Allison Brennan - Cutting Edge

“She doesn’t have a driver’s license,” Steve pointed out.

“She doesn’t have a California driver’s license,” Nora said, “but she could be from anywhere. And even if she has no license, that wouldn’t stop her from driving.” Nora’s mother never had a driver’s license, but they’d borrowed plenty of cars. Lorraine had never been pulled over.

Steve made a note. “Pete and I spent half the night going through the evidence from the dorm rooms,” he said. “We sent Anya Ballard’s journals to Quantico for comparative analysis against the letters that were sent to the media claiming credit for the arsons. The one thing we noticed right off is that so far we have found nothing in her room, or the boys’ room, that has evidence of brewing the iced tea that killed them. No utensils, no containers, no jimsonweed leaves. But this morning when I was going over the logs, I saw that the sheriff’s department had documented four glasses with the tainted tea.”

“Four?”

“I triple-checked, and there were definitely four. I reviewed the crime-scene photos and there was one glass on the dresser, full.”

“Where is it now?”

“Bagged, the tea sealed, but there were some problems.”

“What problems?”

“The glasses were bagged properly, but they were labeled wrong. They were numbered, but no one put the numbers in the logs so we don’t know who had which glass. Trace is currently printing the glasses, but we can’t definitively state which glass was on the dresser.”

Pete said, “Whichever glass doesn’t have one of the three kids’ prints.”

“What if one of the dead kids handed out the drinks? What if the glass was meant for someone who didn’t show?”

Nora straightened. “What if someone pretended to drink, then left?”

“You mean chickened out at the last minute?” Ted asked.

“I mean never intended to drink the tea in the first place. It could be first-degree murder if the three dead students didn’t know their tea was poisoned.” She said to Steve, “Make printing those a number-one priority. Maybe we’ll get lucky. Do you have Ballard’s computer? An address book or cell phone?”

“Yes, but we haven’t gotten to her computer yet.”

“When you go through her things, specifically look for anything about Maggie O’Dell.”

“Will do.”

“Anything else?” she asked.

He grinned. “That’s not enough?”

She smiled. “It’s great.”

“I have one more thing,” said Steve. “We processed Payne’s Jeep yesterday afternoon. Someone much shorter than he drove it last.”

“That’s terrific.”

“And she-”

“She?”

“The strands of hair we found on the driver’s seat were fifteen inches long. Possibly a male, but more likely female.”

“DNA?”

“It’s on its way to Quantico. But I can tell you definitively, it doesn’t match Anya Ballard.”

Pete said, “Leif Cole has longish hair.”

Nora asked, “What color?”

“Brown.”

Anya was blond, and Leif Cole was light brown and gray. “Light brown? Dark brown?”

“Medium. Unprocessed. But that’s all I know until Quantico gets back to us. I rushed it, but the response time really depends on what’s on the schedule before it.”

“Thanks, Steve.”

Ted asked, “Any word on the missing duck?”

“No,” Nora said. “Fish and Game is supposed to let me know if they find it.”

Jason Camp, resident computer expert, stepped into the room. “Nora, sorry for interrupting, but I got something off Larkin’s computer.”

“Good news?”

“Depends on how you look at it. Butcher-Payne’s security logs are wiped, but I can tell that someone accessed password-protected files on Sunday afternoon, only a few minutes before the data was corrupted. But I think I figured out why they wiped the drive. Emails.”

“Something in the emails the killer didn’t want us to know? Why not just take the laptop?”

Jason beamed. “That I know. LoJack.”

“The computer was LoJack-protected?”

“Yep.”

Nora frowned. “Why didn’t Duke trace it on Monday when he was looking for Larkin?”

“He didn’t know. I just got off the phone with him, and he said the laptop wasn’t Rogan-Caruso property.”

Nora got the facts straight in her head. “So the killer realized the computer had tracking equipment and took the information right there. Maybe threatened Larkin, or maybe hacked into it after he was killed.”

“That I don’t know, but I can tell you that I can’t get the emails back.”

“So why do I need to know this? You still have nothing.”

“I have the ISP.”

“How does that help us?”

“The ISP for Russ Larkin is Rogan-Caruso. They have their own server. It’s how their security system replicates itself.”

“But wouldn’t that compromise security if it was used for Internet access?”

“No-the replication is just information, not actual monitoring. It’s like syncing your iPod, but only one way. I talked to Jayne Morgan, the computer chick over there, and she’s going to pull all emails to and from Larkin for the past two weeks. It’s going to take a bit because they’re compressed and archived, but she said she’d have them for me today.”

“If you learn anything-”

“You’ll be the first to know.” Jason left.

Nora finally felt that she was making forward progress in this investigation.

“Pete, can you dig deeper into Russ Larkin? Rachel was working on it, but she’s sidetracked with Maggie O’Dell. Specifically, any connections with the three students who died or O’Dell. Maybe we’re missing something. A relative, a friend, something that connects Larkin to one of them.”

She glanced at her notes.

“Ted, can you check and see if the autopsy report is in from Reno? If not, call Sara and ask her to follow up with the coroner. Also trace evidence in Larkin’s car.”

Ted wrote everything down. “Got it.”

Pete asked, “What about the three college students? We need backgrounds on them.”

She’d asked Duke to run the background checks, as well as an FBI staff analyst. “Already being done,” she said. She wondered where Duke was. When they’d parted this morning, he’d said he would meet her here. It was already after ten.

As if on cue, the door opened and Dean Hooper walked in, Duke right behind him. Duke winked at her, just out of Hooper’s line of vision. Nora glanced at her squad. Had Pete and the others seen that? She tried to control the blush rising up her neck to her cheeks. She glanced down at the table and shuffled her papers.

“Thanks, guys,” she said, dismissing the team. “Let me know if you’re having any problems.”

Hooper said a few words to each agent as they left, and when it was just him, Duke, and Nora, he said, “I just got off the phone with Dr. Vigo. He reviewed a sample of Anya’s journals and concluded that she wrote the first three BLF letters, but definitely not the last one. Style, word choices, tone-everything was different.” That confirmed their assessment from yesterday regarding the fourth letter, but also gave them more physical evidence tying the dead students to the fires.

“I need a sample of Maggie O’Dell’s writing,” Nora said. “Maybe she has an article published in the newspaper or we can talk to her professors and get an essay she wrote. Rachel is on her way to the college now, I’ll-”

Hooper interrupted, “We already have it. It was in the evidence Steve sent yesterday.”

“He didn’t tell me-”

“He didn’t know. It was a handwritten letter folded into Ms. Ballard’s journal that began ‘Dear Anya’ and signed ‘M.’ Whoever wrote that letter, Dr. Vigo says wrote the fourth BLF letter. And moreover, whoever wrote that letter also wrote the suicide note. And it definitely wasn’t Anya Ballard.”