Chapter 29
TWENTY-NINE
Durham, New Hampshire
Tuesday, September 12, 2006
9:11 a.m.
She hated police stations.
A nauseating film clung to her every time she had to be here. Durham PD’s station wasn’t much different from the one she’d spent countless hours in back home. It wasn’t the buildings themselves. It was the empty promises. The values every officer was supposed to live by yet failed to uphold when it came to getting justice for the people they claimed to serve. It was the massive hole in her heart she couldn’t get rid of no matter how many times she told herself this time was different.
It wasn’t different.
It’d been two days since Durham police had arrested Dean. His parents had passed away in his freshman year. He had no siblings or family to rely on or to get him a defense attorney. She was all he had left, and she wasn’t going to leave him to fight this alone. But the investigating detective in charge had refused to give her any information over the phone despite her connection to Professor Morrow. He hadn’t been any help either. Be patient, he’d told her. The criminal justice system takes time.
Well, Dean didn’t have time. Because at a certain point, every officer in this station and every citizen in this town would start believing the lies departments like this spewed to reach their arrest quotas. She’d seen it before. Witnessed the corruption and sickness that took hold when authority and assumed power was left unchecked. People like her father had paid the price for that power. Especially with a case of this magnitude. Small town, big murder. The accusations had already started spreading. Dean was on the verge of losing everything. His scholarship to attend UNH, the research opportunities in the biomedical lab, the job offers, his friends and professors.
But she could stop it.
She hadn’t been able to save her father. She could save Dean.
Leigh approached the front desk sergeant, a bleached-blonde woman who could only peck at her keyboard with the inch-long neon nails. “Excuse me. I need to speak with the investigating detective in charge of Teshia Elborne’s case.”
“Those are some big words for a pretty little thing like you. You watch that Dateline show?” A snap of gum scorched along Leigh’s nerves as the officer gave her barely more than a quick assessment at her lack of an answer. Passing her a clipboard, the desk sergeant nodded toward the chairs lined up against the wall. “Sign in and take a seat. The detective is in the middle of an interview. He’ll be with you when he gets a minute.”
Sign in. Leigh clutched the pen. Frozen. Her name hadn’t done her any favors back home. In fact, it’d made things much, much worse. She scribbled something unintelligible in the box next to today’s date. In the end, her name wouldn’t matter. It was what she had to say.
Stepping back, she took the nearest chair. And waited. Ten minutes. Twenty. Thirty. She’d miss her psychology class if she didn’t leave soon. This was more important. This was a man’s life. She counted off her heartbeats, just as she had in a lobby almost identical to this one to pass the time waiting for police to realize they had the wrong man.
After forty minutes, the investigating detective shoved through the door in his wrinkled brown suit with the smell of cigarette smoke clinging to his skin and breath. His button-down stretched too tight across his midsection. Not a man who saw field work often. He was most likely betting this case would be the one to see him through to retirement. “You here about the Elborne case?”
“Yes.” Leigh sucked in a breath, but her confidence had leaked with every minute she’d had to sit in that damn uncomfortable chair. Getting to her feet, she steadied her voice. “I came here for information on Dean Groves. Officers arrested him two days ago, and no one will tell me when he’s being released.”
The detective’s jaw tightened. That was it. The only reaction he was going to give her. “Now why in the name of all that is holy would we release the man suspected of killing Ms. Elborne?”
“Dean Groves didn’t kill anyone.” She kept her head held high. She could do this. For Dean. She’d lied to police once. What difference would another make if it saved the man she loved? “And I can prove it.”
Durham, New Hampshire
Thursday, October 10
5:23 p.m.
Leigh stood over the body.
Pale. Bloated. And very dead.
Almost exactly how she felt. She should drag the remains into the classroom where Ford was sleeping. Would serve him right for putting it in her line of sight when she’d come around after surviving that hellscape in the basement. But she didn’t want to cause any more damage she wouldn’t be able to explain to the ME or disrespect the victim. “Who are you?”
The swelling in the victim’s face hid any recognizable features. Lips four times the size of normal, a too-wide nose that didn’t fit in the man’s face. Even the ears were out of proportion. The man’s hair was dark with signs of silver. Natural, from what she could see. Clean shaven. Took good care of his nails. No wedding ring. None of the staff knew who this man was and what he’d been doing in the tunnels beneath Thompson Hall. There wasn’t much for her to decipher any patterns, habits, or clues as to who this man had been. Or even when he’d died.
Leigh was careful prying his eyelids open, looking for that telltale irritation.
The classroom door protested on its hinges as Ford entered.
“I see you finally got your beauty sleep.” She sat back on her haunches, hands still connected to the corpse. The medical examiner was going to have a hell of a time determining time of death with the changes in environment and temperature. It wasn’t a conversation she was looking forward to.
“You think I’m beautiful?” The marshal’s crooked smile triggered a chill up her spine as he crossed the classroom to her position. Not a single wrinkle in his damn suit.
Hell, she couldn’t even keep one set of clothing dry, and he looked like he’d stepped out of the office. “Can’t say you’re hard to look at. This guy, on the other hand, has seen better days.”
“We figure out who he is?” Crouching, Ford met her eye line.
“No. Not yet.” She settled the victim’s eyelids back into place. “But I can tell you he wasn’t poisoned, which confirms my theory our unsub wasn’t planning on killing him. It was an impulse decision, but he’s been stripped of any identifiers, including his ID. It’s possible his is one of the six driver’s licenses forensics is working on restoring, but I found something much more interesting.”
Ford’s attention shifted from the body to her, and the entire world closed in around her. Just as it had when he’d hauled her against him in the hallway. “Oh?”
Her breath shuddered out of her at the memory. So much had happened in the past two days—almost dying, for one—but in those short minutes, Ford had brought something in her alive. Leigh pointed to the remains’ white button-down shirt. “Yeah. His clothes are too big.”
“His clothes?” He scanned their unidentified victim from head to toe, and she was reminded that studying dead bodies wasn’t actually part of his line of work. He was a hunter.
“Gas builds up the longer a body is left to decompose. Primarily in the torso. That’s why he floated to the ceiling when I let him out of the closet.” Leigh pointed to the line of buttons bisecting the remains. “The bacteria in his intestines start releasing gas at time of death and it stretches the skin like air in a balloon. If you push down on his stomach, you can feel the gas is there, but the buttons on his shirt aren’t straining against his torso. Same goes for his pants. There are wear marks on the third hole in, but his belt is buckled on the fifth. So either he’s recently lost around fifty pounds without updating his wardrobe, or the killer stripped and dressed him.”
His mouth parted. “You got all of that just from looking at him?”
“What can I say? I’m perceptive.” A bolt of grief shot through her. “Professor Morrow used to have me assess random photos of death scenes and bodies as his research assistant. I’d find them in my backpack, in my email, or sometimes waiting for me in a file slipped under the door of my dorm. One time he built a diorama with handmade dolls and used corn syrup for blood. He wanted to know how the victim died and who was the most likely suspect given as little information as possible. It was probably one of the most effective pieces of my training. Now I can walk onto a scene and tell you everything that’s wrong with it.”
“I’m sorry.” Ford kept his gaze on the body, obviously out of his element in the “offering condolences” department. “He obviously meant a great deal to you.”
She hadn’t considered how much until now. “Yeah. Well, he wasn’t exactly who I thought he was in the end.”
“Are any of us?” Ford said.
His statement wedged into her mind as she turned the remains to one side. She let her grip slip. The body rolled back into place. “What if that’s true?”
The marshal examined the remains. “What? That none of us are who people think we are?”
Leigh gave herself permission to verbally piece the theory together, even if Ford couldn’t see inside her brain. “Serial offenders typically have one goal. They like to exert control over others, but our unsub has two. He has two sets of victims. The five—potentially six if the driver’s licenses can tell us more—males whose identities he absorbed or used to fill a need, including Professor Morrow, and the three females all killed on this campus. What if he’s trying to become someone else with his male victims, and he’s trying to bring our attention back to Teshia Elborne with his female victims?”
“What? Like a split personality?” Ford braced one forearm against his leg.
“No.” She reached for the pieces to shape the puzzle in her head. “We were right before. I think whoever is killing these women now murdered Teshia Elborne eighteen years ago. There’s no other way he’d know to use chloroform to knock out his victims before poisoning them with the syringe. That detail was left out of the reports, and only the medical examiner and investigating detective learned of it after the autopsy had been completed. But I think he regrets killing her.”
A foreign expression contorted Ford’s features. “Guy’s got a weird way of showing regret by killing two more women on campus.”
“That’s where the identity theft comes in.” The more thought she put into the theory, the more solid it became. Real. “He’s doing everything in his power to become someone else. He’s running away from who he was. Teshia Elborne’s death broke something in him, and he’ll do whatever it takes to convince himself he didn’t hurt her.”
“Then he knew her,” Ford said. “He had to be at this school eighteen years ago. You and I both know Durham PD only had one suspect then, Leigh.”
“But Dean Groves wasn’t the victim’s only point of conflict at that time in her life.” Her heart jerked at the mention of Dean’s name, and she feared she was right back in that police station, going to bat for a man she believed innocent. “We’re looking for someone familiar with policing and forensics, someone who knew the area well enough to get on and off campus without raising suspicion. The forensic techs have airtight alibis for each other and the campus police officers we thought could be involved are both new to the area.”
The marshal’s brows met at the bridge of his nose. “So who do you have in mind?”
“The one person who knew Teshia Elborne better than anyone else,” Leigh said. “The boyfriend from high school.”