Page 31 of The System

“Yes. And she and her wife adopted their two kids out of foster care, too. They just adopted their second one, technically. You might know of her wife, actually. Most people do. Kenna Crawford.”

“The host on that crime show?”

“Yup. Her wife’s name is Ripley. I met her through Kenna when my wife and I were on Kenna’s show.”

“You and your wife work cases together?”

“Not exactly. If you look up mine or my wife’s name online, you’ll find the story, so it’s out there, but Ada’s brother, Noah, disappeared when they were kids. They were playing outside by the lake. One second, he was there, and the next, he was gone.” Dylan cleared her throat then. “I was an officer on the case. And before you ask, Ada and I are ten years apart. I promised her that I’d find him, like a dumb rookie, so I stayed on the case even when she and I lost touch. We reconnected when we were both asked to do Kenna’s show on an anniversary of his disappearance, and we’ve been together ever since.”

“You mentioned something about this before.”

“Yeah, I have a new suspect. We’ve been working this for the past few months. Well, I’ve been working this lead for over a year.”

“What happened to him?” Kieran asked.

“It looks like Noah died the day he went missing. Hikers found him a few years ago. The woods surrounding the lake where they were playing butt up against a private acreage that we’d asked to search years ago, but the owner denied the search, and the judge wouldn’t issue a warrant because we didn’t have any evidence that Noah was anywhere near that property. A couple of years after he disappeared, we finally got a new judge to agree to a search, but we didn’t find anything. So, we moved on. Anyway, there’s another property on the other side of that one that’s technically in another jurisdiction. It was miles from where Noah went missing, and it was more than a decade later, so I didn’t think we’d find anything. I’d searched everywhere else around that lake, though, and I’d searched the whole lake myself. He wasn’t there, or I would’ve found him. So, if he was taken and then immediately killed or left, he could only be on that other property. Whoever took him would have been long gone by the time we’d arrived on the scene the day he went missing. I have a friend of a friend who runs a ground-penetrating radar company. He volunteered his time and equipment, and we went over the property. It took days, and we didn’t find anything. Then, on the last day we were there scanning, there were some hikers who were on the outskirts of the property on a county trail. They spotted a tennis shoe under some brush and thought it was weird that one shoe was just sticking out. One of them got closer, and they noticed that it wasn’t just a shoe. If he was buried, it wasn’t deep, and it had been a long time, so there wasn’t much… left to…” Dylan shook her head. “We had to get a forensic anthropologist to look at the bones, but all they could tell us was that he’d been hit over the back of the head with a blunt object. We thought it might be the property owner who denied the search, but he didn’t do it. Finding the body next door to his place got us a warrant to search, but we didn’t find anything. I checked his alibi to be sure, but he was out of town at gun shows in the region for two weeks before and after Noah’s disappearance, and he lived alone. So, that left us with a body but no suspect.”

“Wow, that’s a story,” was all Kieran could say.

“It’s my life,” Dylan replied. “Ada and her brother were close, and she lost him that day but never knew what happened to him. Finding his body gave her some closure, but Noah clearly didn’t run off, fall down, hit his head, and then bury himself in a shallow grave, so not knowing who did this and what happened has always been something she and her parents have had to deal with.”

“But you have a new suspect?” Kieran asked.

“I can’t talk about that part in any real detail. It’s an open investigation. But I’ve got a lead and consider them a strong person of interest.”

Kieran nodded and said, “I hope you figure it out.”

“Thanks. Me too. I want to wrap this up as much as I can before my promotion. I won’t be the lead on the case then because I can’t, but I’ll still oversee it. I just want to give Ada this one thing I’ve never been able to. She deserves to know what happened, you know?”

“Yeah,” Kieran said.

“But you didn’t come here to talk about Ada and Noah or my promotion.”

“I tried calling Carina for an update.”

“She’s probably in court. I’m sure she’ll get back to you.”

“They said I need to get Marin to put me on her visitor’s list to see her again.”

“That’s technically true, yes,” Dylan confirmed.

“But she hasn’t yet. And I can’t exactly text her to ask her to do it.”

“It’s up to her who she wants to see, Kieran. She might not have added you yet, but she will.”

“Our first meeting didn’t exactly go well,” Kieran replied.

“You’re both a little in shock, at least, but trust me, she’ll add you.”

“How do you know?”

“Because she doesn’t have anyone else, and she’s never done real time. She’s adjusting right now, but soon, she’ll realize that she’s alone in there, and the only person visiting her is her lawyer. She knows you exist now, so she’ll add you. It gets lonely in there. Having a visitor to look forward to can get them from one day to the next.”

Kieran nodded and said, “You can’t tell me anything about her case, can you?”

“Just that she’s being arraigned tomorrow morning.”

“Shouldn’t that have happened already?”

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