Page 127 of We Are All Guilty Here

Emmy shrugged, but said, “If we’re still talking about what the plan was, maybe Cheyenne thought the Bad Guy was going to take her to his house or a motel room. She probably romanticized it. He wouldn’t have told her it was going to happen in the back seat of the Jetta.”

Jude asked, “And then?”

“I think Cheyenne was supposed to meet Madison at the park by eight o’clock,” Emmy sounded more certain of the timeline now. “Madison was very anxious when I talked to her between eight fifteen and eight thirty. Then, she tried to talk to me again around eight fifty, but I blew her off. I think she waited until the fireworks started around nine, then she went looking for Cheyenne.”

Jude watched Emmy’s jaw stick out as she clenched her teeth. The self-recriminations were writ large in her expression. Jude knew there was no use in trying to smooth them away.

She said, “That leaves a roughly two and a half hour gap between our Bad Guy abducting Cheyenne on the backroads and abducting Madison at the park.”

“Right. That’s what’s always bothered me.” Emmy leaned her elbows on the back of the chair. “I’m the Bad Guy. I’m driving around in my Jetta. I’ve got Cheyenne and her bike in my car. I wait two and a half hours until the sun sets, then I go look for Madison at the park, but I bring Cheyenne and her bike with me.”

Jude said, “In dual kidnappings, generally they threaten one girl in order to get the other girl to comply.”

“But we know the Bad Guy had a gun. That’s a hell of a persuader. And he obviously had a secluded location he took Madison to, somewhere isolated enough to torture her for hours.” Emmy lifted her shoulder in a stiff shrug. “Why not take Cheyenne to that place, chain her up, then go looking for Madison? Even with virtually nobody in town, it’s risky keeping her in the car.”

Jude said, “So risky that when the Bad Guy drives onto the soccer pitch, Cheyenne manages to escape. She runs toward thetrees. The Bad Guy shoots her in the head. He goes after Madison. He puts them both in the car and off they go.”

“Not exactly,” Emmy said. “Before he drove off, he took time to move their bikes. Madison’s was in the middle of the soccer pitch. Cheyenne’s was over by the trees. And from what we could tell, he laid down Madison’s bike. He threw Cheyenne’s maybe ten feet away from the field until it hit a tree.”

“He was angry with Cheyenne, but he was composed enough to try to misdirect the search.” Jude had seen Emmy’s meticulously drawn map of the first crime scene. “You’d have to be strong to throw a bike that far.”

“You’d have to be strong to swim to the middle of the pond with both girls chained together,” Emmy said. “He dragged the bodies out there, then chained them to a concrete block with a twenty-foot length of chain so that they floated up like a couple of kites in the water. He wanted them to be seen.”

Jude watched Emmy press together her lips. She knew what those memories felt like.

“I dunno.” Virgil looked up from his search. “Sounds to me like the Bad Guy was panicking. Didn’t know what he was doing. Took Cheyenne with him in the car, maybe decided to go somewhere with Madison on the fly.”

“No,” Jude said. “He staged the bikes. He staged the bodies. He wasn’t panicked. He was meticulous.”

Emmy started shaking her head. “That doesn’t sound like Adam Huntsinger.”

Jude had to agree. Adam was impulsive, uncontrollable. He wouldn’t have worried about being caught. He would’ve been too focused on driving away.

“Found it.” Cole walked over to the laptop and started typing. The monitor at the front of the room flickered, then mirrored his screen. He said, “Cheyenne’s flip phone was a Nokia N93i.”

Jude recognized the model. The device was chunky, nearly an inch thick when folded. When it was opened, the top part of the phone swiveled to act as a viewfinder.

Cole indicated the thick, rectangular hinge on the clamshell. “What’s that?”

“That’s a 480p video camera,” Jude said. “The slot on the side is for a miniSD card that holds around two gigs of data.”

Emmy had walked over to the monitor to look at the phone. “I found highly sexualized photos taped to the back of Cheyenne’s locker. They showed her and Madison dressed in slinky, matching bra and panty sets. Madison was in white. Cheyenne was in black.”

“Madonna/whore.” Jude felt a warning shiver through her body. She didn’t like where this was going. “Did the photos look staged?”

“I wouldn’t call it a professional shoot, but someone put some thought into making sure it was nondescript. Unfinished concrete floor. Walls painted flat white. Bare king-sized mattress on the floor.” Emmy didn’t produce the photos from the files, probably because Cole was there. “Only one of the shots completely crossed the line. Cheyenne was nude, lying on her back on the mattress with her legs spread apart. We wondered if there were other pictures that showed the man who’d taken them.”

“Which would mean that Bad Guy had motivations other than sexual. The girls could send him to prison.” Jude asked Virgil, “You never found any miniSD cards?”

He shook his head. “No, and I have to admit, I didn’t do a deep dive on the phone, either. I just assumed it was a regular flip phone.”

Cole asked, “Could she text on that thing?”

“Yes,” Jude said. “Look at the letters under the numbers. You had to hit the numbers up to three times to select one letter.”

Emmy said, “Twelve years ago, you couldn’t text large video files. Wi-Fi wasn’t everywhere like it is now. That amount of data would blow through the family cell phone plan. Her parents would’ve noticed.”

Cole asked, “How would you watch the videos?”

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