Evie relaxed. Tomorrow morning there would be a conversation with an actual person of interest. Lynne had downplayed the fact she had known Jenna. The rest was speculation. But it was David’s approach of looking for who lied to you. Lynne had made herself a person of interest.
Returning to the office complex, Evie parked and took her time walking across the slippery parking lot so she didn’t land flat on her back. She did, however, put on a burst of speed down the hallway, took two deep breaths, and swung open the door. “Tell me she still looks good.”
David laughed. “Catch your breath, Evie.” He swung back to the screen. “Lynne Benoit looks incredibly interesting.” He stood and gestured to the whiteboard and the new data he was building. “Her social media is a treasure trove of Maggie trivia. She actually acquired a photo of Maggie and me having dinner last month at Revere’s Pizza in New York. I didn’t even know it was out there, and I keep pretty good track of things like that. Lynne’s in Maggie’s fan database, no surprise there. She’s flagged for having repeatedly sent song lyrics via email, so there’s a file kept on her. But nothing in that correspondence has crossed the line to suggest a security concern, so no separate security flag.
“Up in the right-hand corner is a printout of her email dated the day after the concert in question where she met Maggie. Wow, did it ever register as the event in her life. Obsession, here it begins. There are 672 emails in her folder now, a big number but by no means a lot. There are some fans who email daily. Still, it’s up there. Once it touches a thousand, someone would routinely run a background check, and I would have heard this name. Lynne has bought tickets from the band’s website for Illinois and Wisconsin concerts—but not the one Tammy attended in Wisconsin—as well as bought every kind of band memorabilia: T-shirts, posters, coffee mugs, key chains. She’s got a bunch of Triple M stuff.”
David reached over to the printer now spitting out additional pages, scanned them quickly. “Moving on, she owns a Honda Civic, has since 2006, so was likely driving it during her college days. One ticket in the last year for speeding, doing thirty-four in a thirty-mile zone—some cop must have gotten up on the wrong side of the bed that day.
“Graduated from Brighton College,” he said, reading from the papers. “Looks like it took her six years, suggesting some part-time enrollment since I have her on the dean’s list for three semesters. She appears in the college alumni newsletters four times—twice for musicals she performed in, twice for stage performances where she sang, all local events. She’s an only child, no birth records for siblings, no adoptions on file for her parents. No criminal history. She’s apparently single, no marriage or divorce on file in this state.”
He flipped further through the printer pages. “Employment is with the Fifth Street Music Hall for the last eleven years, with several breaks lasting a few months, and one with a stretch of eight months.” He held up the pages. “I woke the Music Hall owner, didn’t tell him who I need info on, just asked if he was going to make me get a warrant. He made a call, told their accountant downtown to send me whatever paycheck records I wanted to see.” He thumbed through them again. “These are all the paychecks issued for her social security number. I don’t have it down to days and hours worked, but we can see gaps when she wasn’t getting paid.”
“Nice. You’ve been busy,” Evie said.
“Give me a name and there’s all kinds of information available. I’m just getting started if you want to wake a few more people up tonight. The college strikes me as a good place to look further.”
“Let’s talk it through. I took a few photos of the house.” Evie handed David her phone, walked over to the aerial map and attached a Post-it note with the address on it, studied the neighborhood around it. “If she’s still living with her parents, she’s probably got decent spending money. She could travel to enjoy the music she likes. We can see if the credit card she was using at the band website shows her traveling out of state.”
“The FBI is busy chewing through historical credit-card numbers along the travel routes, and we can ask them to search out her card number in that data set,” David agreed. “Nothing in Lynne’s social media suggests she’s traveled outside of, say, a hundred miles, even on vacation. No posted photos of the ocean, New York in the summer, ‘Here’s me skiing in Colorado’ kind of shots.
“I don’t think she’s attended a recent Maggie concert, at least not since Maggie moved to New York,” he noted. “And it surprisingly doesn’t look like she was at the St. Louis concert last year. There’s nothing in her email correspondence that raves about seeing Maggie in person and how great the concert was. A devoted fan is going to splash that in big, bold terms. This obsession isn’t fading, but it’s not getting Lynne on the road. She might be tied to here because of family—a parent in ill health or the like. But I don’t think from what I’ve seen that we’re looking at someone who ever did the concert loop into Indiana and Ohio and left behind three smothered victims. Her emails didn’t change tone during those years, and they should have.”