“What is it?” Kit said as they stepped into Barber’s wood-paneled office.
“You’ll see,” Barber said as he sat her down in one of the corner chairs.
Barber queued the video on the phone again and handed it to her.
“Wait,” she said as she sat looking. “This...this is the clearing on Grand Teton. This is where it happened. I don’t understand.”
“This is my brother’s personal phone. I just received it with some other effects from his boss in the mail. It looks like he used his personal phone to film the crime scene when he first came into contact with the victim.”
“It wasn’t turned in to evidence?”
“No.”
Gannon and Barber silently looked on as Kit watched the video. In the dim room, the screen lit her fine features with a bluish cast.
“Prepare yourself,” Gannon said. “There’s something stomach-churning coming up.”
“No, no, no!” she said after another thirty seconds. “What the hell is this?”
She thumbed at the Pause button. She sat wide-eyed, staring at a still of the victim’s face. After a moment, Gannon noticed her hand was trembling slightly.
“What is it, Kit?” Gannon said. “What’s wrong?”
Kit said nothing. She just sat there and stared.
“What is it?” Barber said. “Are you okay?”
Kit suddenly put down the phone on the leather ottoman.
Then she stood and went straight for the door.
“Where are you going?”
“My car. I’ll be right back,” she called over her shoulder.
“What in the hell was that about?” Barber said.
It was a minute later when Kit came back with a laptop. She brought it over to the ottoman, laid it down, opened it beside Owen Barber’s phone and turned it on.
Thirty seconds later, she clicked open a folder with a spreadsheet of photos and selected one that filled the screen.
It was a crime scene photo of another naked woman laid out dead in a rocky wilderness. She was a tall, voluptuous white woman with her hands tied up with some sort of braided cord.
Gannon blinked and then looked away as he glanced at her face. It was sliced to bloody ribbons.
“Is that one of the other NATPARK victims?” Barber said.
“No, don’t you see? It’s Grand Teton. This is the victim we went in to see,” Kit said.
“But it can’t be,” Barber said. “That’s a white woman. The deceased on Owen’s video is obviously Asian.”
“So there were two women killed?” Gannon said. “They found two bodies?”
“No!” Kit said, wide-eyed as she pointed at the screen. “They found one body. This white woman here on my computer. She’s the only one they took down off the mountain. The only one in the official file. This Asian woman on Owen’s phone here is brand-new.”
“So who is she?” Gannon said.
Kit shook her head.
“Got me. This is the first time I’ve laid eyes on her in my life.”
“So this means...?” Barber said.
“The bodies were switched?” Kit said, throwing up her hands. “Somebody took away this murdered Asian woman your brother saw here. And then switched it with this new murdered white woman here.”
“How does that make any sense?” Gannon said.
“That’s the thing,” Kit said, slowly shaking her head. “It doesn’t. It doesn’t make any sense at all.”