Page 56 of My Child is Missing

Josie said, “Paracord, metal pieces, cable—all those things can be traced or processed for evidence. This stuff can’t. I think that’s why he used it.” She thought of the ligature on Felicia Evans’s ankle. She’d caught it in something and yet, there was no trap left behind. “Or there were pieces that could be processed, and he took them with him.”

“Maybe that’s why I’m having trouble reconstructing it,” Chan said. “I’ll keep trying to reconstruct it keeping in mind that I’m missing pieces.”

“Do what you can,” Josie said. She touched Chan’s shoulder. “I appreciate it.”

Josie walked over to the window that overlooked the garage bays and saw that both of them were occupied. Brody Hicks’s truck, which they’d impounded the night before, sat in one bay. In the other was a sedan.

Josie said, “Is that one of the Patchetts’ vehicles?”

“Yes,” said Officer Chan. “We processed the truck with the plow on it and the minivan earlier. They’ll be returned tomorrow. We had that one left but with the murder, we wanted to get that truck processed sooner so the sedan has to wait. Hummel will be in soon to talk about the truck.”

The Chief said, “Let’s do this briefing before we send Palmer home for some sleep. First things first, the line searches conducted in the woods across from Henry Thomas’s cabin turned up nothing. No signs of Kayleigh Patchett. No freshly dug graves or overturned dirt. Palmer, what do you have?”

Gretchen said, “I checked in with both Amber and Sergeant Lamay before I came over here. They tell me that the tip line is more of a hindrance than a help. It’s been days and we haven’t had one viable lead. Amber said it rang late into the night and then started again this morning. It’s kids making jokes. Mostly about the Woodsman. They think this is funny.”

“Guess my press conference didn’t do any good,” The Chief replied.

“Teenagers don’t watch that stuff,” said Noah. “This is such a joke to them that it got Felicia Evans killed.”

The Chief rubbed at his scalp. “I can’t shut the tip line down, though. Speaking of teenagers, Palmer, you and Quinn talked with the other kids who were at the Stacks the night Brody Hicks and Felicia Evans went into the woods, right?”

Josie and Gretchen had spent their entire evening tracking down each teenager that Brody Hicks said was at the Stacks and interviewing them. “Most of them were uncooperative,” Josie said. “None would admit to drinking or drug use.”

“None of them heard or saw anything,” Gretchen said. “And we were able to verify using their phones’ GPS and interviewing parents that they were all home by onea.m.”

“You show them the photos of J.J.?” asked the Chief. “Kayleigh’s secret boyfriend?”

“No recognition,” Josie replied. “But it’s hard to identify someone when all you can see is their profile.”

Noah said, “Has anyone interviewed the school staff yet? Maybe one of them can identify him.”

The Chief shook his head. “I talked to them. No one recognized him. There was no kid named J.J. in the school. Or who had gone to school there recently.”

“All this effort to find him and he could be a dead end,” Noah grumbled.

“Or he could break the case wide open,” Gretchen said.

It was exactly something Mett would have said. “We can’t ignore him,” said the Chief. “I know that Henry Thomas looks best for these crimes, but we can’t prove that he’s behind them. Either that’s because we don’t have enough evidence against him yet, or it’s because someone else took Kayleigh Patchett and killed Felicia Evans.”

Gretchen sighed. “Unless the hair we found in Thomas’s cabin comes back as belonging to Kayleigh, we might never be able to prove that he did anything—even if he did.”

The Chief turned to Chan. “Where are we with those results, Chan?”

Without looking up from the mess of leaves and sticks before her, she said, “The state lab is still working on it. Believe me, the moment we know, you’ll know.”

The Chief said, “Quinn. What do you make of this Hicks kid? He was close enough to the area Kayleigh was taken that he could have done it.”

Noah added, “And he was out there long enough to have taken her. Hummel pulled the GPS from his truck and sent it over last night. The report doesn’t go back far enough to tell us where he was when the Montour and Lenore County murders went down, but he was up on Kelleher Road near the burial grounds from eleven thirty in the morning until about three thirty in the afternoon. Plenty of time to have taken Kayleigh.”

Josie said, “But he used the access road, which is nowhere near Henry Thomas’s driveway, and Blue followed Kayleigh’s scent to Thomas’s driveway. She was there. The GPS from Hicks’s truck doesn’t put him near Thomas’s cabin, does it?”

“No,” Noah admitted.

“Dogs can be wrong,” said the Chief. “Hicks is still on our list. What else is outstanding?”

“Kayleigh Patchett’s phone records,” Josie said. “We should have had them by now—even without them being expedited.”

“We got them,” Gretchen said. “This morning. Early. I looked through them already. There’s not much.”

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