An hour and a half later, they were sitting outside at Barber’s picnic table beside his compound’s small lake. They’d just finished lunch and were looking out over the water where Gannon’s son, Declan, and the Barbers’ children, Stephanie and her two high school–aged brothers, Ryan and Nate, were playing water basketball against a backboard hammered into the side of the old gray wood dock.
On the deck itself, Barber’s wife, Lynn, sat in an Adirondack chair reading a book. They all waved as she looked over at them. Gannon noticed how she didn’t wave back.
“So, Kit, have you been doing any thinking?” Gannon said, looking across the table at the FBI agent.
“You could say that, Mike,” Kit said, lifting her iced tea.
“I’m still trying to get this all straight, Kit,” John Barber said.
“You and me both,” Kit said.
“From what you told us before, you think the initial killer you’ve been looking for, the real NATPARK killer, is this Ketchum guy,” Barber said. “This guy they have in custody in Kansas. And he’s not the shooter on the mountain.”
“Correct,” she said. “With the evidence we already have, the sibling link DNA evidence from the stolen truck and Ketchum’s previous history of sexual violence and his whereabouts matching up with the other three murders, there isn’t a prosecutor anywhere in this country who wouldn’t sign an arrest warrant on him.”
“But only for the first three murders,” Gannon said.
“Exactly,” Kit said. “Ketchum’s been in custody in a Kansas penitentiary for nearly the last year. His being the shooter up on Grand Teton is literally impossible.”
“But the crime scene on Grand Teton, the way the victim was posed, the details match Ketchum’s other crime scenes?” Gannon said.
“Yes. To a T.”
“So the Grand Teton murder is a copycat or something?” Barber said.
“Or maybe Ketchum has a partner,” Kit said with a tilt of her head. “As he sat in jail, it’s possible he might have thought that we would eventually catch up with him, so he had a partner kill another victim in the same exact way while he was in custody to throw the suspicion off himself.”
“But how do the two bodies come into play?” Gannon said.
Kit looked out at all the young people in the water. The two Barber brothers were trying fruitlessly to block the much taller Declan, who dodged in the water and leaped up and hooked a shot over them.
“LeBron at the buzzer!” Declan screamed as the ball clunked heavily off the backboard and then made a cartoon boinging sound off the rim as it ricocheted away and splashed in the water.
“You got me on that one,” Kit finally said, shaking her head. “That’s new to me. I can’t even begin to come up with a reason why. I was actually going to head out to Kansas to interview Ketchum after I left here. But now with the switcheroo bombshell we just saw on your brother’s phone—that there were actually two dead women and one of them is still missing—I have to say I’m pretty much at a complete loss what to do.”