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Which... was bad.
“You don’t think he’s guilty,” Baz stated.
“I don’t know,” she said again. “He sounds sincere.” She held up a hand to silence her partner. “I know that’s foolish. The best killers sound sincere. They sound innocent. Otherwise we’d catch them faster. But this guy...” She glanced over at Baz. “It’s possible this was a simple anonymous tip. Maybe one of his clients confessed something that he couldn’t allow to go unreported.”
Baz made a disgruntled noise. “Maybe. How long has he been in the city?”
Kit ran a standard background check, drumming her fingers on her desk as she waited for the results. “Four years,” she said when the report filled her screen. “Not long enough to be our killer.”
“He could always be an accomplice who felt so guilty that he had to call,” Baz said reluctantly.
Kit almost chuckled. Baz sounded so disappointed.
He did have a decided bias against psychologists and psychiatrists. He felt that they chose their occupations at best to fix themselves or because they were arrogant. At worst to hide a more perverse nature under the guise of helpfulness. He didn’t trust any of them.
Thinking of her “optional” appointment with Dr.Scott, Kit was inclined to agree. The man was somehow able to burrow under her defenses, getting her to share feelings she’d rather have kept hidden. Feelings about Wren.
Suspiciousness of shrinks was normal among cops. Her lack of suspiciousness concerning this one shrink was not.
Baz pointed to Dr.Reeves’s current address. “Look at this.”
Samuel Reeves lived in one of the high-rises downtown. She sighed, immediately seeing the connection. “That’s only a few blocks from where the first body was found.” The woman had been buried in a downtown park, which brought to mind a question she’d been meaning to ask. “How could her killer have buried her in a park in the middle of downtown? Surely someone must have seen him.”
Baz shrugged. “We asked that question when we found her, but not knowing exactly when she was killed made it hard to even speculate.”
Kit noted the question and returned her attention to the photo of Sam Reeves. “He was twenty when the first body was found, between fifteen and seventeen when she was killed.” She clicked on the link for his Facebook account. People put a lot of personal information in their social media profiles. Sam Reeves was no exception. “He grew up in Scottsdale, Arizona, went to high school there.” He’d attended Stanford University for his undergrad and UCLA for his doctorate. “He’s not from San Diego.”
“He has a car.”
She sighed again, because she wasn’t going to convince him and she didn’t think she should even be trying. Baz could be right, after all. “Okay. Let’s dig into him a little more. Then pay him a visit.”
“Fine.” He pointed at her screen. “There’s the hat he was wearing today.”
Kit nodded. She’d seen it the moment she’d opened his Facebook page. His profile photo was him wearing the hat. He appeared to be somewhere dry and hot with scrubby plants. There was a tent behind him and the sun was setting in the background.
A cute brown-and-white dog sat at his side, some kind of Lab mix. The dog held a stick in his mouth, looking for all the world like a cigar.
She clicked on the photo. “He uploaded this as his profile pic two weeks ago.” Scrolling down, she found the photo again, this time as a post. “ ‘Camping at Joshua Tree with Siggy,’ ” she read. “Lots of photos of him with the dog.”
“Lots of photos of him camping,” Baz noted. “Lots of places to hide other bodies.”
Which Kit hadn’t thought about. Usually she was the first to think something like that. Get your head back in the game.
“Oh.” She swallowed hard as a familiar scene hit her screen. It was a selfie taken at Longview Park, where they’d found Jaelyn Watts. Dr.Reeves was crouched at the edge of a pond, his dog at his side once again. “He was there just a few weeks ago.”
“Hmmm,” Baz hummed noncommittally. “Lots of folks use that park, though.”
“I know,” she said, troubled. A thought struck her and she made another note. “I’m going to call the parks department first thing tomorrow. We know when Jaelyn went missing. I’m going to ask for maintenance records for the weeks immediately after her disappearance. It’s been less than two years, so they might have the records handy.”
Baz nodded. “Makes sense. If they’d closed off part of the park for some reason, that would give Dr.Reeves opportunity to bury the body.”
“Or someone else,” Kit countered, wincing even as she did so.
Baz tilted his head. “You really don’t want it to be him, do you?”
“No,” she confessed. “And I don’t know why. Just a gut feeling based on no data whatsoever.”
Baz studied the photo, his expression as troubled as she felt. “You’ve got a good gut. Go back to the background check.”
