“They knew each other,” Frank and I said simultaneously.
Cassie was pacing in front of her laptop, which she sometimes did as leads came in.
“What is it?” I asked.
“Two things,” she said. “One, the results on the DNA from Dog did indeed come back. It’s a match. Dog is Skeleton Number Six.”
“But you just found this out?” Frank confirmed.
“Yeah.”
“So Richie didn’t know it,” Frank snapped. “It’s not something we need to chase.”
“What’s the second thing?” I asked Cassie.
“Shooter’s on her way back from the plumbing supply house. Amber is nowhere to be found.”
Frank grimaced, and I guessed at what was going through his head. Richie had been compromised while we were in D.C. As lead, Frank would be held accountable. Now a witness had been placed in jeopardy.
We were running through the last of our leads, and nothing about how Richie had attracted the ire of a killer was popping.
“Guys,” Frank said, frustrated. “C’mon.”
I studied the note about the data analysis project that Cassie had proposed with the stingray device. This was based on the idea that El Médico had a non-burner phone—his own phone—that he might’ve used at two known locations: Amber’s apartment in Gainesville and Amber’s workplace in Shilo.
Cassie’s theory was that we could use historical information on calls made in those two locations, along with the IMSI catcher, to collect data and rule out recurring phone numbers of locals in the area. If we got lucky, this would reduce a pool of ten thousand phone numbers down to five hundred. And if we crossed the two locations and a single number emerged, it might be El Médico’s personal phone.
“Did this stingray get authorized?” I asked.
“While we were in D.C.,” Cassie said, nodding. “We got a three-person tech team to sort through the data.”
“Who’s leading that from our side?” I asked.
“No one so far,” Cassie said. “But I can. We also have a patrolman bringing Richie’s phone and laptop back here. They were found on the side of Highway 24. Low-key trashed, from what I heard.”
“How’s Richie take notes lately?” Frank asked.
“Phone, mostly,” Cassie said.
“If the computer’s trashed,” Frank said, “we can get his calls and texts off the cloud from his work phone.”
I was half listening, half staring at the digital composite of Skeleton #9. She was a Caucasian woman, five foot eight, with wavy brown hair and a square jawline, at least according to the digital reconstruction photo from Patsy Davitt.
“We had one more body to ID,” I said. “Maybe it led Richie somewhere else? There’s a stack of messages he was going through from the tip line.”
The whole case was in front of us. We just needed to find the right string and pull on it.
I heard a noise and turned.
Shooter was standing at the threshold to the conference room. Her face was blank.
“He crashed again,” she said.
“Richie?”
“They stabilized him, but the doc told me that if we can’t figure out what he got injected with by morning…”
She walked over to us, and I stared past her.
