"Will you be speaking with the others?" she asked.
"A couple I already have. A few others have moved on since then so I'll get in touch by phone."
Lydia opened the door for him and he stepped out onto the porch. The afternoon light was fading and the shadows from the barn stretched long across the yard.
"I really hope you get some answers," she said.
"You and me both." He pulled a card from his jacket and handed it to her. "If you think of anything in the meantime. Call me."
She glanced at the card, read it, then looked back at him.
"Thank you for your time," he said.
She nodded once and he walked down the steps and across the yard to his truck. Behind him the storm door closed with a creak that carried across the quiet property.
He sat in the truck for a moment before starting the engine. Lydia Holt had been calm, cooperative, and thorough. Her account matched the file exactly. She'd answered every question without evasion or embellishment. She'd corrected him on thevehicle type without being prompted. She'd offered context about her son without being defensive until Noah pushed on employment, which was a natural reaction for any mother. She'd known Adelaide Chambers by name, which made sense given twenty-seven years at the same hospital.
Nothing about the interview raised a flag.
Noah started the truck and pulled out onto Mountain Lane. He had two more witnesses to reach by phone and Hank Sheridan to visit in person tomorrow. The file was five years old and the case was closed and the man convicted of the crime was eight days from execution.
And yet.
He couldn't name what was bothering him. It wasn't anything Lydia had said. It wasn't anything she hadn't said. It was something between the two, something in the tidiness of her answers, the clarity of her memory after five years, the way she'd turned every question into a complete and final statement that left no room to follow up.
Most witnesses rambled. They contradicted themselves. They remembered new things halfway through a sentence and circled back. Lydia Holt hadn't done any of that. Her testimony was clean.
Too clean, maybe.
Or maybe just the testimony of a nurse who paid attention to detail and had nothing to hide.
Noah filed it away and drove on.
Callie had toldherself she'd study for an hour before bed. The detective exam study guide had been sitting on the passenger seat of her car for three days, untouched, accumulating alayer of coffee shop receipts and a parking ticket she kept meaning to pay. She'd bookmarked the section on interview and interrogation techniques, which felt almost funny given that she spent her actual days doing interviews and interrogations without the benefit of a textbook telling her how.
But the exam wasn't tonight. Derek Hollis was.
She and McKenzie had commandeered the conference room at the far end of the station, the one with the long table nobody used unless there was a briefing or someone needed to spread out more paper than a desk could hold. Right now the table held both. Paper everywhere. Phone records printed in columns so dense they looked like stock ticker tape. GPS logs from Derek's rideshare account. A laptop open to the imaging software that the tech unit had pulled from the devices seized at his apartment.
The apartment had been a surprise. Derek Hollis lived in an RV on Mark Spence's property, everyone knew that. But it turned out he'd been renting a loft apartment in town for the past eight months. Mark told them about it when they'd gone back to ask follow-up questions. The RV was his base. The apartment was something else.
"The apartment's where he kept the hardware," McKenzie said from the other end of the table. He had his reading glasses on, which he only wore when he thought no one was looking. "Two laptops, an external hard drive, and a camera bag with a dozen lenses. The RV was clean."
"Because the RV was parked on someone else's property," Callie said. "He wasn't going to keep anything in a vehicle that Mark Spence could walk into."
"Smart."
"Not smart enough."
The tech unit had finished their initial sweep of the hard drive that afternoon and what they'd found was enough to makeCallie's stomach turn. Hundreds of photographs. Not staged shoots like Garrett Finch's portfolio of exploitative art. These were different. Candid shots taken from inside a vehicle. Women getting in and out of the passenger seat. Women sitting in the back. The angles were wrong in a way that was deliberate. Some of the shots looked straight down from a camera mounted near the rearview mirror, capturing necklines and open collars. Others were taken from low, angled up at legs and skirts. He'd rigged his car with multiple cameras positioned to capture his passengers without their knowledge.
"I counted over four hundred images across the two laptops," McKenzie said, scrolling through a log on his screen. "Three hundred and twelve are identifiable as being taken from inside a vehicle. The metadata puts the oldest at twenty-six months ago."
“Twenty-six months," Callie repeated. "So he was doing this before he even moved to the area."
"Looks like it. The early ones have different GPS coordinates. Vermont, mostly. He was driving up there before he started here."
Callie pulled a chair over and sat beside him. The GPS logs from Derek's rideshare account were laid out in a spreadsheet that the tech had color-coded by date. Green rows were logged rides with matching passenger records. Red rows were trips where the GPS showed movement but no ride was logged.
