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Monday, April 11, 3:15 p.m.
Navarro leaned his head back, his eyes closed. “Are you fucking kidding me?”
Baz sat silently, rubbing his temples. He’d been so happy eating cake and celebrating their “win” that Kit had hated telling him what the ME had found. But he’d squared his shoulders and sat at her side when she’d delivered the news to Navarro.
“No, sir. Not kidding.” Her boss had reacted to the ME’s report exactly as she’d anticipated. “It doesn’t mean Driscoll’s not guilty of murder.”
“The fuck it doesn’t,” Navarro grumbled. “If there’s even the smallest chance that this was homicide instead of suicide, the confession he left behind isn’t worth the paper it was printed on.” Then he sighed. “Go ahead. Say it. You told me so. We should have waited.”
“Oh, I don’t think so, sir,” Kit said firmly.
One side of Navarro’s mouth lifted. “Smart.”
“Or maybe I just have a very well-developed sense of self-preservation.”
Navarro sighed again. “Or that. Fuck. Well, what are we going to do next?”
Kit exchanged a glance with Baz, startled to see him looking so... old. It was as if he’d aged ten years in the last ten minutes. His shoulders were slumped, his eyes closed. His cheeks were pale and he seemed defeated.
Kit hadn’t been in Homicide when any of the earlier victims had been discovered, but Baz had been around for all of them. Being unable to solve their murders for years had affected him as much as Wren’s murder had. Closing this case had rolled a weight off his shoulders. A weight that had now visibly returned.
But Baz straightened in his chair, drawing a breath. “We’re going to keep investigating. We’ll reexamine Driscoll’s house as the scene of his murder rather than only the home of a murderer.”
“I asked CSU to collect evidence as if it weren’t a suicide,” Kit added. “We’ll start with what they found. Although I want to repeat that Driscoll could still be our serial killer. He may have been killed for something entirely unrelated. He wasn’t well liked from what we understand.”
“You’re such a ray of sunshine,” Navarro muttered. “You really think he did it? That Driscoll killed five women? Maybe six?”
“I don’t know,” she said honestly. “If he didn’t, then someone went to a lot of trouble to make us think he did. Batra said it wouldn’t have been categorically impossible for him to have climbed up on that stool to stick his head in a noose. Just very difficult.”
“Meaning the two to ten percent chance she gave.”
“Yes, sir. I think that the brand-new Top-Siders on his feet are more problematic if he was killed, because they would have been part of the setup.”
Navarro scowled. “Which means that someone knew you’d found that print at Jaelyn Watts’s grave in Longview Park.”
That had been worrying her since finding Driscoll’s body. “Best case, Driscoll is our serial and he killed himself, just like we thought. Next-best case, he was murdered but whoever killed him had nothing to do with the murders and was maybe mad at his lies. We’ll check out the neighbor he assaulted, see if this was a revenge tactic. Medium-best case, Driscoll is our serial and he had a partner who wanted to pin it all on him and/or keep him quiet. Worst case, Driscoll only knew about it, and the real killer is still out there.”
Navarro nodded wearily. “Is the shrink a suspect again?”
“No,” Kit said—too quickly if the look her boss shot her was any indication. Baz’s brows were also lifted. “The body was still warmish when we arrived at the scene,” she added, keeping her tone logical. Not emotional. “Batra put TOD between three and seven a.m. Dr.Reeves was in an interview room all that time. He couldn’t have killed Colton Driscoll.”
“But he could still be involved,” Baz countered.
No, Kit wanted to say again, because she didn’t want Reeves to be involved. But she forced herself to nod levelly. “It’s possible. We’ll check him out. But we’re going to dig into every aspect of Driscoll’s life. If he did kill those teenagers, we’ll find the connection.”
“Then get to work and let me make some tough phone calls,” Navarro said, his gaze dropping to his phone, his dread palpable.
Kit glanced at Baz. She’d told him about the Maria Mendoza murder and he’d been supportive of reopening the case, but right now, he shook his head slightly.
“What?” Navarro barked. “What else?”
Kit hesitated, then exhaled. Better to get it all over with at once. “One more thing, sir. Not related to the Driscoll case.” She laid the Mendoza file on Navarro’s desk and told him about her conversations with Rita Mendoza yesterday and with Alicia Batra that afternoon.
Navarro’s lips thinned. “Seriously? Someone changed an official autopsy report?”
“Dr.Batra isn’t certain yet if it was a simple error or something more malicious, but she was sure that she hadn’t submitted the single photo in this file. She’s investigating. The victim was eight weeks pregnant, sir. That’s included in the autopsy report. They took tissue samples from the fetus but never had any suspect to compare DNA. It doesn’t appear that anyone even questioned her employer, and definitely no one asked him for a DNA sample. I’m hoping you’ll reopen the case. I know I can’t work on it because of my connection to the victim’s daughter, but... what if Maria Mendoza’s employer did kill her?”
Navarro stared at the file like it was a poisonous snake. “You realize that in the two years since this investigation, the employer in question has become a city councilman.”
