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12:00 p.m.
Baby teeth?
A Lebanon PD officer—she didn’t know his name—watched Leigh as she hauled two paper boxes full of Michelle Cross’s belongings from the newly secured station evidence room. Still no sign of the original investigation files, autopsy reports, or evidence collected during the case twenty years ago. Why someone had taken them was anyone’s guess.
The APB issued for anyone who’d come into contact with Gresham Schmidt hadn’t issued any results. There hadn’t been any activity on his financials since his disappearance, and the only calls that’d come through the detective’s phone had been from the hotel. Last Leigh had heard, Scotland Yard had dispatched two officers to Schmidt’s flat but had come back with little to report. Evidence said the former detective had simply walked out of his hotel room and vanished before turning up dead in the orchard, taking anything he knew about her brother’s case with him to the grave. How was that possible?
Leigh shouldered into the conference room where Boucher had set the unit up, her escort taking position at the door. “You don’t have to stay.”
“New protocol handed down from the chief himself, Agent Brody. Where the evidence goes, I go,” he said. “Nothing personal. It’s my job to make sure nothing else goes missing. I’m sure you understand.”
Right. And it certainly didn’t have anything to do with the fact Chief Maynor wanted her off this investigation and on her way back to Clarksburg at her earliest convenience.
“Then I hope you wore comfortable shoes.” Unloading both boxes onto the table she’d sat at a mere five days prior, nervous, out of place, she rummaged through the boxes and personal effects taken from the Cross home. Everything was there. The surveillance photos, the scribbled notes, newspaper articles. They would’ve noticed a set of baby teeth during the search. Then again, it was entirely possible Michelle Cross had hidden them as well as she’d hidden her personal investigation into Chris Ellingson. Leigh ran through the evidence log, ensuring she hadn’t missed anything.
No baby teeth. And there hadn’t been any recovered with the body. Would Michelle Cross’s killer have taken them?
“What the hell would you need with baby teeth, Michelle?” Her mother had kept hers and Troy’s baby teeth. When Leigh had found them one day after trying on all her mother’s jewelry from the ballerina box on the dresser, she’d wondered if her mother was a whack job who liked to keep trophies of her children. Like in that Edgar Allan Poe story about Berenice’s teeth she’d read for her English Literature class.
But that hadn’t been it at all.
Later, Leigh had learned about her mother’s anxiety. About how she’d spend days imagining all the horrible and violent ways her children would die. About how she couldn’t get herself out of that downward spiral without cleaning the kitchen counters until the finish wore thin. About how she held on to Leigh’s and Troy’s teeth in case they ever went missing and the police needed DNA to compare to a body.
And when one of those violent thoughts had finally come to fruition, her mother had broken, fully believing Troy’s death had been her fault. That she’d manifested his final moments. No matter how many times Leigh had tried to tell her otherwise.
“Baby teeth have DNA.” If Katherine Garrison was right and Michelle Cross had stolen her son’s baby teeth while she was playing hostess, she’d known they’d existed in the first place. She would’ve known where Katherine Garrison had kept them and arranged her visit around that goal, maybe even inquired if the grieving mother had kept anything of her son’s.
But why? Derek Garrison was dead. His body had been left for his parents to find in his backyard shed, and there was no changing that reality. Not even for a true crime book deal.
Leigh stared at the victim’s handwritten notes long enough for the script to burn into her brain and follow wherever she directed her attention. “Okay. You got the baby teeth for Derek’s DNA. You would’ve needed a sample to compare it to, and someone to execute the testing, but why bother? Police already matched the victim to his dental records.”
Unless Derek wasn’t the only victim Michelle Cross wanted to know about.
Leigh unpocketed her phone, scrolling through the mass of emails she’d collected over the past few days. She accessed the latest update from the fire marshal in charge of the investigation into the destruction of her home. The entire scene had been photographed in an effort to identify the arsonist, and a link to the photos had been embedded into the marshal’s last email. A professional courtesy that could provide answers in this case. She swiped through each image as the photographer seemingly progressed through the home.
Until she found it.
A photo of her parents’ closet. Black wood, hose water, and light ash combined into a mudslide around the hatch where she’d discovered the remains of a boy meant to pass as her brother. And there, set against the collapsed shelf, her mother’s jewelry box splayed open. The contents had spilled onto the floor. Family heirlooms and jewelry had melted together in bright patches under the photographer’s flash. Leigh enlarged the image with a widening pinch across the screen. Everything was there. The ring she’d envied and hoped to inherit one day. The brooch her grandmother had gifted on her mother’s high school graduation day. “Where are they?”
She turned the phone onto its side to widen the photo. Bone was one of the most resilient and indestructible components of the human body, but there was no sign of the baby teeth her mother had kept. Leigh reviewed the notes and evidence spread on the table in front of her. “You took them, didn’t you? Just like you took Derek’s.”
Had Michelle Cross been the one to break into Leigh’s home? Had she gone through Troy’s bedroom in hopes of learning more about one of the victims in the original case and come across something far more useful in a set of baby teeth? A sinking feeling knotted in Leigh’s gut. Had Michelle Cross suffered from the same intrusive thought surrounding the case as Leigh had from the beginning?
That Troy and Derek most likely hadn’t been Chris Ellingson’s only victims back then. That police had missed something far worse than putting the wrong man behind bars.
That it was possible one of Chris Ellingson’s hostages escaped.
Her phone dinged with an incoming email. She focused entirely on the top message. Her request to identify the commenter on Michelle Cross’s social media post had gone through. Hallelujah, it was a miracle. “Got you.”
The username belonged to Officer Donavon Pierce.
He hadn’t just threatened her. He’d threatened one of the victims. That, coupled with the Lego figure Ellingson had given her and DNA recovered at the scene of the house fire, shoved him to the top of her most wanted list. Confrontational. Aggressive. Controlling. Problems with authority. All traits that fit the markings of a killer.
Now she just needed proof to tie him to the murders.
Leigh restacked the files taken from Michelle Cross’s home and fit them back into their respective boxes. With the original case files stolen from the evidence room—along with all DNA samples and lab reports—and external access outside of the department on hold, she’d have to go to the source.
The chief.
