Chapter 9
NINE
Durham, New Hampshire
Wednesday, October 9
3:53pm
They were losing their crime scene.
She watched as a corner of tarp protecting what little they had left came loose from her position at the lobby front doors. Within minutes, there wouldn’t be anything physical connecting Alice Dietz’s killer to her murder.
Ford handed off a bottle of water he’d produced from somewhere. The interruption to her brooding triggered her reactive defenses. Her heart rocketed into her throat, but she managed to limit it to a slight flinch.
“You okay?” he asked.
“Yeah. I just… didn’t see you there.” She did this. Disappeared into the dark corners of her mind to figure out the right angle, the right pattern, the right relationship to bring everything in a case together. To the detriment of her physical health. Eating, drinking, sleeping—none of it mattered in the course of an investigation. She wasn’t sure how long she’d been staring out the glass doors separating her from the scene outside. At least long enough for Ava to be driven, albeit shyly, to go find entertainment with a group of students at the back of the corridor. “Thank you.”
“Have you ever worked a case that didn’t have a shred of evidence to support it?” He took a slug of his own bottled water, as lost in the rhythm of the storm as she’d been.
“No.” Dozens of death scenes, countless man hours combing through investigation files, even more cataloging data into the federal databases for some hope of finding a connection—there’d always been something to go on. To lead her in the right direction. But this case… They were working blind. Having to rely solely on witness statements and character descriptions. That unnerved her. This was new territory. For both of them. But her instincts told her the killer had taken precautions with dumping Alice Dietz’s body as he had with her remains. Ensuring there was nothing left to identify him or the location the victim had been killed. Whether they would’ve gotten anything from the scene before the storm hit remained unclear. “This is your first homicide.”
“How can you tell?” A layer of exhaustion took residence under Ford’s eyes, adding to the strain around his mouth. Up until this point, he’d taken the lead, kept his face of confidence, and held himself together. But she could see the cracks now. The sag in his shoulders and the way he’d socialized less and less over the past hour. The lack of progress was getting to him after a few hours. It was an impatience she understood, that she’d trained to overcome. “The people I hunt are responsible for some of the worst acts of violence in the country, but I’m always dispatched too late. After they’ve already committed their atrocities, and there’s nothing but crime scene photos to study. The bodies are cleaned up and scrubbed down in the morgue, or the victims have already given their statements to police.”
Ford filled his chest with a deep inhale. Preparing himself for something. He nodded toward the fluttering tarps outside, his Adam’s apple shooting down his throat on a swallow. “I’ve never set foot on an active scene until last night.”
“The first time I saw a body, I lost count of how many times I threw up.” Leigh hadn’t told anybody about that. Not even the detective who’d interviewed her afterward. She’d wanted to be strong for her parents, but finding the remains of a twelve-year-old kid in the crawl space of her childhood home had fractured something inside of her. “I want to say you get used to it the more cases you work, but I still have to take an acid blocker anytime I step onto a scene. Helps with the nausea.”
“That strangely makes me feel better about throwing up in the bushes on the other side of the courtyard.” Dark eyes cut to her. His smile made a reappearance, tugging on her insides in an uncomfortable and equally exciting balance.
“I won’t tell anyone.” Her laugh caught her by surprise. Genuine and a little too high-pitched. Damn it. A flush that had nothing to do with the humidity coated her body in an instant. She was a federal agent. She’d faced two serial killers and nearly died in the process, but apparently, embarrassment could still get the best of her. When she’d considered stepping back into the dating scene, she’d apparently forgotten how to interact with the opposite sex. She had to get it together.
“Is that the case file we requested from Durham PD?” He was trying to save her. “The Elborne case?”
“Yeah. I needed to read through it myself.” Leigh locked down the urge to shake her head to reverse time and take another stab at this whole conversation. Handing over the manila file folder, she added a hefty amount of space between them to save him from the rush of sweat pooling beneath her blazer. Had someone turned on the heater?
Ford took the offered file and flipped through the first few pages despite the fact he’d already reviewed it all. He took a particular interest in the crime scene photos. “Anything stand out to you?”
“Nothing too enlightening. Teshia Elborne, nineteen years old, psychology major who made the Dean’s List most semesters, high school popularity followed her to college. She was involved in a mass of student organizations. Biology club, rowing, student union. If Granite State had cheer, she would’ve been captain.” Leigh had already known all of this before reading through the file. Memorized it, fed off of it eighteen years ago. Because there was no way someone could be so… perfect. “She was well liked. No disputes with roommates or fellow students. Professors had nothing but good things to say about her. Her parents told investigators she’d never had problems with her mental health or rebellion. On the surface, she was the picture of innocence.”
“On the surface?” Ford’s intensity focused on her between page flips. “You think she was hiding something?”
“Doesn’t everyone?” She hadn’t meant the words to sound so scathing. “Teshia Elborne and Dean Groves dated for about six months. Things ended… badly between them two months before her death.”
A flurry of betrayal coated the inside of her mouth, acidic and bitter. Or maybe her stomach wasn’t happy with the egg salad sandwich from Pierce Morrow, which she and Ava had shared. She had no allegiance to Dean Groves. And yet the part of her that’d failed to prove her father’s innocence all those years ago wanted to pick up the fight for Dean all over again. To prove she hadn’t misjudged him all those years ago. That he hadn’t turned out to be one more person in her life who’d chosen violence over her.
“The report says he caught her cheating on him. An altercation ensued; campus police were called by a student in one of the neighboring dorms. She heard the fight through the walls and was worried it would turn physical if someone didn’t intervene.” Ford moved on from the photos, more focused on the statements taken from friends, family, and the dorm neighbor. “Is that what made him an initial suspect?”
The only suspect. It didn’t matter Dean had moved on. Didn’t matter that he’d sworn he didn’t have feelings left for Teshia or in the short amount of time they’d been together he claimed to have fallen in love with Leigh. Looking back, she could see how his charm and her inexperience in a relationship had preyed on her past trauma. How he’d taken advantage of her feelings and used her to convince her to give him an alibi, despite the evidence staring her in the face. Ultimately, Durham PD had done their jobs and used the incident with Teshia to support Dean’s guilt. “Teshia had been seeing a guy from back home on and off again since high school. He would come see her on campus whenever he could get away from his dad’s farm. Police interviewed him, but they dismissed him as a suspect. Confirmed he hadn’t been anywhere near campus the day she died. That left the most recent upset in her life.”
“The shouting match with Dean Groves.” Ford closed the file as a passing student careened a bit too close to the huddle they’d created. He craned his attention back through the glass doors. The tarp was gone now. Their crime scene was exposed, and there was nothing they could do to save it without putting their lives at risk. The marshal’s energy had returned, reinvigorated in the past few minutes. He’d lost a bit of the detachment investigators had to keep between them and the victims they fought for. One wrong step and Ford would find himself personally taking responsibility for this case—for these victims—and there wouldn’t be a damn thing Leigh could do to stop it. “Her body was left in the same location as our current vic. You think Groves is trying to make a statement?”
“I think whoever killed Alice Dietz is familiar with the Elborne case and is using it to get our attention. Teshia Elborne’s investigation was never closed. Groves fled before police could learn more. But there has to be a reason the killer chose to bring us here. Why they chose to kill her how they did.” Was it coincidence Leigh had been drawn back to this university, that she’d been involved in the original investigation, or had that been the killer’s intention from the beginning? “Which means there’s a chance they’ve tried to replicate the investigation in more ways than leaving Dietz’s body in the same location as the last victim and using an MO we’ve seen before.”
“What do you mean?” Ford got that look again. He couldn’t read her mind and connect the pieces as fast as she could, an outsider when it came to working active homicide investigations.
“The arsenic and cyanide used to kill Teshia Elborne was traced to the university’s biomedical lab. In addition to the argument, police used that connection to narrow down their suspect pool to Dean Groves.” Leigh was moving to the back of Thompson Hall’s main floor, passing Ava and the group of students she’d joined to ride out the storm. She was safe for the time being. Leigh targeted the president’s office at the rear of the building. “He was a toxicology major. His research focused on the effects of poisons and other compounds at a cellular level, and his professors and several students witnessed an increase in his hours spent in the lab around the time of Elborne’s death. But the greatest predictor of violence is a history of violent behavior, and Dean was never violent. At least, not on record.”
“You alibied him for the night of her death,” Ford said. “Why?”
Leigh pulled up short of her destination. She wasn’t sure how to answer. How to overcome the shame and the guilt holding her in a vise with letting a man get away with murder. She’d tried. So many times. But that mistake had followed her into every case, onto every crime scene over her career. And she didn’t have the energy to talk her way out of it. She wanted Ford to keep looking at her as though she had the answers, like she was the one who could solve this case. She needed him to believe in her. “In my experience, not everyone accused of murder is guilty.”
Ford seemed to understand where they were headed. “But Groves had access to the arsenic and cyanide from the university lab used to kill Alice Dietz. Not to mention a relationship with the victim.”
Both of which could’ve been used against him. Used to frame him. But then why disappear all this time? Why not fight to clear his own name?
Ford didn’t have any trouble keeping up with her. Physically and mentally. He was more intuitive than he gave himself credit for considering this was his first homicide. Maybe one of these days he would get out of his own way and see he had more to offer in her arena rather than always responding too late, as he’d put it.
“The killer has recreated every other aspect of the Elborne case. The location of the body dump, the bleach used to clean the body, a victim who resembles Teshia Elborne. Why not this one?” Leigh ignored the executive secretary’s protests as she charged straight into the university president’s office. His outraged gaze locked on her as the president stood to confront them. “I need access to your biomedical lab.”