“Sure.”
For the third time that day, she headed for the interview room. Stephen Roper was already seated when she got there.
“Another Miranda warning, I suppose?” he asked.
“Yes, indeed,” she told him.
“What is it this time?” he asked when she finished.
“Cannon Beach, Oregon,” Joanna said. It was a statement, not a question.
“Oh, right,” Roper said. “I remember now, Kite Boy. I had forgotten about him. How are you doing this, by the way?”
“By tracing your trophies,” she said. “By looking for unsolved homicides where items are missing.”
Roper considered that for a moment and then shook his head. “Pretty smart,” he said. “Maybe I should have given you an A, after all, instead of that B+.”
“Maybe you should have,” Joanna agreed.
She hurried back to her office and called Hanson back. “I just spoke to Stephen Roper, the man we currently have in custody and who’s already confessed to being a serial killer. All I had to do was mention Cannon Beach, and he remembered Calvin. Called him Kite Boy, but it turns out you’re wrong. There was something missing. We have a piece of bright yellow plastic ribbon inside one of our evidence bags. I’m betting if we run it through a spectrometer, it’ll match up to the ribbon on the tail of that kite.”
“I can’t believe you’ve solved it after all this time,” Hanson murmured.
“I can’t, either,” Joanna agreed. “Are you still in touch with his parents?”
“There’s nothing here in the file,” he answered, “but I’ll do my best to track them down.”
“Thank you,” she said. “Please do.”
Chapter 50
Bisbee, Arizona
Saturday, December 9, 2023
Joanna Brady had always been a three-meal-a-day-typegirl. It was now after three p.m. She had been at work since five in the morning without so much as a cup of coffee or a bite of food. She had a terrible headache, probably due to caffeine deprivation, and she was beyond exhausted. Yes, four more homicide victims had been identified, and she called both the lab and the bullpen to pass along those bits of good news, but by then she was done.
Going to Tom Hadlock’s office, she tapped on his doorframe. “Sorry to be a party pooper,” she said, “but I’ve got to go home.”
“Don’t blame you a bit,” Tom said. “And, if you’ll pardon my saying so, you look like hell.”
“Gee, thanks,” she said, but that little exchange actually made her smile. There was a time not too long ago when Tom would never have cracked a joke in her presence, to say nothing of saying one to her face.
She was in her Interceptor and on the highway for her ten-minute commute back to the High Lonesome when her cell phone rang. Her first instinct was to ignore it, but then she saw Anna Rae Green was the caller.
“We’ve identified four more victims,” Joanna said into the phone without bothering to say hello. “Not only did we identify them, so did Stephen Roper. The BOLO is working. I think we need to send out another.”
“I don’t,” Anna Rae replied.
Joanna was taken aback. The results from the first one had been nothing short of astounding. “Why not?” she asked finally.
“You don’t need a BOLO. You need a press conference.”
Joanna thought about one of the recent press conferences she’d held, specifically the one with only two attendees, one of whom had been Marliss Shackleford.
“I don’t see how that’s going to help,” she said.
“How many people are in your press distribution list?” Anna Rae asked.
