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“You’ve got to be kidding me,” Josie said, trying not to look visibly defeated. “No calls or texts or anything to someone who might be the boyfriend? Or even a burner phone?”
Gretchen shook her head. “What you saw on her phone is basically what you get.”
Josie said, “How in the hell was she communicating with this guy? We searched her laptop. I searched her room—thoroughly. If she had another phone, we would have found it.”
“Through her friends, maybe?” Noah suggested. “Olivia?”
Josie shook her head. “No. Olivia thought that Kayleigh was making this guy up.”
“Maybe she lied,” said the Chief.
“No.” Josie thought about how upset Olivia had become when the subject of the boyfriend came up. How she had fled the restaurant in tears, wracked with guilt that she had thought all along Kayleigh had made up the boyfriend. “She may have lied about other things but not that. I’m telling you, we’re missing something. She had to have a way of communicating with this guy.”
“Social media?” asked Noah.
“No. I checked through all of Olivia’s followers and people she follows, and couldn’t connect Kayleigh to any of them. It seems that Kayleigh really didn’t have social media.” Josie looked at Gretchen. “Wait. You said ‘basically.’ The contents on the phone werebasicallywhat was in the records. Did you find something?”
Gretchen slugged down the rest of her coffee and threw the empty cup into the nearest trash bin. “I don’t think it’s relevant. It’s just the only thing that was not on the phone. There were texts between her and Felicia Evans. They’d been deleted from her phone. They were from the fall. The records from the cell phone carrier only tell us when the messages occurred and how many were sent and received. We can’t see the content.”
The door to the garage bays banged open and Hummel stepped through it, carrying two evidence bags. “Thanks for coming,” he said. “We’re still working on a ton of stuff, but I thought you guys might want these.” He froze and looked around. “I didn’t need all of you. Is something going on?”
“They’re trying to avoid the press,” Chan said over her shoulder.
Hummel laughed. “Oh yeah. Chief, I guess your press conference yesterday about the Woodsman just threw more fuel on the fire.”
The Chief raised a bushy brow. “You think you can do better, Hummel?”
Gretchen rolled her eyes. “Don’t wind him up. For the love of God.”
Quickly, Noah said, “What did you bring us?”
Hummel handed him the two bags. “The phones belonging to Felicia Evans and Brody Hicks. I checked mainly to see if either of them had taken video or photos the night they were in the woods. Sometimes you get lucky, but not in this case. Thought you guys might want to take a closer look at them. Maybe there’s something that will stand out to you that doesn’t to me.”
Gretchen said, “What about the Evans scene? Anything we need to know about?”
“There wasn’t much to work with,” Hummel said. “No murder weapon. No ligatures. Outdoor scene. The Hicks kid trampled all over it. But her sneaker—the one on her right foot?”
“The ankle with the ligature mark,” said Josie.
“Yeah. I think the killer took her sneaker off and put it back on.”
Josie thought about how the pull tab had been dented downward and in. “He had to do it to get the snare from her ankle.”
“Yeah, probably,” Hummel said. “I pulled some DNA from the sneaker. Sweat, most likely.”
A stillness fell over the room and Josie could feel it filling with their collective excitement. It could blow the case wide open if they could match the DNA found on Felicia Evans’s sneaker to someone.
The Chief said, “I’ll call the lab about getting things expedited.”
Josie resisted the urge to point out that they were still waiting on the expedited DNA results from Henry Thomas’s cabin. She knew it was beyond the Chief’s control. She just hoped no one else died or was abducted in the time it took them to get the results.
THIRTY-SEVEN
Josie’s lower back ached. She had been at her desk hunched over Felicia Evans’s phone for an hour. She shifted in her chair, trying to appease the spasm knotting its way across her back. Across from her, Noah leaned back as far as his chair would allow, studying Brody Hicks’s phone. With a sigh, he threw it onto his desk. “There’s nothing here. You got anything?”
“Not yet,” Josie said.
She’d started with Felicia’s texts, since they already knew that she’d been in contact with Kayleigh, but Felicia hadn’t saved any of them. In fact, Kayleigh wasn’t even a contact in her phone. It probably didn’t matter. Gretchen was right: it was irrelevant that the two had been in contact. They went to the same school. Of course they’d had contact. Plus, Josie knew from Brody and Olivia that there’d been some “beef” between the girls early in the year that had to do with something academic.
