Chapter 18
Three weeks later…
Christmas had come and gone. New Year’s had come and gone, as did my accompanying hangover.
Our department had four other homicides over the holidays, and we had the four perpetrators responsible for them in custody.
What we didn’t have was anything remotely close to progress on either the Mehen homicide or that of Grant Minter.
We also had yet to locate Keegan Sloan, and there’d been exactly zero hits on the BOLO that had been issued for his vehicle.
Halloway had called a morning meeting to rehash the Mehen and Minter cases to see if there was anything else we could do or, however unlikely, whether we might uncover something we had missed.
I sipped on what had to be my fifth or sixth coffee as the captain erased the whiteboard in our conference room. The time was just before ten Monday morning. Steve and Garcia sat to my left, with Detective Ryan across from Garcia. Colt and Wade took up the chairs to the left of Ryan.
“Okay,” Halloway said. “We’ve done this too many times before, but with nothing else pressing, let’s do it again and see if we can think of something new to crack one of these. Let’s start with Mehen. What do we have in the way of forensics?”
Colt flipped open the file before him and ran his finger down a page.
“COD was from multiple gunshot wounds, which we all know. A total of thirteen rounds were recovered from Mehen’s body.
Ballistics didn’t net us any matches to other cases.
We didn’t recover any prints from the sixteen nine-millimeter shell casings that were found on scene.
No other evidence recovered. No DNA evidence to process. About it from our end.”
Halloway jotted the word “Forensics” on the left side of the whiteboard then made a list of bullet points from what Colt had said.
“Tech?” the captain asked without looking at the group.
“We recovered Mehen’s phone from his vehicle, but having taken a couple bullets during the homicide, the phone was far too damaged to get anything from,” Wade said.
“After striking out on that, we put in for phone records with his carrier. He used a phone service that was one of the small brands that just piggybacks off the towers from the main carriers. We’re still waiting for those records to come in. ”
“Call on them again,” Halloway said. “Let’s stress that we need these in our hands.”
“I’ve called multiple times on both Mehen’s and Sloan’s, who also used one of the discount phone companies.
But I’ll call again,” Wade said. “What else?” He looked at his notes.
“We retrieved multiple pieces of video from the supermarket where the homicide occurred, as well as quite a few neighboring businesses. The video we have shows the Mehen homicide in its entirety. We also have video of Mehen pulling into the supermarket and parking. And we have video that shows our shooter arriving at the supermarket, committing the homicide, and then fleeing in Keegan Sloan’s vehicle.
He leaves traveling east. Arrived from the west. We have one piece of traffic cam video from about a quarter mile away from the supermarket to the west, but that video shows nothing questionable—just the two vehicles passing.
No aggressive driving or anything like that.
We made still images of the suspect from the video, and also, we released a clip of the video to the public and press in hopes of getting an identification, though nothing has come in. ”
Halloway wrote the word “Tech” beside the list he’d created for “Forensics” and wrote down the points of what Wade had said.
The captain went to me next, and I let Steve go through what we had, as he’d pretty much been leading the case.
Steve told the captain that we’d questioned everyone related to Mehen—coworkers, family, friends.
Mehen had zero connections to Sloan. He hadn’t mentioned anything being off to friends or family.
There’d been nobody questionable around his home or work.
His friends couldn’t offer a possible suspect, and none of them could come up with a reason someone would want him dead.
None of his friends or family knew Keegan Sloan, and none mentioned seeing an older Honda around.
As far as Keegan Sloan was concerned—where he was or if he had any connection to the case—we were at a loss.
Steve said that we had established tracking for Keegan Sloan’s phone with zero hits.
We had banking and credit card alerts in place, but there had been no charges or withdrawals in weeks.
The laptop recovered from his home gave us nothing to work with.
Steve said that we’d interviewed all of Sloan’s friends and family and had no idea how he could be connected to Mehen in any way.
“I don’t even know what to write up here for that,” Halloway said. He held the marker to the board and finally jotted down “Irons in the Fire.”
“All right, what are we still waiting on answers for?” Halloway turned to us and looked around the room.
“We need to know what happened to Sloan,” Steve said.
“He’s a missing piece to at least a part of this puzzle.
Finding Sloan can possibly give us our suspect in the Mehen shooting.
And if we end up finding Sloan dead, we can try to work that in an effort to get a suspect.
Because if he is dead, it was probably Mehen’s killer. ”
“And we have made Sloan’s photo public,” Halloway said. “And we still have the BOLO issued on his vehicle.”
“Correct,” Steve said.
Halloway wrote “Find Sloan” beneath “Irons in the Fire.” “So what can we do to get closer to finding him? Where was he last seen? Who talked to him last? You said we were still waiting on his phone records?”
“Yeah, waiting on his phone records. But his girlfriend, or ex-girlfriend, printed off a couple weeks of text messages for us. But there was nothing that could be described as questionable contained in them. His buddy Nick was the last to get a message from him,” Steve said.
“That message was via text on the night he went missing, a couple minutes after his last message to Ally VanHaren. The text said he was going to Ally’s house to talk to her.
But it doesn’t seem like he ever made it there.
And she had no clue that he was planning on going there.
We tried to look for video near his house of maybe him leaving to go there but came up empty.
We knocked on every door he’d pass to get in or out of his neighborhood. ”
“And his mother wasn’t home that night, correct?” the captain asked.
“Correct. She saw him before she left for her weekly Sunday trivia night at the neighborhood clubhouse. She came home and Keegan wasn’t there, which wasn’t unusual. She assumed that he went to his girlfriend’s house.”
Halloway dug his fingers into his eyes and nodded. “All right. I’m going to see if we can get some rewards added for information that leads to his whereabouts. Same with the stills and footage for the Mehen shooter. Do we know what Mehen was doing prior to him getting shot at the supermarket?”
“He was at home,” Steve said.
“Someone could have followed each of these guys from their houses,” I offered.
“We’ve gone door to door,” Steve said. “But we can go back out to both places to do another round. I guess we could also go back out to Sloan’s workplace again to see if anyone has anything a second time around.”
“I can have another talk with Mehen’s wife,” Garcia said. “See if maybe another talk will get her to remember something.”
“Let’s do that,” the captain said. “Stretch a little further. Dig a little deeper. Tell people that we are offering a reward. I’ll get you a dollar amount when we have it. Ask people to check their cameras again. Maybe even from a day or two before. We need to find something.”
Steve nodded, as did Garcia.
“Ryan, you can give me a hand with some of this if you don’t have anything going on from the stuff over the holidays,” Steve said.
“I’ll roll with you, yeah,” Ryan said.
“Okay. Where are we with the Minter storage-unit homicide?” Halloway asked.
Before I could get into the fact that I’d found basically zero to run with, other than some grainy video of our suspect that we’d put out to the press, my phone vibrated against my leg.
With Halloway, Steve, and Colt also reaching for phones, I knew we had another homicide. I pulled out my phone for a look.
“Another one,” I said. “Right up the street.”
“All right. Who wants it?” Halloway asked.
With everyone but me having just stated what they were working on—and knowing that I had pretty much nothing to follow up on in the Minter investigation—I lifted a finger. “I got it.”
“I’ll meet you over there,” Colt said.