Speak No Evil_ A Novel - Allison Brennan [98]
Carina grinned. “Really? When?”
“Several times over the last three months, usually in the late afternoon during the week.”
“Only three months?”
“That’s all MyJournal has archived.”
“But the time frame suggests that he’s a college student,” Nick said. “He comes by in the late afternoon.”
“Nothing he said using the Shack computer system was incriminating. Most of it was viewing MyJournal pages and surfing the Internet. But I have every private message or public post he made through that server on a grid to see if we can find a pattern or anything that identifies him.”
“We need to talk to the employees again,” Carina said. “Someone might recognize a general description. What about the library?”
“I went there, showed the librarian Kyle Burns’s photo like you asked, and she put on thick glasses and was noncommittal. The woman can’t see more than two feet in front of her is my guess.”
Patrick sat down and slid the files across to Carina. “You think it might be the manager?”
“I don’t know. He loosely fits Dillon’s profile. Under thirty, college student, underachiever.”
“How is he an underachiever? He works full-time and goes to school.”
Carina rifled through papers until she pulled Kyle Burns’s transcript. “I had one of the uniforms pull his transcript. He was in and out of college for three years. His grades are good, not great. His advisor put a note in his file that he aspired to do great things with his life, but didn’t have the focus to stick with any one thing. His strength is management because he’s neat, organized, and disciplined.”
Nick nodded. “Our killer is organized, but I wouldn’t call him disciplined.”
“Still, Burns fits. He lives alone in a small duplex near the university. He has the light brown hair the half-blind librarian noticed. He has access to the Shack public computers. I think we need to interview all the employees again while Burns is off-site.”
“He doesn’t work Sundays,” Nick said.
“So we go there and talk to the employees, then track everyone else down at their homes. I have the files here. We were focusing on friends of Angie, so we only talked to the employees who regularly worked the same shifts as Angie. Now we need to dig deeper. We have a connection with the Shack and the killer—assuming Dillon is right and Scout is who we’re looking for. We focus there.”
“One more thing popped,” Patrick said. He put a printout in front of him. “This is a private message to an Elizabeth Rimes that he sent through the MyJournal server using the library Internet connection. He talks about his cat Felix being hit by a car.”
“And he told Becca that someone shot his cat.”
“When we pulled down messages from the Shack from the last three months, and reviewed all public comments posted by Scout that are stored indefinitely, he’s told several female MyJournal members over the last year that his cat had been killed. Died of cancer, hit by a car, drowned by his roommate.”
“For sympathy,” Nick said.
Patrick concurred. “Women are suckers for a good cat sob story.”
“Oh, stop that,” Carina said. “They sympathized because they didn’t think anyone would lie about something like that. It’s the old ‘help me find my lost puppy’ trick that pedophiles use to lure kids away.”
“Now where?” Nick asked. “Do we have an ISP?”
Patrick sighed, sat down. “Not yet. We know that Scout was in both the Shack and the library. We can get a warrant to search a house or business if we can get a name that goes with the profile—Dillon already convinced the DA of his reasoning, and he’s ready to take the stand on it if questioned. But because the MyJournal site is a free Web page, no one has to give truthful information. We have an e-mail address and it goes to a free e-mail account that is open, but it’s been inactive since Scout registered with MyJournal two years ago.”
Carina stood and walked over to the map. Red pins showed where the victims were abducted, blue pins where their bodies were found. “Angie was last seen more than ten miles from where her body was found, but Jodi and Becca’s bodies were found where they were last