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Jade eyed the two cups. “Since when did you switch from the regular coffeemaker to the fancy one?”
“I use both now, depending on my mood. And right now, I’m going to park my butt in this chair and enjoy this delicious, frothy espresso.”
Jade followed her over to the table to check her emails. She sat down and began to peruse through her inbox, deleting the spam and junk mail first before opening any of the others. Her eyes widened. “Here’s someone responding to our plea for information. But they want to remain anonymous.”
“Anonymous won’t do us much good in court. Is it possible to trace the IP address?”
“Sure. If this person isn’t using a VPN. Some of those have military-grade security. I don’t have my laptop with me.”
“Use mine,” Brogan offered, grabbing it from the side counter. “Show me how it’s done.”
“It’s simple really,” Jade said after opening the lid. “You bring up the email, right-click on it to view the source code. Look for ‘received from’ or search for the IP address in the little popup window. Then go into Windows and open the command prompt. But it’s not here. The sender is definitely using a VPN and blocking anyone from seeing his location.”
“That says he knows a thing or two about hiding his identity. Wonder why he’d go to such extremes?”
“He obviously doesn’t want you to be able to find him. Weird. What’s he hiding?”
“At least he kept his email short and to the point. He wants immunity if he tells us what he saw that night. He says he knows who killed Gidget. He knows how and he knows why. He claims he witnessed the whole thing go down.”
“It sounds like he’s afraid of the killer, like there will be retaliation if he comes clean about what he saw.”
“Send him this reply. Assure him he has nothing to worry about as long as he tells us the complete truth, his story checks out, and he’s willing to testify to what he saw.”
Jade’s fingers flew over the keyboard in response. After typing in the reply, she hit send. “Let’s see how long it takes for him to get back to us.”
For the first time in days, Brogan felt hopeful. “Now we’re getting somewhere. With a little luck, we might solve this thing.”
Jade sipped her coffee. “Putting the pieces together won’t be easy.”
“It’s never easy catching a killer, especially when we’re talking about decades. But I have an idea. Scoot over. I want to send an email to Canada.”
“Canada?”
“Yep. It’s a long shot. Good thing I’m willing to make a fool of myself.”
21
While Dennis, Tazzie, and Richie cooled their jets in a jail cell, Brogan and Lucien doubled their efforts waiting for DNA results from the lab. When Brent contacted them in the middle of the week with news, Brogan sent out text messages getting the team together for an update.
As people began arriving at the house, there were questions. But instead of dropping any hints, Lucien veered them into the den, where Brogan stood by the whiteboard waiting. She pointed to an array of appetizers and refreshments. “Help yourself. We could be here a while.”
“Why the big mystery?” Kelly asked, reaching for a cute little chicken salad sandwich. “What, no peanut butter?”
Brogan forced a smile. Everything she’d discovered over the last two days would probably land like a series of bombs going off. She looked out into the sea of faces and took a deep breath. “We had such success with our appeal to the public during Jade’s podcast that I had this idea to take it a step further. So a week ago—it seems like a year—I put feelers out to anyone in the Saint-Georges area because Katharine Pellico grew up there in Quebec’s Child Welfare System. It’s the same thing as our foster care here in the States. Anyway, Social Services was extremely helpful in helping me narrow down a blast email to anyone who spent time in that system between 1954 and 1964.”
“So this isn’t about the Gidget case?” Beckett wanted to know.
“Patience,” Lucien replied. “We’re putting together pieces of the puzzle that go back forty-five years or more. In doing so, we uncovered a long line of secrets. Remember the dead guy in the box?”
“Let’s get to it,” Birk urged, swiping a ham and cheese sandwich from the tray.
Amused at their eagerness, Brogan smiled. “It took forever, but a couple of days ago, I received an email from a woman detailing how her mother—who grew up with Katharine and recognized the name—often talked about her best friend, wondering what happened to her. Monday, I was able to speak to this woman myself. We talked for two hours. Her name is Jill Chapin. Jill turned seventy-five last spring. Jill insists that she and Katharine shared birthdays only two weeks apart. So there’s already an age discrepancy between the woman who called herself Vera Lockhart and Katharine Pellico. The birthdate Jill gave me matches the one on Katharine Pellico’s driver’s license. And we already know it had a photo of her looking twenty instead of twenty-five. So maybe Katharine sacrificed five years to become older and match her new identity.”
“What woman does that?” Jade asked.
“Especially if she got the name Vera Lockhart from a headstone in Colorado,” Kelly pointed out. “Isn’t that literally starting with a blank slate? Don’t you get to pick your date of birth after that, use a social security number you stole from someone else, someone you know isn’t going to use it because they’re dead?”
“They’re dead because a desperate woman had to put some distance between her murderous rampage across the country,” Brent answered. “A woman who needed to cut ties with her past and do it fast. Go on, Brogan. Wow them with what you discovered.”
