasmussen had known everyone by name. People came in with flowers and candy and get-well cards for Tom Redfield, the deputy who’d been hospitalized with carbon monoxide poisoning. Word got around. What if someone let something slip? Innocuous? Without realizing they were putting the investigation at risk?
