Pretty Girls Dancing(21)
If the older woman wasn’t reliable, it might put into doubt her claim that Brian and Shannon DeVries had violent arguments sometimes on their back deck late at night. Money problems, the woman had confided. Mark put a mental question mark on the neighbor’s input. “Mind if I look around again? In the garage, and in Whitney’s room?”
“Why? It’s clear Whitney left—or was taken—through her bedroom window.” Brian’s voice bordered on combative.
Mark had already learned that Shannon reacted with tears, her husband with anger. Under the circumstances, both responses were normal in a situation that was anything but. “Probably so,” he agreed. The only prints on the window and casing belonged to family members. Nor had dusting in the garage or the other exits resulted in other latent prints. “But the last thing we want to do is to accept anything at face value. This case is too important to overlook anything.”
“Fine.” Brian shot up, striding out of the room, his spine stiff.
Shannon watched him go, her soft, dark eyes worried. “It’s all right. Let us know if you need anything.” Before Mark could rise, she’d scurried after her husband, disappearing into the kitchen.
Left to his own devices, Mark exited the room and walked down the hallway, walking past the kitchen. Next to what would be the master bedroom, there was a small foyer, with a coat closet on one wall and the entry from the garage on another. The house’s security system was rigged to the front and back entrances but not to this door, although it did boast a dead bolt. In Mark’s experience, most people felt garage entries were already secure. After all, the automatic door was also locked.
He pulled a pair of latex gloves out of one pocket of his leather coat. The evidence team was done with the scene, but old habits were hard to break. He unlocked the inner door to the double garage, flipped the dead bolt, and pushed it open. The space bore no windows or extra outside exit. Two midsize vehicles would be a tight squeeze. It was kept neat enough to give him a flicker of guilt about the boxes he’d never gotten around to unpacking in his, though he and his wife had been in their house for almost five years. A pegboard kept the tools organized over a small workbench on one wall. Four bikes hung from hooks suspended from the ceiling. He’d already ascertained that Whitney’s was among them. The lawn mower and snowblower were wedged into one corner. Just inside the automatic door was a double-door metal cupboard. Crossing to it, Mark pulled open one side, peered in. It contained bats, balls, basketballs, gloves . . . the type of sports equipment kids accumulated.
He let himself back into the house, resecuring the door behind him, and headed toward Whitney’s room. Criminals had ways to exploit weaknesses in garage-door security. It was even possible, he supposed, for an intruder to wait until Brian DeVries returned from work after dark and roll into the garage while the man drove inside, or get his hands on a master garage-door opener and find the same frequency the DeVries had. The plausibility ratio ratcheted downward when factoring in the dead bolt on the door leading into the house. The first cops on the scene had found it secured, and the parents had sworn it was locked every night. If true, it meant Whitney hadn’t left that way, no matter what the neighbor claimed to have heard.
The most obvious answer was usually the right one. He stopped in the doorway of Whitney’s room. The window was closed, but the interior screen still leaned against the wall. He went to it, craning his neck to look out, following the path she’d taken with his gaze. The trail the dogs had picked up was beneath this window, through the yard between the DeVries and Gladstone houses. Across the backyard and the neighbors’ yards to the south. No way to tell from that whether she’d been walking or had been carried. The dogs would alert either way.
But what they’d discovered on the girl’s Facebook account pretty well cemented the theory that she’d left of her own accord. Pervs haunted social media sites for opportunities to make contact with kids, but Mark was struck by the amount of planning evident with the use of Patrick Allen’s account. The kidnapper hadn’t aimlessly trolled for young girls; he’d targeted Whitney. Mark knew Brian had guessed that, too.
Turning back to the room, he studied it again. He’d been on the scene before, of course. More than once. It was a typical teenage girl’s room, if a bit on the messy side. The floor was so littered with clothes, shoes, books, and empty hangers that it took a careful scan to discern the color of the carpeting. Beige. The crime-scene team had been thorough, but there’d been nothing of note under the mattress, behind the posters, or squirreled away in the dresser drawers. Certainly nothing as telling as what they’d found in her Facebook account.
There was a hooded sweatshirt hanging from the blade of the overhead ceiling fan and a white ballet slipper in the center of the closet doorway. The door couldn’t be closed without shoving it aside. Something about that slipper nagged at his memory, but Mark couldn’t put it in context.
Stepping carefully, he wandered about the room. The set of shelves held books and notebooks, framed photos of Whitney and friends. All had been identified in the file. Each one had been questioned, with the exception of Macy Odegaard, whom they’d been unable to reach. Shannon had thought they were out of state for the girl’s grandma’s funeral. Hopefully, they’d have a line on the family tomorrow. Maybe Macy would know more about Whitney’s relationship with the supposed Patrick Allen. The other friends all had denied any knowledge of a boyfriend, although Mark had accumulated a lengthy list of boys who were supposedly interested in the girl, which they were checking out.