AllFreeNovel
Share Us
“I’ve been calling the parks in town, asking about planting schedules. I focused on Longview Park, where Jaelyn Watts was found, since she’s the most recent victim, not counting Skyler Carville.”
“Because Skyler wasn’t his MO.”
“Right. Longview Park confirmed a scheduled maintenance for two weeks around the day Jaelyn disappeared. They weren’t planting, though. It was a new irrigation system. They’d just finished putting it in that morning. The ground had been dug up, leveled, and was sodded over the very next day, covering up the body.”
Yes. “Who had access to that information?”
Connor blew out a breath. “Who didn’t? The park staff and the volunteers. That part of the park was closed off for a while, so it was on their website.”
“Well, shit.” Anyone in the public would have known that area wasn’t going to be accessible. “I guess we have to start looking at park employees and volunteers.”
“And the board of directors.”
Kit’s brows went up. “They know about maintenance schedules, too?”
“For some maintenance, yes—at least at this park, because it’s private and charges for admission. That area is a major draw because of the pond, and schools sometimes use it for picnics. It being closed meant an expected drop in admissions revenue and that, along with the expenditure of the new irrigation system, required approval from the board. I’ve requested a list of board members.”
Which was exactly what she’d been about to ask. “Excellent. Maybe get a list of their membership from the public, too? Since this killer exclusively uses parks—at least from what we know so far—it’s more likely that he’s more involved in the system rather than a random guy who cruises park websites looking for service outages.”
“I already asked the person from Jaelyn’s park for their general membership list, but she clammed up. Said she’d need to ask the lawyers.”
“Which means a warrant.”
“Already requested it.”
Kit was impressed. “Thank you. What about the earlier victims? Any success there?”
“Most of the parks don’t keep records that long. Unfortunately, that was the case for the park where the victim before Jaelyn was discovered.”
“Miranda Crisp,” Kit murmured.
“Right. She disappeared seven years ago. I did request maintenance and planting schedules from all the parks for as far back as they had them, though. I’ve got details for two of the parks already and am waiting for the rest. Hopefully we’ll get those soon, because we already got a match. Balboa had scheduled a planting for the week around when Cecilia Sheppard disappeared.”
“He buried Skyler in Balboa as well.”
“Hell, Balboa’s so big he could have buried half his victims there and no one would have suspected a thing. I’ve asked CSU to get a team out to the area where Cecilia might be buried ASAP with a GPR to scan the ground.”
“Wow. You’ve made so much progress. I should have made those calls weeks ago, dammit. We could have had all this information earlier.”
“Don’t beat yourself up,” he said kindly, surprising her yet again. “You’ve been working nonstop on this case. Besides, we didn’t have a lot of the details to make sense of the schedules.”
“Thanks,” she said, but was still angry with herself. “What next?”
“Navarro is working on getting us a search warrant for the mail room where Colton Driscoll worked.”
“So we can hopefully match the living room in his videos.”
“Yep. When that comes through, I’ll call you and we can go over together. Until then, I’m going to keep calling the parks. Finding those bodies might not give us any new information about their killer, but we can at least enable their families to bury them.”
Kit’s chest tightened. “Yes. The closure is important.”
“I know,” he murmured, and she wondered what he meant. Was he empathizing with what she and the McKittricks had gone through with Wren, or did he have his own story to tell? “Where are you?”
“In front of the third bar on the list Howard gave me,” she said. “I checked the security footage at the first two but didn’t see Skyler and no one remembered her. I’ll call you as soon as I’m done with the remaining bars.”
“Unless you find him first.”
“Your mouth, God’s ears.” She ended the call, pocketed her phone, and pushed through the bar door. It was dark, unlike the first two places she’d checked out, which hadn’t yet been open and had the lights on full as they prepped the serving areas.
