Lenny did his most important work down in the department’s crime scene lab, which was situated across from the property room in the basement and didn’t have any natural light. The lab was a large open space with plenty of workbenches and an impressive amount of state-of-the-art equipment, including a drying cabinet and a superglue fuming chamber with a fume hood. A grid of fluorescent lighting on the ceiling made everything look flat and cold. She found Lenny seated at his corner workbench where he wrote his reports. The workbench was crammed with computer equipment and half a dozen video monitors.
“So what’ve you got?” she asked, hoping for a breakthrough.
Lenny finished his cake, rumpled up the napkin, and tossed it in the trash. Then he scooped a pile of paperwork off the chair beside him and said, “Have a seat, Nat.”
She watched while he typed in a command and pointed at a nearby screen. “Check this out. We pulled video from the liquor store across the way—you can see the mouth of the alley at an angle through the plate glass. At eleven forty-three P.M., a woman dressed as Wonder Woman heads east along the sidewalk. Here. At eleven forty-four she enters the alley alone. As you can see, she looks inebriated. Impaired motor skills. Swaying a little. Stumbling. Once she enters the alley, she never comes out. I’ve fast-forwarded the tape for the subsequent two hours, but she never exits the alley.”
“Back up a minute,” Natalie said, and he rewound the tape and hit play.
In the grainy security footage, the woman dressed as Wonder Woman seemed visibly distraught. She kept glancing nervously over her shoulder, as if someone was following her.
“Shortly before she goes into the alley, she panics and pushes her way through a group of people,” Natalie observed. “See there?”
Lenny nodded. “Right. As if someone’s chasing her. But nobody follows her into the alley. There’s nobody pursuing her, as far as this tape goes. I had a couple of officers down here looking at the tapes with me. We checked two hours prior to the time stamp, as well as two hours after the time stamp,” he explained. “That’s a window of four hours. Now, we spotted maybe a dozen people going into the alley before she does, but they all come out again well before the time stamp. For example, there’s a young couple that stumbles into the alley two hours prior to Wonder Woman, but then they leave the alley fifteen minutes later. And then, an employee dumps his trash at nine fifty-five, but he comes out right away. Doing his job. A drunk stumbles in around ten oh-three, a couple of teenagers go in there to get high, but they’re all accounted for—meaning they all exited the alley well before eleven forty-four. Then afterwards, between midnight and two A.M., you have sixteen employees who are throwing away trash. But every single one of them comes back out within a minute or two of going in, and we’ve identified and interviewed all of them. They didn’t see or hear anything unusual. Nobody in the alley, nothing unusual, no cries for help. They simply tossed their trash and went back to their jobs. We’re still reviewing the other surveillance tapes we collected today, and we’ve gotten to widen our window with this one, but the guys are getting fatigued, so I’ve put in a request for more volunteers.”
“Just to be clear,” Natalie said, “you checked two hours prior to eleven forty-four P.M. and then two hours afterwards?”
“Yeah, basically nobody followed her in who hasn’t been accounted for. And for at least two hours prior, there was no one lying in wait for her. We’re going to keep looking, of course, but I need fresh pairs of eyeballs. Keegan’s coming down shortly to review this tape farther back, and Petrowski will check it out between two and four A.M. It’s always possible an offender was lying in wait, hiding in that alley for longer than two hours, waiting for some random person to attack,” Lenny explained. “But I doubt it. And we haven’t seen any proof of that so far. But still, just to be thorough, our goal is to go all the way back twenty-four hours prior to the incident and twenty-four hours after the incident, just to make sure our vic wasn’t ambushed. But right now, it’s looking as if she walked into that alley alone, and what happens next we don’t know.”
“Good job, Lenny. I’d like a copy of this segment of the tape.”
“Sure thing. Hold on.” He took out his phone and sent her the attachment. “Don’t keep the lieu waiting.”
She went upstairs to the third floor and knocked on Luke’s door.
“Come in,” he said. He was on the phone.
She took a seat in a wooden guest chair and studied his face, his inscrutable male feelings locked deep inside. His hair was the color of dark-stained wood, and his reading glasses made him look studious and solemn. There was a prowling inquisitiveness about him—an innate skepticism. He seemed forever poised to question whatever anyone had to say, one eyebrow arched.
Luke didn’t have a lot of personal touches in his office—there was a worn catcher’s mitt on his desk, a rubber band ball, Skye’s watercolors taped to the wall, and a framed photograph of himself and his ex-wife from many summers ago when she was pregnant with Skye. They looked madly in love back then—you could see it in their eyes. Natalie felt an irrational twinge of jealousy. She wanted to be that in love.
He hung up. “The chief,” he said. “He’s like sandpaper to my raw nerves.”
“What now?”
He shook his head. “Incompetence, hypocrisy, cowardice, ineptness, duplicity. Just the usual.”
She smiled. The stark office lights dusted the steel cabinets with angled shadows. “So,” she said a little awkwardly, “how’s it feel to be thirty-nine?”
“Feels no different than yesterday, frankly.” He smiled politely and waited for her to say something, but Natalie was all out of small talk.
“I saw the video,” she said. “She looked exceedingly paranoid, constantly glancing back over her shoulder.”
“And yet no one followed her into the alley.”
“But she was clearly afraid of something.”
He leaned back in his ratty office chair and said, “What did you find out today?”
She informed him about the music contest, the wrist injury, Morgan’s failed attempts to get an orchestra gig, her relationship with her ex-boyfriend, her roommate’s concerns, the library book on Wicca, and the rest. She told him about Sheriff Dressler and his offer to help with the case in exchange for their help with Lily Kingsley—another violinist.
“And Dressler thinks it’s possible she was one of Samuel Hawke’s victims?”
“Well, she disappeared six months ago, so she could’ve been his last victim. But she doesn’t fit the profile. She wasn’t a transient, and the only bodies they’ve found so far belong to the Missing Nine. It’s worth looking into, but the violinist connection is what I’m interested in—a young female violinist from Chaste Falls. They both attended the conservatory, and judging from the pictures I found online, Lily Kingsley resembles Morgan superficially. Both are petite with long mahogany hair.”
Luke nodded thoughtfully and put down his pen. “And you said Morgan came down here for Halloween?”
“For the Monster Mash contest last Friday night. It sounds like she was hoping her performance might create some heat. Go viral and get her a record deal or something.”
“But she didn’t win?”
“Apparently not. That’s something I need to follow up on, along with a million other things.” She opened her notebook. Her handwriting had deteriorated since high school, and it was difficult to read her own notes. Frustrating. “The witch sigil tattoo is an interesting lead. I’ll drop by Cody Dugway’s tattoo parlor and see if that’s his handiwork, or if he knows who else might’ve done it. Lenny and his team are reviewing the security tapes, and we’re still door-to-dooring. Morgan’s ex-boyfriend had no alibi for last night after nine o’clock, so Dressler’s going to look into it further. It’s only half an hour from Chaste Falls to Burning Lake, so he could’ve driven down here.”
“You think her ex-boyfriend was stalking her?” Luke asked.
“It’s a possibility. Although he seemed relatively harmless.”
“So you don’t think this was an accidental overdose?”
Natalie shook her head. “Not after seeing the surveillance tape. She was scared to death of someone or something.”
He gave a concerned nod.
“According to Dressler, a lot of these kids feel so much pressure to succeed that they become suicidally depressed. But Morgan strikes me as tremendously determined. Maybe the contest was her last hope, like her roommate said … but then again, it also gave her exposure.”
“Exposure how?”
“To the judges and other contestants. Who knows? She might’ve made some good contacts that night. She might’ve been networking, trying to use her performance to leverage a job. We don’t know yet.”
Luke rested his hands on his desk. “The chief thinks there’s a high probability that this was an accidental overdose. She was partying, she got drunk, took a few pills, and ended up dead.”
“That’s what Director Brock is hoping for as well,” Natalie said, recalling the picture of the chief of police on the conservatory’s donor wall.
“We’re under a lot of pressure to solve the case quickly,” he told her. “But I’m not going to interfere with how you run your investigation, Natalie. Just keep an open mind to all possibilities.”
She scowled. “You think she crawled into that dumpster all by herself?”
“Maybe. You saw the tape. Nobody went into that alley after her, or before, that wasn’t accounted for. That’s a four-hour window. Maybe she was hallucinating from a bad drug combination? Which could explain why she removed her clothes.”
“Maybe her attacker entered the alley three hours earlier? Maybe he was hiding in the dumpster? We won’t know until Lenny has reviewed all the tapes and exhausted all possibilities. We have to open up that window to at least six hours before and after.”
Luke gave a stiff nod, as if he didn’t want to argue with her anymore. “You’re right. It’s premature to draw any conclusions.”
She took a deep breath before leafing through her notebook. “You spoke to Dressler?”
Luke nodded. “I’m glad they’re cooperating. Makes our job a heck of a lot easier.”
“Some of these graduates from the music conservatory have meltdowns after their careers tank. The sheriff told me the rate of suicide for these kids is unusually high. It’s clear Hyacinth Brock doesn’t want the post-graduation suicide rates getting out to the media. Bad for business.”
“So she’s covering the conservatory’s ass by trying to get ahead of the story.”
Natalie nodded. “Meanwhile, nobody recognized the silver necklace, but she could’ve purchased it here in Burning Lake, and the Wiccan symbol interests me. She also had a library book on Wicca in her room.”
“You think she was into witchcraft?”
“It’s one of the leads I’m following.” She closed her notebook. “How long before we get the tox screen back?”
“The state lab is prioritizing our request. They put a rush on it. In the meantime, Barry says there’s no evidence of rape. The sperm in the condom was more than twenty-four hours old.”
“What about the rape kit? Did he have any luck?”
Luke shook his head. “Test results were negative for semen or saliva. And the autopsy report was negative for abrasions, bruises, tearing, or forcible entry.”
She sighed heavily, exhaustion tugging at the corners of her mouth. For a moment she felt all the pent-up rage she’d buried deep inside come rising to the surface, but those feelings quickly dissipated and turned into a hard resolve. She was going to solve this thing.
Augie knocked on the door and popped his head in. “Sorry to interrupt, folks, but Lenny just got a hit on one of the credit cards … we know where Morgan Chambers was staying over the weekend.”