Hope's Peak (Harper and Lane #1)(38)

“Any boyfriends? Men hanging around?”

Dudley shakes his head. “None that they knew of. She was a good girl. Top student.”

“What about Albie? Any luck with the records from the phone?”

Dudley nods. “He’s in IT right now, pulling everything off of it. Should have it any minute. What I heard was he had the cell phone sitting in a bowl of rice to dry it out.”

“Apparently that works,” Harper says. “Did we get anywhere with the trucks in the local area?”

“Nope. There’s just too many. Until we get a plate, or a distinguishing feature.”

“I hear you,” Harper says, looking at him—really looking—trying to determine if he’s the sort who would do something like phone a colleague’s ex-wife and cause trouble. He’s hard to read. His appetite for the job, for career progression, his dickish behavior sometimes—it’s possible.

“What’s up with Detective Raley? He seemed off.”

“Oh he’s caught up in the case. Those young women, the way they’ve been killed. He’s finding it tough switching off.”

Dudley nods, as if he understands. “Yeah, I guess it gets that way, huh?”

“So anyway, I’ll let you get going. I’ll catch up with you later,” she says.

Dudley flashes a smile—she notices again that the gesture does not fit his face. “Sure.”

When she’s certain he’s gone for the time being, Harper heads down to the basement, where she finds Stu sitting at a table, the files in front of him.

“Stu? You okay?”

“Yeah,” he says, as if nothing is wrong.

That’s a bad sign, Harper thinks, but she tries to push the thought to the back of her head. He promised her he’d keep himself under control. She has to trust that’s what’s going to happen. “What’re you looking at down here?”

“The files again. You know, we can’t question the families of the other cases because they weren’t made aware of the real circumstances. Their loved ones died, but they were lied to. Ida is our only link to the past, to this guy’s first murder,” Stu says. “But looking through them all, you see a definite pattern. He goes for the same look, the same build, the same kind of hair.”

“Either he’s revisiting that murder, over and over again, because he enjoyed it, or—”

Stu says, “He’s infatuated. Something about Ida’s mom, the way she looked. Do you think he had a thing for her?”

Harper shrugs. “Could’ve been what you were saying before, an infatuation. Does it say where Ruby worked?”

Stu leafs through the file, looks up, shaking his head. “No.”

“I’ll look into it. If he was an admirer, he might’ve been seen with her. People who worked with her might remember.”

“It really kills me not being able to talk to the other families. We have this stack of files, but we’re handicapped.”

“I know. And I feel guilty, knowing the truth, knowing the pain they feel, and that they’ve been lied to all this time.”

“But what can we do?”

“Nothing,” Harper says. “Same way we can’t go asking any of the other investigators. Claymore is our only lead, in that regard. The case will implode if those other guys catch wind of the truth being revealed. We can’t have that yet.”

“I know. It’s shit.”

“I’ll dig around. We should check in with the captain soon. Say an hour or so?”

“Yeah.”

She starts to leave and hears the chair scrape back from the table.

“Jane?”

Harper pauses at the door, turns back.

“Thanks for keeping my head cool,” Stu tells her. “I would have done something I regretted otherwise.”

“Anytime.”



Albie moves aside as Harper pulls up a seat next to him. The IT room has a few officers working, a few of them chatting among themselves.

“So you got into it?”

He nods. “Yeah, it was impossible at first. The phone was waterlogged, but a bowl of rice did the trick.”

“That got it working?”

Albie shakes his head. “No. But it was enough to allow me to access its files, its data, and grab everything I could.”

“Right. I’m with you.”

Albie moves the cursor on the desktop to maximize a window that contains all of Gertie Wilson’s incoming and outgoing calls. There are no names, just numbers, times, and dates. Next to that information is a time stamp indicating the duration of each call.

“Okay. So this is the call log,” Harper says. “What about text messages?”

Albie shrinks the first window and maximizes another. “Ah, well, this is where it gets interesting. There are quite a few connected to different numbers. Friends, maybe her parents. But the interesting one is here . . .”

He shows Harper a seemingly unending series of exchanges, all from the same number. There’s a name mentioned several times, too.

“Hugo,” Harper says. “These messages read like boyfriend-girlfriend texts.”

“They are,” Albie says. “They’re saying they love each other. Look.”