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Noah told him what little information he’d shared with Josie earlier.
“One of you can look into those,” the Chief said. “But for now let’s focus on Thomas since Blue followed Kayleigh’s scent to his cabin.”
Josie thought about the old traps she had seen in Thomas’s spare bedroom. “Did you find any furs in his cabin?”
Everyone stared at her. “What?” said the Chief.
She looked at Noah. “There were traps in his residence. The kind trappers hunting for furbearers use. He said that they belonged to his father, but he also admitted that he knew how to trap. He could be doing it illegally. Maybe he set traps near where the Patchett girls were walking. He might have been out checking them and seen Kayleigh.”
Noah said, “You think that he took her because he didn’t want to get in trouble for trapping without a license?”
“I doubt that’s why he took her,” Josie said. “He was in prison for five years for forcing a nineteen-year-old girl into a basement at gunpoint and holding her there. We know he is capable of something like this—abducting Kayleigh Patchett. I’m just saying maybe their paths crossed by accident because he is trapping illegally. Did you find any furs on his property?”
“A few,” Noah said. “But they were in boxes marked ‘Dad’s stuff’ just like the traps. It was hard to tell how old they are. They could have been his dad’s.”
The Chief said, “We can swap theories about how this went down, but that doesn’t tell us where to find this girl. It’s most likely that he killed her and dumped her body somewhere, but that’s not the only possibility. This guy’s got an interest in teenage girls. A criminal history. We know she was at his place but we can’t find her and the dog lost the scent, indicating that she was taken by vehicle from Thomas’s cabin, so we need to consider that she might have been trafficked. You get into this guy’s phone?”
Noah sighed. “It was clean. Phone calls and texts to buddies of his, mostly about meeting up at a bar now and then. Phone calls and texts to his boss. He’s got a sister who lives in Oklahoma. He calls her once a month. Food places, doctors’ offices. Nothing that raises any red flags.”
Josie said, “We need to look into his buddies, though. What about his laptop?”
“The ERT is still working on that,” said Noah.
Gretchen reached into her jacket pocket and pulled out a cell phone with a sparkly purple cover. “For the sake of due diligence, we also need to look closely at Kayleigh Patchett. Since we don’t have any trained experts in-house who could do a forensic download, I’ve already prepared a warrant for her phone records in case there are things she’s deleted from the actual phone that would still show up in records. We need to make sure that no one was threatening or stalking her and that she hadn’t come into contact with anyone who might have wished her harm. Anyone grooming her over the internet who might have gotten the bright idea to spy on her in the woods and take her.”
“Yes,” Josie said. “Also, it seems unlikely, but we should see if there is any connection between her and Henry Thomas.”
“Good point,” said Noah. “Maybe this wasn’t random at all. Maybe Thomas was so far from home because he was specifically going to find Kayleigh Patchett.”
“We have to entertain every possibility,” Josie replied.
“The bos—Josie’s right,” said Gretchen. “If Mett were here—” She broke off. The silent seconds that ticked by were like bombs going off. Everyone’s heads swiveled toward Amber.
Without looking up from her tablet, Amber said, “If Finn were here right now, he would be challenging every single one of your assumptions and telling you that even though this guy—Henry Thomas—looks good for this abduction, you don’t have enough evidence to prove it. So you better make sure you turn over every rock and eliminate every other possibility before you throw all your resources behind the case against Thomas.”
Josie felt a warmth spread through her center. Her admiration for what Mett had always brought to the team was tempered by a strange sort of longing for her felled colleague and the way he had always challenged her at every turn. Mett had made her a better investigator, she realized, and she missed that. It was one of the many things she missed about him.
“That’s true,” said Josie.
More silence. When it stretched into awkwardness, Amber glanced up from her tablet, staring at them. “Better get to work then.”
FOURTEEN
The Chief sent Gretchen home for a few hours of sleep. Noah worked on tracking down the names of Henry Thomas’s associates and doing background checks on them while Josie went through Kayleigh Patchett’s phone and laptop, which her parents had given them permission to do. They’d even given the Denton PD Kayleigh’s passwords, which was concerning to Josie. The fact that they had such control and supervision over their daughter’s electronics told Josie that she was unlikely to find anything of use on either one of them. If there was any activity that Kayleigh wished to hide, she likely would not conduct it on a device to which her parents had unfettered access.
The first thing she noticed was that there were no social media apps on the phone, which was odd since they usually came pre-installed. Were the Patchett parents really that strict? Josie made a mental note to ask them when she saw them next. There were frightfully few contacts, but Josie made note of their names. Most of the non-family names were followed by some description like Felicia (from English class); Braelyn (from softball); Hector (from work). Had Kayleigh done that herself or did her parents insist on it? Braelyn from softball had texted Kayleigh telling her she should quit the team if she wasn’t going to play like she wanted to win. Kayleigh had responded by saying her parents wouldn’t let her. Since her parents had full access to her phone, this seemed like an intentional barb.
The only contact whose name did not have a qualifier was Olivia. Moving to the text messages, Josie found that the majority of texts were between Kayleigh and Olivia. Based on the messages, it appeared that Kayleigh went to school with and worked with Olivia. There were multiple texts coordinating rides to and from work together. Josie made another mental note to find out where Kayleigh worked. There were also texts scheduling sleepovers, shopping trips, nights out to the movies.
Days before Kayleigh’s abduction, there were two exchanges about changing shifts at work. Nothing gossipy. Nothing that Josie typically saw on teenagers’ phones in her line of work, although most of the time, the personal and often incriminating stuff was in their social media accounts. Josie found it hard to believe that Kayleigh had no accounts. Usually kids whose parents restricted them from having social media had secret accounts, and simply used friends’ phones to log in. Josie would have to ask Olivia about this.
Next, she checked the photos. There were fewer than Josie expected to see on the phone of a teenager. She scrolled through dozens of selfies occasionally punctuated by photos of Kayleigh side by side with another teenage girl. Olivia, perhaps? The girl was taller and more striking than Kayleigh with bright blue eyes, red hair, and a smattering of freckles across her nose. Josie briefly studied the background of each photo. One looked as though it was a school; another a restaurant; several looked to be outside. Scrolling through the rest of the photos, Josie found that the only other person who appeared in them was Kayleigh’s younger sister, Savannah. Kayleigh photographed her doing just about everything: practicing soccer in their backyard, napping on the couch, eating a red popsicle that stained her lips, trying on makeup, playing board games, dancing. There were dozens of selfies of the two sisters, cheek to cheek, making funny faces or laughing. There were also selfies of the two side by side in a bed with Savannah sound asleep, her head on Kayleigh’s shoulder, while Kayleigh held her phone up above them, smiling contentedly.
Finding nothing of interest in the photo gallery, Josie searched the rest of the phone, making a list of the apps that were installed on it. There was no tracking app installed, like Life360 which would tell them where Kayleigh’s phone was at any given time. Nor were there the more exhaustive apps like Bark or FamiSafe which would monitor her activities on the phone as well as location. Josie’s eyelids were drooping, her pen faltering when she came across a second calculator app.
“Gotcha,” she muttered.
Noah looked up from his computer screen. “What was that?”
