She figured if David stayed at the Bishops with Maggie, the man might get some sleep. He’d spent most of yesterday shuttling between there and Maggie’s house to oversee shoring up the wall and getting the glass replaced in the patio door. The entrance was now blocked by vehicles intentionally obstructing the driveway, along with a group of men there to provide security.
“She’s talking about wanting to go back to New York. Give me a day, Evie, and I’ll be on the job again.”
“If you hurry back right now, you’ve misjudged the women in your life. I’ll keep you in the loop,” she promised. “We’re two weeks into the task force and we’re both already due about four vacation days. I’ll put aside anything you might want to see for when you come in.” She said goodbye and tucked the phone into her pocket.
The flowers from Rob were showing their age, though they were still beautiful. She stopped to admire them, touched a few. She loved the guy who had sent them. It feels good to admit that, she thought. As mismatched as they might be in careers and even personalities, she loved him. He’d asked for an answer by Valentine’s Day. She still had several weeks to sort out her personal life. That she was leaning toward yes and was getting comfortable with the idea suited her fine.
She dumped her backpack on a spare chair. She pulled out her now-ragged master list of facts and theories. Under Facts was a new entry:
21. Andrew Timmets killed Jenna Greenhill.
Under Theories she waffled between two competing ones:
27. He wanted something he saw in Jenna, to have her forever as only his.
28. Jenna annoyed him, and he wanted to have her gone.
She favored the second, given everything she suspected. Jenna had annoyed Andrew at the concert, said something snarky about Maggie or the band, gotten on his bad side, and he’d simply been in a position to react to someone who irritated him. He’d handled the problem by shutting her up for good. Lifted her wallet, and the rest was easy.
His dad being a locksmith, Andrew had learned those skills over a very long time. Get inside Jenna’s apartment ahead of her, wait for her to go to bed, smother her once she was asleep, haul her body down the stairs and out at three or four a.m. when even a college neighborhood gets quiet. Use some common sense on where to hide the body and drive out of town.
Evie wouldn’t tell that to Jenna’s family. What she did want to do if possible was finish up the case completely. She took her coffee and walked over to the aerial maps of Brighton College and the surrounding area. She really had only one piece left: Jenna’s remains, and one fairly decent clue.
Five rough sketches had been found in an envelope in Andrew’s desk, along with his Last Will and Testament. They were obviously something he considered important. That they were maps seemed certain. Given there were five of them, it became a puzzle of geography. But with no method of orientation for the sketched lines, nothing as simple as a location marked with an X, the pages were a mystery.
A detective in Ohio had found the first answer early this morning, matching one of the pages to the Emily Close site by referencing the lines as gradients, not roads, turning the page into a topological sketch, the darkest line being a ditch and the only dashed line a bridge. With those marks providing units of distance, the sketch turned out to be accurate to within a few feet of where Emily’s body was recovered.
Indiana quickly followed that format and picked out two of the remaining pages as directions to the remains of Virginia Fawn and Laura Ship. That left two pages and the question of which one was the map pointing to the remains of Jenna Greenhill and which to Tammy Preston.
Evie could live without the closure, but still she wanted it—for herself and for the families. She’d told herself she first would get the report finished, the case files stored, before making any educated guesses as to the geography. That plan lasted only as long as it took her to finish drinking her coffee while staring at the two sketches. She made half a dozen copies of both, modifying the scale with reductions and enlargements.
She took the aerial shots she had for the Brighton College area off the board, laid them out on the conference room table, and tried to get something—anything—to line up.
Two hours later, she separated the two versions of the sketch into neat stacks and considered again the problem. Part of it was fatigue. Even with the extra sleep, her eyes were tired and this was detail work. And she was working in the abstract with what were tangible facts. These were topology sketches reflecting how landscapes changed heights, nearly impossible to assess against an aerial map.
She grabbed folders, separated the two different sketches, stacked the aerial maps and carefully rolled them up. She put everything into a map tube and left the building. She needed a neighborhood expert’s instincts to interpret the features on these pages. If there was anyone who knew the Brighton College area like the back of his hand, it would be the guy who’d grown up in the neighborhood.