Page 52 of Bad Mother

“Yes, but he didn’t recognize any of the kids as the one he mentioned.” The one boy they’d found in the yearbook named DanielForester had turned out to be presently living in Cleveland and working as a morning newscaster. There were enough clips of him online that he had a solid alibi going back months. Not that Sienna had thought that potential lead would pan out anyway.

“So our Danny Boy never showed up on picture day,” Kat murmured.

“No,” Sienna said. “Not any of them. So now I have Xavier going through the class lists and marking the names of boys who didn’t appear in the yearbook.”

“Good thinking. Hopefully there are only a few. We might have gotten lucky, and that will end up being a great way to narrow things down.”

“Yeah...” And that was exactly what they needed to do.Narrow things down.Because right now, the information they’d gathered felt overwhelming. Sienna’s mind shuffled through the evidence they possessed, the clues and writings they’d been given, and the profile Dr.Vitucci had presented as she tried to figure out an avenue they hadn’t yet taken that might lead them closer to Danny.

“Oh, by the way, we got the full forensics on the items tested in that first vacant house,” Kat said, handing Sienna the report. “Nothing,” she said dejectedly.

Sienna took it and glanced through. No prints. No DNA.No surprise.She skimmed down a little farther. The first aid kit they’d found in a drawer was just that, the contents of the corroded bottle identified as iodine, a common product in a first aid kit, not out of the ordinary. “Damn,” she muttered, even while something pricked at her brain. She bounced her knee. What was it?

Something...

She picked up her notes, scanned through them, and stopped at the spot where she’d made a note of the periodic table of elements Danny Boy had mentioned. Something about the callout had caused her towrite it down, but at the time, it hadn’t meant anything. “Kat, is iodine on the periodic table?”

Kat looked up from her computer screen. “Off the top of my head? You’re asking the wrong girl.”

Sienna smiled, then opened a search engine and pulled up an image of the periodic table of elements. It sure was. Her knee bounced faster. Its symbol was I, its atomic number 53.

He’d left that there. It’d been one of his clues. She was suddenly sure of it. But by itself, it meant nothing.

Her knee bounced, head throbbing as she desperately tried to focus. There was something to this.

That house was the second location where Danny Boy had left clues for them. The first had been under the overpass where Reva Keeling’s body had been posed. She opened her notes, found the report on that scene, and skimmed through it. Nothing else had been found other than the clues left with the body.

Okay, but she’d been placed in that particular spot for areason. Their Danny Boy hadn’t gone to the trouble of dragging a dead woman up an incline and sitting her there randomly. What had she been facing? Sienna cast her mind back. A building that made... she flipped through her notes and printouts. Tools. They made tools. Armstrong and Sons. She tapped a key, bringing her computer back to life, and did a search on the company. No one had been there the day Reva had been murdered, but perhaps there was some meaning to the fact that she’d been facing that particular building. And if that was the case, the spot where the body had been left made sense, because from what Sienna could remember, two sides of the building were flanked by two-lane, somewhat busy streets and the back by another business. That area under the overpass was really the only mostly private place where a body might be positioned facing the tool company, if that in itself was meant as a clue.

Why here? It’s weird.

She read through the description of Armstrong and Son’s products. They designed and manufactured vanadium steel hand tools, including clamps, cutters, files, saws, and knives.

Knives... hmm.Motherhad used a knife. Mother had been quite proficient with a knife.

Sienna clicked on another page and scrolled through the photos of their vanadium knives. Vanadium... vanadium. She brought the picture of the periodic table back up, her heart giving a small jump. Vanadium. There it was. Symbol V, atomic number 23.

Iodine was to the right. Symbol I, atomic number 53.

In order of the scenes they’d gone to, the letters wereVI. “Roman numeral six?” she muttered.

Or possibly 2353? Another address?

Or maybe... the beginning of a word? Video? A name? Vincent?

Ouch.A particularly piercing pain emanated from her temple to the back of her neck.

She pulled the file for the second victim they’d found, Bernadette Murray, otherwise known as Queen Bee. Like Reva Keeling’s scene, nothing had been found connected to the murder, other than that left on the victim’s body. She, too, had been sitting upright facing a building, though. It was through a fence and didn’t offer a great view, but it was the direction she’d been posed in, as if staring directly at it. She flipped pages. Med Plus. Again, she turned to her computer. Oxygen tanks and equipment. They soldoxygen. She pulled up the periodic table and found oxygen, symbol O, atomic number 8. VIO. So not a roman numeral. And 23538 was getting a little long to be an address. She did a quick computer search. There was no such zip code in the US.

VIO... a word? Oh Lord, her head hurt.

She glanced up, but Kat was on the phone, talking in low tones as she leafed through papers on her desk.

The fourth scene they’d been led to was the house on Bluebell Way where they’d found Sheldon Biel, a.k.a. Mr.Patches. She glancedthrough the forensics report, looking at the photos of what had been found, including the radio and... the extra battery. She brought it closer. It was a Panasonic lithium battery with theiinPanasonicscratched or worn off.

She pulled up the periodic chart again. Lithium, symbol Li, atomic number 3. 235383? Or...VIOLi. But theiwas scratched off the battery. Did that mean theiinLishould be discarded?VIOL. A word? Violence, violin, violets. A name? Viola?

Wait, there’d been another scene. Reva Keeling’s apartment. Her head pounded so hard she almost let out a moan. That place had been a wreck of stuff strewn over every surface. If there was something else there relating to an element, it’d probably be like looking for a needle in a haystack. They’d found the other clues there because they’d been pointed specifically to them. Certainly they couldn’t be expected to catalog every button and random bottle top?

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