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The call had reached Detective Kit’s desk just after five in the morning. He had been going over the evidence collected from the dead girl’s bedroom. It wasn’t a match for John Murphy. The prints did not match the ones on record.
John Murphy had died of a drug overdose in a Tijuana motel room that had been paid up for a month in advance. He had been there for three weeks before discovery, but no one had bothered to run a D.N.A. test and John Murphy somehow got lost in translation.
By the time he had been run through the database, his body had already been cremated and his ashes tossed in the trash.
How things got so mixed up between Mexico and the States Randy wasn’t certain, but it wasn’t the first time things like that happened.
No, it had been someone else, someone connected to the boy in the yearbook photo, the boy who stared up at him from his desk, the absent smile that had been acknowledging Randy at the very moment that he had received the telephone call.
It was from the phone of Tammy Reynolds, the dead girl’s roommate. He had met her twice the day before—once at Catherine Murphy’s home and again at the apartment of Chase Sheppard, boyfriend of the friend who had received the girl’s heart. He hadn’t bothered to think that the boyfriend who had taken off was the same boy in the picture. It had been so typical of John Murphy that Randy hadn’t even thought to ask about the boy in the picture, or ask to see a picture of the young man to determine if it was the same.
Tammy had told him in a panic that the killer was inside Saint Joseph Hospital, coming for her friend and roommate Aaron Christopher—who had since been found and taken to the emergency room. When he questioned her about why this person was after him—why he had killed Catherine Murphy and had almost killed the boy—Tammy had paused for just a moment before finally telling him she had no idea.
He hadn’t believed her for a second.
All in good time, he thought to himself after he had gotten off of the phone.
Randy could be a patient man when he needed to be, and nothing excited him more than a mystery.
Randy Kit ran his fingers through his greasy brown hair, tired from almost twenty-four hours of no sleep, but he had a job to do. He picked up the phone and dialed the line to the hospital, determined to get to the bottom of the situation.
“Saint Joseph Medical Center, Patsy speaking—”
“Yes, this is Detective Kit with the Bellingham PD; is everything all right over there?”
“Oh fine, just having a little maintenance problem in the inpatient wing—”
“What kind of maintenance problem?” The wheels in his brain were turning.
“Oh, the power went out, but that’s all. We have someone attending to the situation right now.”
He hung up the phone without saying another word. Randy opened the top right-hand drawer of his desk and pulled out his gun, making sure it had bullets, and requested two officers to accompany him to the hospital. He was determined to put an end to this psychopath once and for all and learn what the secret was around the boy in the photograph. The boy that he was now certain was Aaron Christopher.