WE PUT ALL the old correspondence we’d looked at back in the manila folders and in the file cabinet. Except for two letters I’d read and set aside. I handed them to Leah. They were addressed to Krista from Leah and were mailed in the fall of 1999.
“You might want to keep those,” I said.
She looked at the envelopes and her eyes started to tear up. She sat down at the desk and read each one.
“These letters are twenty years old and she kept them.” She took a deep breath and wiped her eyes. “Whiny letters from her kid sister in college who was homesick during her first year away from her family and she kept them. God, I wish I would have kept the letters she sent me. They were so hopeful and encouraging. They really helped me through a tough time. I can remember the sentiment, but not the words. Why didn’t I keep them?”
She stood up and looked at me. Her blue eyes shimmering in liquid.
“You’ll always have the memories and now you have the letters that she kept all these years because they meant something to her.”
Leah gasped a sob. I hugged her and we locked together for a solid minute. Her tears dampened my shoulder. Finally, she pulled away.
“I’m good.” She wiped the last tears away. “What’s next?”
“Let’s see.” I pulled open the third drawer and thought I’d found the jackpot. Copies of police reports. Cold cases. Murders. Not the complete files because they would take up the entire office and more. No three-ring binder murder books either. But what looked like copies of the original police reports and pages and pages of summaries of the progress made in the cases. It looked as if Krista had brought home information on all of SBPD’s cold cases since she’d joined the Major Investigative Unit to work on in her free time. She’d always been passionate about the job, but this was next level.
Colleen’s murder should be in one of the files. I pulled them out.
The first case went back over fifty years to the 1963 murder of a high school couple found on Gaviota Beach. The pair had wandered off from a high school senior ditch day. Notes in the file noted similarities to murders in the Bay Area claimed by The Zodiac Killer during the 1960s and ’70s. The Santa Barbara Sheriff’s Department, who had jurisdiction, even issued a press release in 1972 stating that there was a high degree of probability that the murders were committed by The Zodiac. SBPD had a file on the murders because there’d been a joint task force with the Sheriff’s Department.
The next case was the 1993 rape and murder of a woman whose body was left on Hendry’s Beach, about two miles from East Beach. DNA found at the scene had since been linked to that of the California Coast Killer, a serial killer who operated from 1988–2007 then suddenly stopped but remained at large. CCK was known to have murdered women in the Bay Area and as far south as Santa Cruz.
It wasn’t until 2010 that law enforcement linked the Northern California murders with those that took place in Santa Barbara and other cities in Southern California in the 2000s. Once the connection became public, I hired a lawyer to try to demand that SBPD check all the DNA found in Colleen’s case against that of CCK’s. The department maintained that the only testable DNA found was my semen inside Colleen. We made love, in between arguments, the night before she was murdered. Her body had been washed in bleach, unlike CCK’s victims, but maybe he changed his MO. I petitioned SBPD to search for more DNA using the additional advanced science available now. The department ignored my letters and calls.
Krista hadn’t made any notes connecting Colleen’s murder to the body found on Hendry’s Beach.
The most recent case in drawer number three was a double murder in the Eastside area of Santa Barbara thought to have been a drug deal gone wrong in 2004. Colleen was murdered in 2005.
I opened drawer number four.
Empty.