Kit’s windowless work space in the corner of the Behavioral Science basement office was way in the back by the mechanicals. Since the whole office was always so dim and depressing, they’d finally gotten the powers that be to rehab the entire floor two months before. There were nice espresso-brown wooden cubicle walls now and overhead pin lighting and a row of shiny new reference books in the open-walled cabinet above her two monitors.
She was standing up and slipping out the latest copy of Federal Rules of Evidence with Objections from the new cabinet when Francis Sinclair walked in.
“There you are,” Kit said. “Sit down, Francis. Boy oh boy, do I have news for you.”
“I have news for you, too, Kit,” Sinclair said.
“What?” Kit said looking at him. “No, scratch that. Me first. Sit down.”
She rolled her spare chair over to him.
“Believe me,” she said. “You have to hear this.”
“What is it?” Sinclair said as he sat.
“The shooter on the mountain. That wasn’t our guy. I don’t know who it was, but it wasn’t the NATPARK killer.”
“What?”
“It was a copycat or something, Francis. This whole thing is so crazy.”
“What are you talking about, Kit?”
“I’m coming in this morning, and I get a call from the detective in New Mexico we worked with when we got the DNA in victim three’s truck over a year ago.”
“The Rocky Mountain Park murder?” Sinclair said squinting. “The Gatorade bottle?”
“Uh-huh. Well, long story short,” Kit said, lifting up the Genodex Labs report she’d been mailed, “we have a hit on the DNA with a sibling match.”
“A sibling match?”
“Two months ago, a woman named Johanna Halstead had a minor health scare and wanted to check her ancestry roots, God bless her. She’s the sister of the unknown subject who left the DNA in our victim’s truck. The beyond awesome news is that it turns out Johanna only has one sibling, a man named Cameron Ketchum.
“Here’s where it gets good,” Kit said, putting down the DNA report and lifting up a spreadsheet. “I’ve been scouring the database all morning about Cameron Ketchum. He’s a long-haul trucker from Indiana, and I called his company, and his routes line up with the national park locations, Francis. They are a perfect match.
“He was in North Carolina when victim one was killed and in Grand Canyon for victim two. And not only was he near the Rocky Mountain Park for victim three, he was staying in a trucker’s hotel on the same road within walking distance of where the pickup was found! That very night! Not only that, he’s got some burglary charges from when he was in his twenties and a rape arrest.
“It’s him. Ketchum is the NATPARK killer.”