Ilse slammed the door as she took the two steps from the street to the elevated sidewalk and scowled in the direction of the small townhouse centering the street. The left side of the duplex had police officers moving in and out. A woman wrapped in a shawl was sobbing next to a female officer who was trying to speak to the woman.
Ilse hesitated then scowled. “Thought they said the mother was on the way to the precinct,” she muttered.
Sawyer, at her side, just shrugged, shaking his head. He ignored the bawling woman and stepped right past, moving towards the front door. One of the cops recognized Sawyer and tipped his head in a greeting that Tom returned.
Ilse hesitated near the sobbing woman, wondering if she ought to comfort her. Sawyer though, gave an insistent tug on her arm, muttering beneath his breath, “Best thing you can do for her is find her kids. Come on.”
Ilse winced, but nodded, ducking her head, not making eye contact, then following Sawyer into the house.
Forensics seemed bunched at the end of a short hallway, three of them crowded in the doorway. Ilse glanced around the entrance. A single couch, a beanbag, and television sitting directly on the ground. The sort of room one might expect from college-aged kids. It was unusual for a brother and sister to live together, no doubt. But twins often played by different rules. She'd spent much of her life trying to escape her siblings, her family. She felt a strangely timed pang of jealousy at the idea of desiring to be around them.
“Bathroom?” she asked slowly.
Sawyer frowned, paused, then pointed towards a door centering the hall. “Tiled floor.”
The two of them moved towards this. Dispatch had mentioned an open bathroom window. Ilse paused in the doorway, staring across the blue and teal tiled floor, over a sink with a curling iron balanced precariously on the back of the tank. A giant mess of electrical cords hovered over the sink, far too close to any source of water than was advisable.
Ilse ignored the sink, though, frowning towards the window. It was ajar. It had been slid up.
She stepped towards the window, frowning and glancing into the alley.
“See anything?” Sawyer called from behind.
She just shook her head.
“I'll check the alley. You check the room.”
She didn't speak but flashed a thumbs up, most of her attention still claimed by the open window. The killer had climbed through... had he known the window would be open? She peered at the small metal latching mechanism and felt a flicker of apprehension.
It was snapped. Someone had broken it.
It took some level of know-how to break a lock, didn't it? Did the killer have experience with breaking and entering?
She shook her head, cataloging this information for further use and then turning to move down the hall and side-step a forensic tech to now move in the direction of the room which drew most of law enforcement's attention.
She stepped past another figure, apologizing briefly, and sidled under a sign that read Toxic Waste. Then, peering into the room, she realized the source of their gathered attention. Blood stains on the carpet, and blood stains on a desk chair facing a computer screen. Ilse frowned towards a football helmet which had been left on the ground. She spotted a crimson stain containing strands of hair and felt a faint shiver up her spine.
She glanced towards the window beyond the computer desk, but this one was closed and looked as if it hadn't been tampered with. A couple of the forensic techs were dusting down the computer, and another was examining the blood stain on the carpet.
Ilse, though, was glancing towards a corkboard above the bed. On it, there were pictures of the twins and their families. Penny and Clyde Denzel were both good-looking, with bright smiles and eyes full of good humor.
Their parents were equally attractive, tall and athletic. There were other Polaroids of their friends on ski trips, surfing or pontooning on a lake.
Such a lively collection of memories, and now those same memories were threatened. Ilse looked to the two photos she recognized from the driver's license photos of Penny and Clyde. Both of them smiled out at the camera, their arms over each other’s shoulders, though Clyde was a head and shoulders taller than his sister, so he was stooping a bit in the photo. They both had blonde hair and turtleneck sweaters in the image.
Ilse frowned suddenly, staring at the photos. Her gaze flickered along the corkboard, searching out the other photographs of the twins.
In each one, she spotted the same thing.
“Sawyer!” she called over her shoulder. “Tom, get in here!”
She dropped slowly to a knee, frowning at the item on the ground, careful not to step in the blood stain. She heard the sound of footsteps, jostling then a voice behind her. “You called?”
“Look at this,” she said faintly.
Something brushed against her shoulder as Sawyer stooped next to her, following her indicated finger. “Yeah,” he said. “Hair fiber.”
“Yes,” Ilse replied, “but—”
“Ah shit,” Sawyer replied suddenly as realization struck him.
Ilse pointed towards the corkboard behind them. “See?”
“Yeah,” Sawyer murmured. “They're blondes.”
Ilse nodded quickly, pointing towards the single brown hair fiber smeared in the blood on the helmet. Not a particularly long strand of hair—perhaps from a male. The killer?
Sawyer was already clicking his fingers and gesturing for one of the lab techs to join them. “Bring an evidence bag,” Sawyer said. He pointed at the hair follicle. “Need forensics to run a DNA test on that as fast as humanly possible.”
The tech approached, wincing and shaking his head. “Normally that takes days,” the man said.
“I don't care,” Sawyer retorted. “Those kids might already be dead. We don't have days. Bag it, tag it, lab it. Got me?”
The man sighed but nodded slowly, unhooking a pair of tweezers from a small folding kit in one hand. As he knelt, Ilse and Sawyer regained their feet. Ilse felt her heart pounding rapidly. Was this the lucky break they'd been waiting for? What were the odds of a hair follicle being left behind?
She hesitated, frowning, staring towards the helmet.
It almost seemed too good to be true, and generally, in such cases, things were too good to be true.
She bit her lip, feeling a rising sense of uncertainty.
But Sawyer was still barking instructions. Now that kids were involved, he seemed to have hit a new gear. “I mean it,” he was saying, “I want those results as fast as humanly possible. Twice as fast!”
***
Ilse was back in their car, sitting with one wheel on the curb where Sawyer had hopped it in his rush to reach the crime scene. State and local police were on a full-scale manhunt, along with a number of volunteers, evident by the flash of headlights and whirring sirens against the cloud cover of night.
Sawyer hadn't joined Ilse in the car, but instead was pacing the sidewalk, back and forth, raising his phone to check every few minutes if the DNA results had returned yet.
It was such a small thing to put so much hope on. A single hair follicle. They had no other leads. The searchers hadn't found anything yet either. What if the hair was from one of the twins' friends? What if Clyde or Penny had a pet they didn't know about.
Another officer was still interviewing the mother but thankfully had taken her back to the station. Ilse wasn't sure she could've continued sitting by while the woman had wept without comfort or compassion.
Still, Sawyer was right.
The best way to truly help her was to find her kids. Ilse drummed her fingers against the dashboard. She had other concerns cycling through her mind. The killer had been so careful up to this point. He hadn't left any evidence behind. If this hair was from him... had they just gotten lucky?
She knew it happened. No one could perfectly maintain every crime scene. In reality, murder was a messy business. Things went awry.
And yet still, Ilse had a sense of foreboding she couldn't quite quell.
Sawyer paced the sidewalk beneath a streetlight, but then suddenly froze, his eyes widening. He lifted his phone. Ilse's heart fluttered. But then Sawyer cursed, lowering the phone again and shaking his head in the direction of Ilse's parked car.
Not the lab.
And so the waiting continued. Sawyer did another circuit up and down the sidewalk outside the house. The whir of sirens were distancing further now.
Ilse closed her eyes for a moment, thinking through their next move. This was the only lead they had—if this didn't turn up anything, then the Denzel twins were as good as dead. Against the insides of her eyelids, she could see the images on the corkboard, just pressed there. Those young, beautiful lives couldn't end like this. She refused to let it.
She bit her tongue faintly, trying to use pain to focus.
In her mind's eye, she glimpsed a shadow lurking just beneath the corkboard. She glimpsed dark images drawing nearer in her thoughts. The twins were running out of time, and if they didn't hurry, there was nothing they could—
Tap! Tap!
Her eyes snapped open, her stomach lurching as she turned sharply. Sawyer was knocking on the window, his motions urgent, his phone pressed to his face. Ilse's own eyes widened, and she shoved open the door, narrowly avoiding clipping Tom on the leg.
He stepped back with the blow and kept speaking on the phone, watching Ilse as he did.
“You're sure? I know it was rushed, so are you at least mostly sure. Great... Yeah. Great.” He paused, listening. Then Sawyer bobbed his head once. “Thanks. Send it.”
He hung up.
Ilse met his gaze.
He looked back at his phone, waiting.
“Well?” she insisted.
He looked distractedly at the device in his hand before shooting her a sidelong glance. “Got a match. Hang on.”
Ilse felt her heart skip. If Sawyer was calling it a match, that meant the strand of hair wasn't automatically ruled out. Which meant...
“Here,” Sawyer said, stepping near and tilting his phone so she could see.
Ilse stared at the image on the device. The man in question was passably handsome, though his eyes ruined the illusion. Something about those eyes—too deeply set... too dark. Too cold. The face itself was nondescript. Dark hair, just like the strand they'd found. The man looked trim, athletic, his chin and jawbone more than pronounced.
“No record,” Sawyer said, tapping a second of the document below the picture. “No priors. One arrest.”
“An arrest?”
“Nearly fifteen years ago,” Sawyer said with a nod.
“Hang on—what's this blank spot here?”
Sawyer tapped the phone, zooming in. He shook his head, running a hand over the back of his baseball cap. “Guy's a ghost,” Tom muttered. “No online presence. No email.”
Ilse fidgeted uncomfortably, tapping her fingers against the windowsill of the car. “So what's this arrest from fifteen years ago?”
“Umm...,” Sawyer turned the phone now, skipping through the report's pages. Then, his eyebrows went up. “Huh. Interesting.”
“What is?”
“They brought him in to question him for a murder.”
“Wait, so was he arrested or just a suspect?”
“Looks like here they wanted to arrest, but there wasn't enough evidence.”
As he said it, a cold shiver crept up Ilse's spine. She looked Sawyer dead in the eye. “Is that so?” she murmured.
He returned the look. “Guy is practically a nobody.”
Ilse studied the name next to the picture. Guy Wolfe. “Hello, Mr. Wolfe,” she murmured faintly, feeling her nerves still prickling across her skin. “So what case was he suspected in?”
“Murder of his mother, looks like. Mr. Wolfe's mom was brutally killed some time ago. He was questioned—only a teen at the time—but cops confirmed he and his abusive mother had been estranged for years.”
“So Guy was released?”
“Right. Case left unsolved.”
Ilse stared into the cold eyes of the figure on the screen. The man's mother was killed. The fellow himself had been a suspect in the brutal murder. Now three other victims attested to the brutality of their serial killer. Two teens had just been kidnapped. And the same man's hair was found at the crime scene.
She looked at the screen a second longer, staring into those deep-set, cold eyes. “I think we should head to his place,” Ilse murmured softly, her voice shaking somewhat from the adrenaline now rushing through her system.
“Already got the address,” Sawyer said, sliding over the hood and spinning into the passenger seat. “You drive. Let's go.”
The door opened and slammed as Sawyer flung himself into the vehicle, and Ilse—without hesitation—turned the key, put the car in gear and pulled away from the curb. “Where to?” she said as the vehicle bounced off the sidewalk. “Call out directions if you think I'm going to miss. We're going fast, Tom.”