Latent Danger (On the Line #2)(16)
“We’re not finished.”
“On the contrary, officer, we’re not going to begin. My clients came down here as a courtesy and you’ve kept them waiting almost an hour. We’re leaving.”
“Sure,” Zach said, showing his teeth now, but not in anything that could be termed a smile, “as soon as we get a DNA sample.” He tossed the paper toward the lawyer and crossed to a chair at the table. He didn’t bother to encourage them to join him. No way that lawyer was going to waltz them out of here after he looked at that warrant.
“What is he talking about?” Mr. Sawyer barked more than spoke to the lawyer, and the lawyer raised a hand to halt his questions while he scanned the paper. With a nod, he directed the Sawyers back to the table. The parents and lawyer murmured a few words, while Zach set about laying a photo of Carrie and Adrienne side by side on the table in front of Jonathan Michael Sawyer, whom he now knew to be Jonathan Michael Sawyer, the third.
The boy looked at the girls and paled. Zach laid out the third photo. This one showed Adrienne on the medical examiner’s table. It showed only her shoulders on up, the lipstick and rope removed, but there was no mistaking the fact she was very much dead. Of course, Sawyer knew she was dead, but he seemed to turn green now.
Zach waited until the boy’s mother looked over. “Oh, my Lord.” She fell into the seat next to her son as her lawyer and Mr. Sawyer lit into Zach.
“I’ll have your badge for this shit, detective.” Mr. Sawyer’s face was red, in stark contrast to the pale white sheen of his wife.
Zach ignored him and focused on the younger Sawyer. Tapping the photo, he spoke quietly. “When I run your DNA against the semen we found in her mouth and vaginal cavity, is it going to be a match?”
The look on the boy’s face told Zach the answer to that.
It was going to be a match. Or at least the boy was reasonably sure it would. Either way, it didn’t bode well.
“Of course, it’s not going to,” his mother all but pled. “Jonathan, tell him it’s not going to match.”
“He can’t,” Zach said, not looking at her. He kept his eyes locked on the kid. “Because he knows it will.”
The lawyer wasn’t dumb. He stepped right in. “Jonathan, don’t say anything. Officer, get your technician in here to take a sample. We’re not going to answer any more questions today.”
Zach leaned back in his seat, hands behind his head with his chair tilting back to two legs as the door opened. He hadn’t needed to call for a technician to collect the sample. They’d had one ready and waiting behind the glass.
He spoke as the technician set about her job, pulling swabs out and labeling the time and date. “Well, now, I gotta tell you. If we were only looking at Adrienne’s murder I might let you walk on out of here while I ran that sample, but here’s the thing. Carrie Athill is still out there. We’ve got a missing young woman and we have every reason to think her disappearance might be linked to you, too.”
He let the feet of his chair slam back onto the floor with a thud, as he pulled the screenshots of the private Facebook group out of the folder he’d sat in front of him.
He tapped the photo Sawyer had loaded to the Facebook group. The one that showed he’d had sex with Adrienne the day she died. “You were stupid, Sawyer, bragging about what you’d done to Adrienne. I’m going to do everything in my power to bring Carrie home to her parents in one piece. And that means holding you here until you’ve told me a bit more about these.”
Zach’s blood was boiling as he watched the indignation bloom on Sawyer’s face. Zach had long ago learned to control his rage during questioning, though. Sure, the squad might taunt him when he spent twenty minutes in the bathroom after this, growling and counting under his breath to calm that rage, but he wasn’t going to let it out in this room. Letting your anger get the better of you in the interrogation room or with a witness could cost the case.
Sawyer gaped as he looked from Zach to his lawyer and back to Zach. “You can’t do that. That’s a private Facebook group. I have an expectation of privacy there. You can’t look at that without a warrant.”
“Big words. You been studying your legal rights?” Zach asked.
“I know my rights.” Now Sawyer covered his chest with crossed arms and dug in.
“Well, you’d be right if—” Zach made a show of shaking his head like he was sorry to have to be the one to tell Sawyer the bad news “—if one of your buddies in the group hadn’t given us access to his account. I guess he didn’t expect we’d be able to match your DNA to the semen in Adrienne.”
Mrs. Sawyer made a choking sound, but the lawyer spoke up. “You don’t have a match yet, officer. Let’s not get ahead of ourselves here.”
“Oh, hey,” Zach pulled out one more sheet. The report showing Adrienne had been drugged. “Did I forget to mention this?” He put the paper on the table. “GHB. Needed a little help to get Adrienne to—” out of respect for Mrs. Sawyer, Zach didn’t fill in the blank “—well, you know.”
“You know what GHB is, right, Mrs. Sawyer? The date rape drug?” Zach looked to Mrs. Sawyer for a split second, but then looked back to her son, shoving the Facebook posts back to him and pointing to the Can’t Be Fucked code under Adrienne’s image. “We know you couldn’t get the job done without it, Sawyer.”