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Navarro flinched. “God, I hope not. What other professions garner trust?”
Kit wrote Is he a cop? in her notes, hoping that wasn’t true. “Doctors, nurses, teachers.”
“Clergy,” Levinson suggested. “Or someone posing as one of these.”
Kit noted it. “I’ll check with the schools, too. See if anyone fitting that description was hanging around. I’ll focus on the schools attended by Cecilia and Jaelyn since they’re the most recent.”
“Have we tracked where Skyler went when she left the bar where she worked?” Navarro asked.
“I reviewed the security footage around her workplace last night,” Kit told him. “It’s in Little Italy and close to the interstate. She left at midnight when they closed, got in her car, and drove toward I-5, but the street cams lost her about a block from the on-ramp. I’ve asked IT to search the interstate cams, but I haven’t heard anything from them yet.”
“What’s in that area?” Levinson asked.
“Not her car,” Kit said. “We searched a four-block radius around the interstate entrance. But that was last night. Her parents said that she texted them at around one a.m. Saturday to say she was meeting Dr.Reeves for a drink. So either she thought she was meeting him, or the killer had her and her phone by then and sent the text himself. We’ve requested her cell phone records to see if she received any texts that evening, but we haven’t gotten them yet.”
“If she parked somewhere in that area, she would have been towed,” Navarro said, looking at the map on his phone. “Add checking impound for her car to your to-do list, Kit.”
She did so, then startled when her phone buzzed with an incoming text. Yes. “Batra says the urine screen came back positive for Rohypnol. That’s why there are no defensive wounds. He gets close enough to roofie them. Or at least he did with Skyler. The question is—where did he dose her?”
“Add to your list canvassing all the local bars open after midnight with her photo,” Navarro said.
“Done.” Kit had come to the end of her prepared questions. “To summarize, we’ve got a forty-something white male who’s in good shape. He’s smart and cocky and holds law enforcement in contempt. He kills and buries them on a pattern—early fall and late winter. He’s trustworthy to his victims—enough to be able to drug them and enough to get them not to tell a soul about him.”
“That’s a little more fleshed out than we had before,” Levinson said. “Good work, Detective.”
“Thanks, Doc. I’ve got a million things to do, so I’m heading out.”
“Wait,” Navarro said, looking up from his phone. “I just got confirmation that Cook and Robinson will be free to work with you starting tomorrow morning. They’re tying up loose ends on another homicide. They know to report to your desk in the morning, first thing.”
Her brows shot up. “Howard and Connor? Okay. Sounds good.” Half good, anyway. She liked Howard. Connor was kind of abrasive. “Will Howard bring more cake?”
Navarro chuckled. “I’ll mention it. Call me when you learn anything new.”
“Will do.”
CHAPTER ELEVEN
Clairemont, California
Monday, April 18, 5:30 p.m.
You’re going to get arrested again,” Sam muttered to himself. He’d been sitting in front of the Beckhams’ home for thirty minutes, trying to talk himself into going in. He’d gotten himself into trouble the last time he’d tried to play detective, the memory of his stupid crime board still making him flush with embarrassment.
But he thought he’d found another victim and he owed it to Skyler to at least try to find out who’d killed them.
He’d spent hours combing through the missing-person databases available online, then, on a whim, had googled “missing teenager,” “San Diego,” and “Avondale.” McKittrick had said that the family of Cecilia Sheppard, the lilac-wearing lacrosse player, had never mentioned the show. He’d begun wondering if Colton had mixed up the details in his mind.
He hadn’t gotten a hit right away but had kept digging into the many Facebook shares of missing kids who were suspected to be runaways and had finally found one who had been wearing an Avondale T-shirt the day she’d disappeared.
Naomi Beckham had been blond, five foot one, and fifteen at the time of her disappearance three years ago. She’d been declared a runaway because she’d already run once before, following a band she liked.
The post about Naomi’s disappearance had several hundred messages from her family and friends. In the beginning, they’d begged her to come home. And then weeks later, they’d begged whoever had taken her to tell them where she was. And, months after that, her parents begged to know where her body had been hidden.
They knew she wasn’t coming home. How their hearts must have been broken.
He could help find out what had happened to their daughter. He had to.
There were risks, of course. Especially now that he was considered a suspect. But his current reality was very different now. In the past he wouldn’t have considered interfering with a police investigation, but everything had changed with Skyler’s murder. His life would never be his own again if whoever killed her wasn’t found.
