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Josie’s heart fluttered. “She got caught in a snare trap.”
“We think so,” said Heather. “But without the trap, we can’t prove it or trace it back to the person who put it out there. It’s not even trapping season.”
“Coyote is legal all year round,” Josie said, echoing Morris Lauber. “Can you send me the crime scene photos?”
Heather raised a brow. “I can. You think your case is connected?”
“I don’t know,” Josie said. “But we found something out there where Kayleigh was taken. It looks like a trap to me. Something made out of leaves and sticks. Not a snare or a foothold trap, but some sort of trap. It was in a heap when we located it. Our Evidence Response Team is trying to reconstruct it. Plus, we followed Kayleigh’s scent to a cabin. Remote. Owned by a guy who did time on a charge of unlawful restraint of a young woman. His dad used to trap. Taught him. His dad is dead but he’s got his dad’s trapping equipment in his house. He also has a friend who is licensed and traps, and that friend uses this guy’s property often.”
Heather’s spine straightened. “Really?”
“Yes, but we didn’t take any of the trapping stuff into evidence because we couldn’t prove any link between the traps and Kayleigh’s disappearance.”
“But this could be our guy,” said Heather.
“Maybe.”
“Any snare traps in his cabin?”
“No,” said Josie. “Footholds.”
“Shit.” Heather sighed. “I can’t get a warrant based on the fact that we think one of our cases involved a snare trap and some guy in your jurisdiction has foothold traps in his home—even with Kayleigh’s scent being inside the cabin. This sure sounds like it could be him, though. I mean, in your case, the kids went into the woods during the day. Were they doing the challenge?”
Josie slugged down the last of the coffee. “No. Kayleigh wanted to prove to her little sister that the Woodsman wasn’t real. Heather, this guy lives pretty close to the Patchett house. It’s not out of the realm of possibility that he either ran into Kayleigh or stalked her—but these other kids? Montour and Lenore Counties are hours away from one another. How would he have known that these kids were going to be in the woods in the middle of the night?”
“He’s hunting,” Heather said. “You have to understand, these aren’t the first or only kids to go traipsing through the woods at night in either of these counties. They’re just the only ones who ran into this guy.”
Josie thought about the kids who had gotten lost in the woods throughout Denton in the last six months. None of them had told the police that they’d been looking for the Woodsman, but it couldn’t be a coincidence that a rash of incidents involving kids getting lost in the woods coincided with the lore of the Woodsman infiltrating schools.
Heather continued, “We’re talking about kids who live in mostly rural areas with not much to do. This Woodsman bullshit is all some of them are talking about. Then there is the social media aspect. Lots of these kids post that they’re going into the woods. It’s not that hard to figure out where they are because none of them know how to protect themselves on the internet. If you post a video of yourself standing in front of your damn house—with the house number visible—and you’re wearing a shirt with your school name on it, it’s not going to be hard to figure out which area you’re in. Some of these kids even post where they’re going into the woods. Really, all this guy would need to do is check the Woodsman hashtag on Instagram any given weekend and he’d have a pretty good idea where to lay his traps.”
To Josie’s knowledge, the search of Henry Thomas’s phone had not turned up any social media accounts although it was possible he’d had a burner phone at some point. They’d searched his property and vehicles and not found one, but that didn’t mean he didn’t have other ways to search social media. The ERT was still examining his laptop.
“Where to lay his traps,” Josie echoed. “You said in the Chavez case, she was prone when a large rock hit her in the head, right?”
“Yeah.”
“What kind of rock? Was it flat?”
“Sort of, yeah.”
“You find any large sticks nearby?” Josie asked.
Heather laughed. “It was the forest. So yeah. What are you thinking?”
“Could Amanda Chavez have tripped a deadfall trap?”
A deadfall trap was a primitive trap that usually involved using sticks to prop up a large rock or log. There were other, more modern tools available to use instead of sticks, but the concept was the same: a large, deadly item was propped up and beneath it was a bait stick or bait string of some kind where the trapper would leave some kind of food. When an animal touched or bumped the bait stick or string, it triggered the mechanism and the rock or log fell directly onto them, killing them. They were typically used on small to medium-sized animals. Building a deadfall trap that would kill or at least injure a human being would be a challenge, though not impossible.
Heather thought about this. Slowly, her eyes narrowed. “I don’t know. Maybe. It would be really hard to make a deadfall large enough to take down a person. It would have had to be modified for her height.”
“Or the killer set up an additional element. A trip wire that would make her fall, positioning her head under the deadfall trap.”
Heather shook her head. “I don’t know. There wasn’t enough found at that scene to support the idea of a deadfall trap. If he did set one, then he took some stuff from the scene when he left. This is getting complicated.”
“Complicated? It sounds absurd. We’re theorizing that there is a man who wanders around various patches of forest in all different locations in the middle of the night, setting traps for kids. He can’t possibly know when or where these kids are going to be in the woods but he somehow manages to trap them and kill them—and in your two cases, in the middle of the night.”
Heather sat back. Her eyes wandered around the truck stop. People coming and going, most stopping at the coffee kiosk. No one paid any attention to them. “I hate to say this but we’ve both seen stranger things.”
