Page 90 of Shadow Sabotage
“Even with tech, it’s still my favorite way to organize evidence,” I said, returning her grin.
“I’ve never seen one. Not in real life, anyway.” She moved toward me, gazing at the board with an intrigued look on her face. She then pointed to the photograph hanging beside Katelyn’s. “You still have Tony as a suspect.”
“I do. I don’t think he did it, but until we rule him out, he stays up there.”
“Sheriff McGrath is also a suspect,” she said, swallowing hard as she looked at his photo.
“Yeah.” I cast a glance her way, pained at the tight lines around her eye. It would take a while for her to get over his betrayal.
“And I guess that’s Katelyn’s mom and uncle over there?” she asked, pointing to the left side of my board.
“Exactly. I like to keep track of everyone I’ve talked to, even if they’re not an active suspect.” I walked to my briefcase and pulled out some additional things to tack onto the board. “Snowmobile registrations. Everyone within a one-hundred-mile radius who has one registered. Gotta love public records.”
Claire grinned. “Nice work.” She turned back to the board. “Um. Okay. What about the Evanses? Are they on the registration list?”
“Negative,” I confirmed. “They don’t own one. However…” I tapped a name on the list.
She exhaled. “Sheriff McGrath does.” She smacked her head. “He would also have access to the SAR snowmobiles. They’re housed in a storage unit that belongs to the Sage County Sheriff’s Office. I can’t believe I didn’t think of that.”
“You weren’t thinking of him as a suspect at that point,” I reminded her. “But that’s good to know. Is there any way for us to find out if someone accessed one of those for a non-SAR event?”
“No,” she said, shaking her head. “Unless the storage facility has security cameras and kept the footage from that far back. But the place is locked with a regular deadbolt. Everyone at the sheriff’s office has keys to it. So does Hank, our base command operator.”
“We can check on footage,” I said, making a note. “But I agree. That’s a long shot at this point.”
“The evidence is stacking up against him, isn’t it?”
“It might be,” I said gently.
She sighed deeply, staring at his picture. “Alright. So he had snowmobile access and Tony didn’t. But there are places around here that rent snowmobiles in the winter. We should get a list of people they rented them to in March and April. Maybe we’ll get lucky and Tony Evans will be on that list.”
I shook my head. “We can ask them if they’ll share, but right now, we don’t have enough for a warrant. Having a theory that the killer used a snowmobile isn’t enough. If we had more, I could push for the DA to draft a subpoena. But we don’t even have enough for that.”
“Alright, so we ask nicely. What else?”
“Katelyn’s phone,” I said, grabbing a marker to make some notes on the board. “The only calls or texts to or from a Wildwood phone number were the ones to Tony Evans, and those were few and far between after January. But get this. Her roommate said she was texting someone before she left thatnight. And there were no texts sent or received during that time on her phone.”
“Maybe she deleted them?”
“That’s what I thought, too. But I checked her cell phone carrier’s metadata. There weren’t any.”
“She was probably messaging on a social media app,” Claire pointed out. “That’s the way most of my personal messages are sent these days.”
“I’ve checked the apps on her phone and didn’t see any messages for that time frame.”
“Some of those apps automatically delete them after a period of time—that’s why some people use them to try to find hookups online without leaving evidence behind for their spouse,” she said, rolling her eyes. “Will your data warrant cover that?”
“No. We might get metadata, but not message content.”
“Crap.” Claire looked disappointed.
“Metadata still helps,” I assured her. “But my gut says that’s not where we’re looking anyway.”
She turned to me, her lips twitching. “You have a different idea.”
I did. The thought had hit me earlier, and it made perfect sense. “What if she had a second phone? A burner used only for her new boyfriend.”
Claire’s eyes lit. “That would explain why she left hers behind. It didn’t matter to her. Only the one she used to contact him did.”
