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“Hey,” she answered, trying to keep her voice level and failing completely. Just the sight of his face made her want to weep.
“Kit,” Baz said softly. “Talk to me.”
“I can’t,” she whispered. “Marian will kill me.”
“No, she won’t,” Marian said from off camera. “Unless his blood pressure or pulse start climbing. Then I’ll end the call. Talk to him, Kit. He needs to help.”
Kit shuddered out a breath. “How did you know to call me?”
Baz smiled. “I might have gotten a call from a certain someone who may have finally forgiven me for threatening to shoot his dog.”
Kit’s gaze flew to Sam’s face. He shrugged. “The forgiveness part is still up in the air, but I did call him.”
“Thank you,” she said softly, then turned back to her screen. “It’s all fucked up, Baz.”
“Tell me what you know,” Baz said in the no-nonsense way on which she’d come to depend. “Is Connor keeping you up to speed?”
“He is. He and some of the other detectives are searching Dr.Scott’s house right now. Rita’s not there, and neither is Scott. His black Mercedes is in the garage.” Clean and shiny. No trace of the mud they’d seen in the street cams on the metal detector kid’s street. “They found a gray wig and glasses.”
“He disguised himself,” Baz said. “Should have been watching for that.”
“They also found the stepladder he used to hang Driscoll and all the stuff he took from Driscoll’s house. We think he drove Driscoll home in Driscoll’s car, killed him, came back to his place on Mission Beach to dump the stuff, then drove back to Driscoll’s to leave the car in the garage. Connor said that one of the other detectives had found the taxi driver who picked up a gray-haired man with glasses about a mile from Driscoll’s house, not even twenty minutes before we arrived.”
“We just missed Scott,” Baz said, sounding disgusted. “What else did Connor find?”
“A drawer full of handcuffs and a case of sparkly pink paint cans. And three dozen photos.”
Baz frowned. “Of the victims?”
“Not exactly. They’re eight-by-ten photos of beautiful parks, framed and hanging on his living room wall.” Ironically, they hung just above where Driscoll’s camera had been, so they hadn’t been shown in the videos. The camera was no longer there, and Connor didn’t yet know when it had been removed. “Two of the photos they were able to ID—the grave sites of Jaelyn Watts and Skyler Carville.”
“So he didn’t keep his victims’ jewelry, but he went back and took photos of their grave sites?”
“It looks that way. There were two photos in between the pictures of Jaelyn’s and Skyler’s graves. Connor said that the photo closest to Jaelyn’s is probably Cecilia Sheppard’s grave. He identified it this afternoon through Balboa Park maintenance records. The second one was between Cecilia and Skyler’s graves.”
“A new kill,” Baz said grimly. “What else did they find?”
“Driscoll’s laptop and the hard drives that Scott took from his safe. The laptop wasn’t password protected, so CSU’s going through it now. Maureen’s video showed Scott making Driscoll sign into his computer. Seems like Scott was cocky enough not to reinstate a password.”
“Bold bastard. But we knew that. What else?”
“Scott had his own cameras around his house. Driscoll came to Scott’s house the night he died, skulking in the bushes, trying to see in the windows.”
“Why?”
“We don’t know yet.”
“So you followed the lead on the parks,” Baz said. “Good job, Kit.”
“Connor did it.”
“Because you told him to, right? Right. If Scott’s not in his Mercedes, what is he driving?”
“A car that looks like mine,” Sam said. “Mine was stolen out of Joel Haley’s driveway by a tall kid in a hoodie. But it’s not my car.”
“So a gray RAV4,” Baz said. “He had to have acquired it recently. You could check for where he bought it from—or stole it from—and see if there’s GPS.”
“That could take a while, though,” she said. “And Rita doesn’t have a while.”
