Chapter 19 #3
Callie had told herself she'd study for an hour before bed.
The detective exam study guide had been sitting on the passenger seat of her car for three days, untouched, accumulating a layer of coffee shop receipts and a parking ticket she kept meaning to pay.
She'd bookmarked the section on interview and interrogation techniques, which felt almost funny given that she spent her actual days doing interviews and interrogations without the benefit of a textbook telling her how.
But the exam wasn't tonight. Derek Hollis was.
She and McKenzie had commandeered the conference room at the far end of the station, the one with the long table nobody used unless there was a briefing or someone needed to spread out more paper than a desk could hold.
Right now the table held both. Paper everywhere.
Phone records printed in columns so dense they looked like stock ticker tape.
GPS logs from Derek's rideshare account.
A laptop open to the imaging software that the tech unit had pulled from the devices seized at his apartment.
The apartment had been a surprise. Derek Hollis lived in an RV on Mark Spence's property, everyone knew that.
But it turned out he'd been renting a loft apartment in town for the past eight months.
Mark told them about it when they'd gone back to ask follow-up questions.
The RV was his base. The apartment was something else.
"The apartment's where he kept the hardware," McKenzie said from the other end of the table. He had his reading glasses on, which he only wore when he thought no one was looking. "Two laptops, an external hard drive, and a camera bag with a dozen lenses. The RV was clean."
"Because the RV was parked on someone else's property," Callie said. "He wasn't going to keep anything in a vehicle that Mark Spence could walk into."
"Smart."
"Not smart enough."
The tech unit had finished their initial sweep of the hard drive that afternoon and what they'd found was enough to make Callie's stomach turn.
Hundreds of photographs. Not staged shoots like Garrett Finch's portfolio of exploitative art.
These were different. Candid shots taken from inside a vehicle.
Women getting in and out of the passenger seat.
Women sitting in the back. The angles were wrong in a way that was deliberate.
Some of the shots looked straight down from a camera mounted near the rearview mirror, capturing necklines and open collars.
Others were taken from low, angled up at legs and skirts.
He'd rigged his car with multiple cameras positioned to capture his passengers without their knowledge.
"I counted over four hundred images across the two laptops," McKenzie said, scrolling through a log on his screen. "Three hundred and twelve are identifiable as being taken from inside a vehicle. The metadata puts the oldest at twenty-six months ago."
“Twenty-six months," Callie repeated. "So he was doing this before he even moved to the area."
"Looks like it. The early ones have different GPS coordinates. Vermont, mostly. He was driving up there before he started here."
Callie pulled a chair over and sat beside him. The GPS logs from Derek's rideshare account were laid out in a spreadsheet that the tech had color-coded by date. Green rows were logged rides with matching passenger records. Red rows were trips where the GPS showed movement but no ride was logged.
There were a lot of red rows.
"He drove past the Route 73 corridor six times in the last three months on nights he wasn't logged into the app," McKenzie said, tapping the screen. "Twice on the stretch near where Fiona's car was found. Once past the Cascade area. Three times on roads that connect to Bloomingdale."
"And those nights line up with anything?"
"Two of them line up within forty-eight hours of when forensics estimates at least two of the bog victims disappeared. Based on the timeline the M.E. gave us. Obviously that's still being refined."
Callie leaned back and looked at the ceiling. The fluorescent light above them had a flicker that pulsed every few seconds like a heartbeat with an arrhythmia.
"What about his phone?"
"Burner. Prepaid. He's got a personal cell that's clean, boring, nothing on it. The burner has call logs to numbers that don't trace to anything. Probably other prepaid phones. He was careful."
"Careful doesn't mean innocent."
"No. But it makes the warrant tighter. We've got the photos, the unlogged routes, the proximity to disappearance sites, and the assault charge from two years ago in Vermont.
" McKenzie pulled off his glasses and rubbed the bridge of his nose.
"I talked to the DA's office an hour ago.
They said we're close but they want the photo identification to be airtight before they'll sign off.
If any of the women in those vehicle photos match our victims, that's the lock. "
Callie nodded. "Brooke Danvers, Fiona Spence, and Hailey Benton. Run every image through facial recognition and have someone go through them manually. If he photographed any of them from inside his car, that puts them in his vehicle."
"Already submitted. Tech says twenty-four hours."
"We don't have twenty-four hours."
McKenzie looked at her. He'd been working this job longer than she had and he understood urgency but also understood what happened when you moved too fast and a judge threw out everything you'd built.
"We also don't have a case that survives a motion to suppress if we cut corners," he said quietly. "One more day. Get the photo matches. Get the warrant airtight. Then we go pick him up."
"If we can find him."
"We'll find him. APB is active. His plates are flagged in three states. He's driving a vehicle with a description that every patrol officer in the Adirondacks has memorized. He can't hide forever."
Callie stood and walked to the window. The parking lot was dark.
A few patrol cars sat under the lot lights, their hoods collecting dew.
Somewhere out there Derek Hollis was moving through the night in a vehicle full of cameras, and somewhere else Fiona Spence was either alive and waiting or dead and past help, and the distance between those two possibilities was measured in hours that Callie couldn't speed up no matter how many phone records she read.
She turned back to the table. "I want everything we have organized into a case file by morning. Phone records, GPS, photo inventory, the apartment search report, Mark Spence's statement about the RV and the apartment. All of it. When that warrant comes through, I don't want a single loose page."
McKenzie was already stacking papers. "You going home?"
"In a bit."
"You should sleep."
"So should you."
He almost smiled. "I'll lock up when I'm done. Go study for that exam."
Callie grabbed her jacket off the back of the chair.
The study guide was still in her car, still bookmarked, still unread.
She thought about interview and interrogation techniques.
She thought about the four hundred photographs on Derek Hollis's hard drive, each one taken without the subject's knowledge, each one a small act of theft that the woman in the frame never knew had happened.
Tomorrow they'd have the photo matches. Tomorrow they'd have the warrant. Tomorrow they'd go find Derek Hollis and put him in a room with no cameras except the ones that belonged to the department.