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“She works fast,” Ripley said. “Where to start?”
Ella was already viewing Abigail Cartwright’s pictures. She felt a little uneasy browsing such intimate materials of a dead woman, but a person’s camera roll told you everything you needed to know about them.
“Abigail,” Ella said. “Let’s see if she has anything in common with Vanessa.”
“On it.”
Ella scrolled through Abigail’s photos and didn’t find anything that stood out. She had a fondness for landscapes, picturesque scenes, and close-ups of protein-rich meals. A few pictures of herself, some of her friends, none of her ex-husband. Ella then navigated to Abigail’s received pictures folder, and only got two rows deep before she spotted an anomaly among the nature and food pictures.
A shot of a shirtless gentleman, cropped to hide the face.
Ella guessed Abigail had gotten over her divorce pretty quickly.
The file was labeled two days ago. Someone had sent her this picture recently, someone who was keen to get close to Abigail. Someone who might have used that perceived intimacy for more sinister matters.
She followed the trail to Abigail’s messages. Her most recent conversation had been with a woman named Amelia, her second had been with someone named Clarence. She pulled up the exchange, the software taking her to the oldest messages first. Judging by the date, they’d only been in contact for a week.
A spark flickered in her brain, teasing an ignition but not quite getting there.
Hey, good to e-meet you,Abigail had said. Ella speed-read through the getting-to-know-you parts of the conversation until she got to more tangible matters.
Monday night sounds good,Abigail had told her man.
I’ll see you there at 8,her mystery guy had replied.
That was two nights ago. There’d been only a few messages of contact since, all declarations of appreciation for each other’s time.
“Ripley, can you search a phone number for me? See who it belongs to?”
“Yeah. Hit me.”
Ella uncovered the mystery man’s cell number and read it aloud.
“Got it,” Ripley said. “Who’s this for?”
“Someone Abigail met up with two nights ago. Their interaction has been alarmingly minimal since. Plus, this makes him one of the last people to see her alive.”
Ripley tapped away then said, “Belongs to a Clarence Broderick in Fallbank, which is…” Ripley tapped again. “Ten miles from here. Three miles from Abigail’s house.”
“Any details on him?”
Ripley went quiet, gawping at her laptop screen. After a minute of unusual silence, she mustered, “Oh….Oh.”
Ella caught her partner’s wave of concern. She rushed around to the other side of the table.
“What is it?” she asked.
“Clarence Broderick. He has a record. But that’s not all.”
Ella saw all laid out in front of her. Domestic abuse, assault and battery, sexual violations. “Holy crap. Who is this guy?”
Ripley scrolled down to the mugshots.
Ella blinked away the disbelief. She saw a much more haggard version of a face she’d been looking at only a few minutes before.
It was a perfect fit.
“You gotta be kidding me,” she said.
