Although we wanted to keep the investigation moving along as quickly as possible, it would be dangerous to venture out in the hailstorm. Detective Jackson and I stood behind the double glass doors of the theater, watching helplessly as the hail fell. The accumulation on the ground showed that the hail was increasing in size, from dime to quarter. While the hail scale began with comparisons to coins—dimes, nickels, quarters—at a certain point, it switched to sports balls: golf balls, baseballs, softballs. With the rapid changes in climate, we might soon experience our first bowling ball–sized hailstone. Heaven help us.
Brigit whimpered again, the noise making her nervous. She could use a distraction. “Come with me, girl.” I led her over to the snack bar where I ordered a large popcorn and two small drinks. “Throw in a box of Hot Tamales, too.” In for a penny, in for a pound. I only hoped this mid-morning snack wouldn’t pack the pounds onto my backside. I had wedding gown shopping to do. Then again, maybe I could get a design with lots of ruffles to cover my butt.
After paying for my order, I handed one of the cups to Jackson and held the tub of popcorn out to her. She grabbed a handful and shoved it into her mouth, moaning in bliss.
“This is your breakfast, isn’t it?” I asked.
“And lunch.” She shrugged. “I’ve had worse. I was on a stakeout at a drug house for a full week once. Survived on nothing but Diet Coke and Skittles.”
So that’s what I have to look forward to when I make detective. I tossed pieces of popcorn to Brigit, and she caught each of them expertly, snapping them out of the air like a frog catching flies. Meanwhile, outside, my cruiser was taking quite a beating. I could only hope the windshield wouldn’t crack.
When the popcorn was gone, I pulled my baton from my belt and extended it with a snap, spinning the nightstick in my fingers with a swish-swish-swish. The repetitive motion and soft sound comforted me, like a mantra. I’d been a twirler in my high school marching band and could handle a baton with finesse and flair. My gun? Not so much. Shooting hadn’t come naturally to me. I’d had to practice for hours on end to pass the marksman test.
Fortunately, the hail let up after several minutes and we were able to scramble through the rain back to my squad car. I inadvertently kicked a few hailstones as we ran, sending them skittering across the parking lot. Brigit snatched one up in her teeth and crunched down on it, like a frozen treat. My patrol car sported a fresh ding or two, but all of the glass was intact.
Jackson buckled her seatbelt and put a hand over her mouth to stifle a yawn. “Let’s go talk to Knapczyk.”
She gave me the address listed on his driver’s license and in the DMV records for his motorcycle. I knew the street. It sat about halfway between the theater and the bank.
As we headed down a short stretch of highway, my eyes spotted no less than three roofing company trucks. Jackson pointed at one as we drove past it. “They didn’t waste any time, did they?”
Any time there was a hailstorm, roofing companies engaged in a mad scramble immediately afterward, hoping to lock down homeowners before they could sign with another company. The noise of hammers would be heard throughout the city for the next few months as new shingles were installed.
We exited the freeway and turned onto Knapczyk’s street. The biker lived in the left side of a rundown brick duplex that slumped on its lot. Hailstones gathered in the dented gutters and littered the muddy front lawn. The motorcycle was parked out of harm’s way on the covered porch. A pack’s worth of cigarette butts littered the area around the bike.
It took four times knocking and a full minute to bring Duke Knapczyk to the door, but he finally pulled it open. He held a lit cigarette and wore his signature scowl. His place smelled like corn chips, dirty laundry, and an unsuccessful pine-scented attempt to negate the other odors. When the man took in my uniform and the furry, fanged K-9 beside me, his face wriggled with a fresh mix of emotions, at least one of which was confusion. “What are y’all doing here?”
Jackson introduced herself, me, and Brigit, and motioned for the man to step out onto the porch. It would be safer to have him out here, where we had a chance of escape if he pulled out a hidden weapon. Knapczyk hesitated a moment, but stepped outside. My gaze dropped to his feet. He appeared to be wearing the same dark boots he’d had on in the video footage from the bank, a type with smooth soles. If he’d been in the Olsens’ kitchen last night, it hadn’t been in these boots. The soles on the men’s shoes we’d seen last night had all been patterned rubber, typical of sneaker-type footwear.
Jackson didn’t pussyfoot around. “Where were you yesterday evening?”
“Here.” He waved his cigarette around like a kid waving a sparkler, using it to indicate the place.
“All evening?” Jackson clarified.
“Yeah.”
“Was anyone with you?” Jackson asked.
“Jack Daniel and Jose Cuervo.” He snorted in amusement. “Why?”
“We’ll get to that, if necessary,” Jackson said. “For now, I want to talk about the deposit you made at the bank yesterday.”
He took a long drag on the cigarette, released the smoke out through his nostrils, and narrowed his eyes in challenge. “I didn’t make a deposit.”
“I’ve seen video footage that says otherwise.”
“No, you haven’t.” His mouth spread in a smug grin. “What you saw was me paying NSF fees on an account they closed without my permission. Them banks are crooked. You screw up balancing your checkbook and they treat you like a criminal, charge you all kinds of penalties. It’s not like I did it on purpose. I’m just not good at math. Never was. Back when I was in school they diagnosed me with that math dyslexia.”
“Math dyslexia” was a common nickname and misnomer for dyscalculia, a learning disability that left those who suffered from it struggling to accurately perform basic math computations. As a child, I’d suffered from a stutter. Because many children who stutter have associated learning disabilities, I’d been tested for a slew of issues, despite the fact that I earned good grades and showed no other symptoms. I’d later learned the terms for the conditions. Dyslexia. Dyscalculia. Dysgraphia.
Knapczyk could have inadvertently overdrawn his account, or he could be up to his old theft-by-check tricks, intentionally bouncing checks like they were basketballs. His situation raised an interesting and complex issue for law enforcement, one my professors at Sam Houston State University had taught as part of my criminal justice curriculum. What crime a person should be charged with, or whether the person should be charged for a crime at all, was not necessarily determined by their actions and the results thereof, but was entirely dependent on their mens rea or mental state. For instance, a person who’d caused the death of another could be guilty of murder if the person had intended to cause the death, but they might only be guilty of manslaughter or assault if they intended to hurt the other person but not kill them.
Knapczyk’s situation was even more complicated, straddling the divide between criminal and civil law. His mental state would determine whether a criminal act had been committed. If he’d intentionally written checks knowing there would be insufficient funds in the account to cover them, he could appropriately be charged with theft by check. If he’d simply made a math error and unintentionally bounced a check, the matter wouldn’t be one for criminal law enforcement, but rather one for the civil courts to handle. Of course, the distinction could be a fine line, and it was often impossible to truly know what a person’s intent was. I presumed the inability to prove intent might be the reason Knapczyk’s earlier charge for theft by check had been dropped. But in the relevant case, even if Knapczyk had purposely issued bad checks, it didn’t make him a killer.
Jackson stared at the man, assessing him. “What about the man at the teller next to you?”
Knapczyk’s expression didn’t change. “What about him?”
“You were eying the money he deposited. Hundreds of dollars in cash.”
“What if I was?” He lifted a shoulder. “Can’t blame me for wishing it was mine. Some guys get all the breaks. Then there’s guys like me that life craps on over and over again.”
Jackson and I exchanged looks. If this guy had attacked Greg Olsen in hopes of stealing the theater’s money, it seemed he wouldn’t be so open. Instead, he’d try to deflect his guilt by lying, saying he was checking out the conversation hearts in the candy dish or something like that.
He elaborated. “Anyways, the money wasn’t why I was looking at him. The phone in his pocket wouldn’t stop going off. It kept playing that ‘Popcorn’ song. Annoying as hell.”
“Popcorn” seemed like an appropriate ringtone for a manager of a movie theater.
Jackson pointed down at Knapczyk’s feet. “Could we see one of your boots?”
“What for?”
“Comparison.”
It had been a vague answer at best, but nonetheless it seemed to satisfy him. He removed his left boot and handed it to the detective, standing like a flamingo with the leg crooked up behind him. A claw-like toenail in desperate need of a trim protruded through a hole in the end of his dingy sock. Ew.
Jackson turned the boot over, and the two of us took a look. The sole had worn evenly, no evidence of supination. When she turned the boot upright again, I tried not to gag at the musty food odor that emanated from it. She checked the tag sewn inside. “Size ten-and-a-half.”
Unless Duke Knapcyk had been wearing someone else’s ill-fitting shoes in the Olsens’ kitchen last night, he wasn’t one of the guys we were looking for.
Jackson dismissed him with “Stop bouncing checks.” She turned and headed back to the cruiser.
“You going to at least tell me why you came by?” he hollered after her. When she didn’t answer, he turned to me.
“Sorry,” I said. “It’s classified.”
He muttered in irritation as Brigit and I returned to the cruiser.
As we rode back to the station, Jackson’s cell phone rang. She pulled it from the pocket of her blazer and consulted the screen. “It’s the lab.” She tapped the screen and put the phone to her ear. “Got those results for me?” She listened intently, issuing one “Really?”, a couple of “Mm-hms” and “All rights,” and ending with “Thanks for turning this around so quickly.” She slid the phone back into her pocket. “All of the blood in the kitchen was Greg Olsen’s.”
“Oh, no.” My heart sank. “He has to be dead then, doesn’t he?”
“The lab ran the math,” the detective said. “There was three-quarters of a gallon of blood in the kitchen. No one can survive that kind of loss.”
I knew from my forensics classes that the average adult body held between 1.2 to 1.5 gallons of blood. A person would feel fairly normal until they’d lost around thirty percent of their blood. Beyond thirty percent and they’d go into hemorrhagic shock, with their pulse rate and respiration rocketing to compensate as their blood pressure dropped. A person could not live if he or she lost more than forty percent of their blood or, on average, a little over half a gallon. Even assuming Greg’s blood supply ran on the higher end at 1.5 gallons, he’d lost fifty percent of his blood. Facts were facts, and we had to face them. Greg Olsen was dead. May he rest in peace.
“What about fingerprints?” I asked. “Any luck there?”
“Most of them belong to Greg and Shelby. None of the others matched anyone in the system.”
Darn. “What are you going to do now?”
“Review his computer and phone records. See what they tell me. I’ll call businesses in the area, see if anybody caught the Jetta on their security cameras. I already canvassed the Olsen’s immediate neighborhood. Quite a few of the houses are rentals, so there’s no security cameras on them. Neither the landlords nor the tenants wanted to make that kind of investment. One of the neighbors has an inexpensive doorbell system, but it only shows their front porch and walkway.”
I knew from experience that even if the Jetta showed up on camera footage, the video was unlikely to be helpful given that the car was dark and it was nighttime when it had taken off, presumably with Greg inside. The quality of the video on most security cameras wasn’t very good, either. But even if the odds were stacked against us, we owed it to Shelby to perform a thorough investigation. We owed it to Greg, too. The dead deserve any justice we could provide.
“Before I look at Greg’s phone and computer,” Jackson said, “we need to pay a visit to Shelby, give her the news.”
We? A lump of dread clogged my throat and I had to gulp to force it down. I had to learn to face difficult tasks like this head on or I’d make a lousy detective.
I drove the cruiser to Shelby’s house, half hoping we’d get into a fender bender along the way that would delay the heartbreaking task. But no sense putting off the inevitable. The crime scene tape had been removed from her yard, but a white van from the cleaning service sat in the driveway. The sides and back bore the biohazard symbol, a clear indication that something awful had happened here. Shelby’s car had been moved into the garage, which stood open. Shelby sat on a folding lawn chair inside the space with Marseille on her lap. Both the woman and the dog were wrapped up in a blanket. The front door of the house was open, too. Through it, we could see workers in hazmat suits moving about.
Shelby stood when she saw my cruiser pull to the curb, but she didn’t move forward. She seemed to sense we came bearing bad news.
Because we wouldn’t be going into the house, I left Brigit in her enclosure in the back of the cruiser with the windows cracked. She stood at the glass, fogging it with her breath and watching as the detective and I walked into the garage. Shelby looked as exhausted as the detective. Her eyes were bloodshot and rimmed in dark pink. She smelled faintly of mentholated ointment. All that crying had probably caused her sinuses to become stuffy. I recognized the scent right away. Cops carried small jars of the stuff in their pockets or cruisers. Between the stench of rotting corpses, the odiferous squalor of flop houses, and the funk of evidence tossed into garbage dumpsters, police officers often found themselves in stinky situations.
“I’m afraid I’ve got some difficult news, Shelby,” Jackson said, preparing the woman for the blow she was about to deliver. “We heard from the lab. All of the blood was Greg’s.”
“All of it?” Shelby’s tone was high-pitched and incredulous. “None of the blood spatter came from anyone else?”
I noticed Shelby used the correct term, “spatter.” Many civilians inadvertently used the wrong but more familiar “splatter.” Perhaps she read crime novels or watched detective shows on television. Or maybe she’d learned it from one of the many movies in her husband’s DVD collection.
“We’re as surprised as you are,” Jackson said. “I’d expected for the blood to have come from at least two sources, maybe three.”
“Could he—” Shelby closed her eyes and shook her head, before forcing herself to ask the question. “Could he lose that much blood and still be alive?”
“Honestly?” Jackson said on a sigh. “It would be a miracle.”
Shelby stood stock-still for a moment before dropping into the chair, her shoulders shaking. She buried her face in the blanket. Jackson and I took up positions on either side of her, putting supportive hands on her back.
“I’m so sorry, Shelby,” Jackson said.
“Me too,” I added.
We let her continue to cry for a minute or two, both of us dabbing at our eyes as well. The tough-cop cliché was just that, a cliché. Most cops cared about the people they served. Those who didn’t rarely lasted long in law enforcement.
Finally, Shelby’s sobs eased up. She wiped her eyes on the blanket before looking up at us. “Do you have any suspects?”
“Not yet,” the detective told her. “We’ve reviewed the security camera footage from the bank and spoken with another customer who was in the branch at the same time as your husband. He checked out.”
“What about Greg’s car?” Shelby asked. “Has anyone seen it?”
“No reports so far,” Jackson said. “We’ve spread the word. If law enforcement spots it or pulls anyone over in it, they’ll detain the occupants for questioning.”
“So what now?” Shelby asked, her voice desperate. “I just wait?”
“That’s really all you can do at this point,” the detective said gently. “I’m heading back to the station now to look over Greg’s phone and computer. I’ll let you know if it generates any new leads.” She eyed the woman. “Sure you don’t want to go somewhere else? Or get someone over here to sit with you?”
Shelby wrapped her arms tighter around herself and Marseille and shook her head. “I can’t face people right now. I want to stay here in case Greg comes home.” She sniffled, blinked, and looked directly at the detective, her voice soft. “Miracles happen sometimes, don’t they?”
Jackson didn’t respond to the question. If she answered honestly, it would seem cruel. And if she agreed with Shelby, gave the woman false hope, it would be just as cruel. Besides, the question was likely rhetorical, and Jackson seemed to assume as much as well. She settled for saying, “I’ll be in touch.”
Her lip quivering, Shelby nodded.
As we drove off down the street, a news van from a local television station came around the corner. In the passenger seat sat Trish LeGrande, a brassy, bosomy reporter with hair the color of orange sherbet or circus peanuts. No doubt she’d come here in the hopes of interviewing Shelby Olsen about her husband’s disappearance. She was like a buzzard, searching for carcasses on which to feast. But we had no legal right to stop her from approaching the grief-stricken woman we’d just left behind and, in fact, there were times the media could be a police department’s best ally in identifying or tracking down suspects or people of interest. I only hoped her arrival wouldn’t send Shelby over an emotional edge.
The heater whirred and warmed the car on our drive back to the station. Jackson’s eyes drifted closed and her head bobbed a couple of times as she nodded off only to jerk awake again. She groaned and shook herself alert as the cruiser rolled to a stop at the curb in front of the station. “Thanks for your help, Megan.”
“Any time.”
With that, she climbed out of my cruiser, and my partner and I set out on our beat. I had quite a bit of autonomy while out on patrol, and I decided to use that discretion today to see if I could locate Greg’s car. My guess was that Greg’s killers wouldn’t have risked traveling very far in his vehicle, especially once they realized they were transporting a dead body. They’d have likely ditched the Jetta, and Greg, too, within a short distance from the Olsens’ home.
I drove to the more secluded areas of my beat to see if the Jetta had been abandoned in any of the out-of-the-way spots. The car wasn’t in any of the parking lots at Forest Park. It wasn’t hidden behind the bathhouse at the park’s pool. It wasn’t parked in the remote reaches of the TCU stadium’s parking lot. It wasn’t behind the dumpsters at a church or a shopping center. Damn.
I continued on and crossed the bridge over the Trinity River, which was brown with silt and moving swiftly with runoff from the morning’s storm. I wondered if Greg Olsen and his car might be in the water below. It wouldn’t be the first time someone had pushed a car into a body of water in an attempt to hide the evidence of their crime. Other times, criminals set cars on fire for the same reason. I supposed only time would tell what had happened to Greg and his Jetta. Then again, even time didn’t always yield answers. Some cases went cold and remained unsolved for decades. But for now, I needed to issue a speeding ticket to the college kid in the sports car who’d just passed me doing 68 miles per hour in a 35 zone. I reached out to the dash, flipped on my lights and siren, and hooked a U-turn.
The following morning, as our shift began, Brigit and I headed directly to Detective Jackson’s office for an update. On her desk sat Greg’s computer and cell phone, the plastic evidence bags beside them. Both were plugged into a surge protector on the floor behind the detective’s desk.
She looked up from her chair as we stepped into her doorway. Although her forehead was furrowed in concentration, she appeared better rested today. She motioned for my partner and me to come into her office. While I took a seat in one of the chairs, Brigit circled around the desk for one of Detective Jackson’s ear rubs. Jackson reached down to grasp a furry, pointed ear in each hand and massage them. “How’s the big girl this morning, huh? How’s the big girl?”
Brigit wagged her tail to let the detective know the big girl was doing quite well this morning, thank you very much.
Jackson continued to stroke my partner while she filled me in. “There was nothing on Greg’s computer or phone that gave any indication he’s been having an affair or any type of problems with anyone. In fact, there was little on his phone or computer at all. What few personal e-mails there were in his inbox were mostly from Shelby or online stores he’s ordered stuff from. His work e-mail account had nothing of interest, either. There were only a handful of contacts in his phone. His recent call history showed that the only numbers he’d called in recent weeks were Shelby’s and his boss’s number at the theater. He had the usual incoming calls from spammers and solicitors, but nothing from a private number other than Shelby’s or his boss’s.”
“So he led a fairly insular life.”
“Looks that way. He had a bunch of photos on his phone, but they were mostly of him and Shelby and their dog. He’d snapped a few pics of movie posters and a selfie of him with that cardboard cutout of The Rock from the theater’s lobby, but that’s it.”
From what I’d heard, it wasn’t unusual for a man who’d been married a while to lose touch with friends. Besides, I’d gleaned that the Olsens were one of those couples that did nearly everything together, functioned almost exclusively as a unit. Their unit didn’t seem particularly extroverted, either. Nearly all of the photographs at the Olsens’ house and on Shelby’s social media showed the couple doing things by themselves, not with other people.
As the detective and I talked, the screen on Greg’s phone lit up and the device blared the standard default ringtone. I looked at the screen. Although the phone faced the detective’s side of the desk and I was reading upside down, I could tell the words on the screen warned SPAM RISK. There was no point in answering the call. But wait a minute … “Didn’t Duke Knapczyk say that Greg’s phone had played the ‘Popcorn’ song?”
Jackson sat up straighter, her brows moving up her forehead. “He did.” When the phone stopped ringing, she picked it up, typed in the password, and reviewed his ringtones before turning her gaze on me. “I don’t see a ‘Popcorn’ ringtone on here.”
“Think he deleted it yesterday after he left the bank? Maybe he got tired of it.”
“Or maybe Knapczyk only thought the sound was coming from Greg. Maybe it was coming from someone else. There were quite a few people in line.”
“If the sound was coming from someone else, it would explain why we didn’t see Greg reach into his pocket to turn off the ringer.” Besides, even though popcorn was generally associated with movie theaters, the song itself wasn’t. “Or Greg could have had a burner phone on him and ignored the call.”
“That’s always a possibility.” Jackson leaned back in her chair. “I’ll run by the bank again, see if anyone heard the ringtone Knapcyk mentioned and whether they could tell where it had come from. In the meantime, I’ll have the technical team take a closer look at Greg’s computer and phone. They’ll be able to recover any deleted files or browsing history, make sure I didn’t miss anything. But unless they find something, this investigation could stall out.”
“Nothing turned up on security cameras near the Olsen’s house?”
“A convenience store picked up a glimpse of what might have been the Jetta heading north on Hemphill, but that’s it.”
With nothing left for the detective and I to discuss, I stood and patted my leg to round up my partner. “Call me if I can help.”
She gave me an appreciative smile. “You know I will.”
Brigit and I set out on patrol. As we cruised through the well-established, exclusive Mistletoe Heights neighborhood, I spotted a white Chevy pickup with New Mexico license plates parked in front of one of the largest, fanciest homes. A sixtyish woman with olive skin and shiny black hair stood in the front yard next to a trim, silver-haired man wearing khaki pants, a white dress shirt with striped tie, and a heavy, fleece-lined shearling jacket. The two stared up at the gabled roof, the man pointing first to one spot, and then to another. Looked like the out-of-town roofing companies had set their sights on Fort Worth, too. Typical. Many contractors were mobile, taking their crews to disaster areas where skilled labor would be in short supply. Houston had become a contractors’ mecca after Hurricane Harvey, pulling in construction workers from far and beyond to rebuild homes and businesses. Fortunately, the fact that contractors were willing to travel meant repairs could be made sooner and homeowners could get their lives back on track quicker than if everyone had to rely only on local construction crews. It was a win-win situation.
Brigit and I continued down the street and turned into Forest Park. My first murder case had originated in this very park, after a jogger found a corpse in the woods. The victim’s face had been pulverized, and I’d lost my breakfast in front of a group of bystanders. I’d become more hardened since, but I doubted I’d ever get to a point where a violent crime scene didn’t affect me. I might be a cop, but I was first a human being. It was impossible for those of us in law enforcement to completely set aside our emotions when working a traumatic case.
As a greenbelt that was dark at night, the park made a good place to dump a body. Although I’d driven around looking for Greg’s car in the more isolated areas of my beat yesterday, I figured it couldn’t hurt to make a more concentrated effort today on searching for his body. Greg might have been left here before his killers took off in his car. I decided to park and take Brigit on a walk down the trails, see if I spotted his body anywhere, or maybe a pile of loose dirt that marked a shallow grave.
I let Brigit out of the back of the cruiser and grabbed a tennis ball from her enclosure. We walked to an open area, where I threw the ball for her several times, letting her get some exercise and work out the kinks in her muscles from sitting in the car. I, too, worked out some kinks, performing some knee lifts and stretches. When I realized I was procrastinating out of fear that I might actually locate Greg’s corpse in the woods, I called Brigit over, took a deep breath, and set out on the trails.
Enjoying her off-leash freedom, Brigit chased a squirrel up an oak, putting her paw up on the trunk as she barked up at the little beast. The squirrel clung to the bark, chirping down at Brigit, cursing her out in squirrel-speak. Chit-chit-chit!
Although the rain had moved on, yesterday’s brief yet heavy storm had left quite a few puddles behind. Brigit stopped to lap at each one we came across, sampling each puddle as if she were a sommelier tasting a variety of vintages. This puddle is mud-forward, with subtle hints of dry oak leaves and earthworm.
As we made our way down the path, I peered carefully into the woods, looking for any clue that a body might be secreted among the trees and dead leaves. But all I seemed to see were squirrels making desperate searches for overlooked acorns, and twigs broken in the torrential storm. As we drew closer to the Trinity River that formed the northwest boundary of the park, my eyes landed on something bright yellow sticking out of a pile of leaves in the woods. Could it be Greg Olsen’s yellow theater uniform?
It was a Schrödinger’s cat situation. So long as I didn’t verify what the yellow thing was, Greg Olsen wouldn’t be confirmed dead. But if I determined that the yellow object was Greg’s blazer—and found him dead still wearing it—there’d no longer be any hope at all. But there wasn’t really even a glimmer of hope any more regardless, was there? Not with the lab confirming that all of the blood found in the kitchen belonged to him.
Ordering Brigit to stick close by my side, I ventured into the trees, the leaves crunching under my feet. I circled wide so as not to disturb any evidence that might be about. When I drew close, I squatted down and squinted at the object. It’s only a Lay’s potato chip bag. I released a long breath, equal parts relieved not to be facing a corpse and frustrated it wasn’t the missing man. Brigit, on the other hand, stuffed her snout into the opening and licked the salty remnants from the crumpled bag.
My partner and I continued our trek through the trees. When we reached the river, Brigit traipsed down the bank and lapped at the water’s edge, taking another drink. I, on the other hand, ran my gaze over the water and riverbank, looking for a body washed up on the shore or anything that might indicate a car sat under the surface or had been pushed down the slope. A pair of ducks floated past on the swiftly moving current, but nothing else caught my attention.
Where is Greg Olsen and where is his car? Normally, as we worked a case, I could sense us drawing closer and closer to the truth. In this case, though, it seemed that the truth was drifting farther away, much like the mallards floating on the Trinity.