AllFreeNovel
Share Us
Wytheville, Virginia Wednesday, May 31, 2023 8:30 p.m.
“WAS IT ONE OF HIS VICTIMS?” ALEX ASKED. “WHO YOU BELIEVE killed Jerry Lolland?”
Detective Crew took another sip of whiskey and nodded. “It was.”
“How did you come to that conclusion? And if you were so certain, why was it so hard to prove?”
“You have to understand what I was up against. I got called to the scene of a suspected suicide, not a homicide. So the first people there were not cops, but the evidence eradication unit.”
Alex squinted her eyes. “Who?”
“That’s what we call the EMTs and fire department. Their job is to save lives, not preserve crime scenes. By the time I got called to the scene, camp counselors, EMTs, and an entire fire department had all traipsed through Lolland’s cabin. So there wasn’t a lot of good evidence we could pull from the scene. It was just too contaminated. But still, I managed to find enough to make me suspicious.”
“Like what?”
“Fingerprints. If the theory was correct that Lolland had killed himself, his prints should’ve been on the gas valve on the side of the cabin since he’d have been the last person to touch it. But of course, after the camp’s director, a guy named Allen McGuire, found Lolland unresponsive in bed, he also smelled gas, found the gas line wedged at the windowsill, and ran outside to shut off the supply. McGuire’s prints were on the gas valve, but he had a rock-solid alibi. If there were other prints on the valve, including Jerry Lolland’s, they were destroyed when McGuire touched it. The bedroom window, however, that was another story.”
“The window?”
“Yes. The techs pulled a clear, full palm and five-fingerprint impression off the window of Jerry Lolland’s cabin.”
Alex’s mind flashed back to her evidence board and the lone, unidentified print that had been found on her bedroom window.
“Were you able to ID the print?” she asked.
“We ran it through the database but got no hits, and I knew we wouldn’t. The palm print was small and clearly made by a kid. When we didn’t get any hits, we asked the parents of the victims—the kids in the photos—if we could take their kids’ prints. There were fourteen kids in the photos, and they all agreed to be printed.”
“And? One of them matched the window?”
“Yeah,” Crew said, taking another sip of whiskey. “The problem was that since Lolland used his cabin to abuse the kids, it was without question that the kids in the photos had been in Lolland’s cabin. Hell, the pictures were taken when the kids were in the cabin. So we found several prints in various parts of the cabin belonging to the kids, and that angle quickly became a dead end. In fact, I was ordered by my superiors not to even consider that one of the kids had killed Lolland by snaking the gas line into his cabin while he slept.”
“But you suspected it?”
“I did.”
“Why?” Alex asked. “Because of the palm print on the window?”
“It wasn’t the print itself that made me suspicious. It was the location of the print.”
“Because . . . what, it was on the window, right? On the glass?”
“Yes. But it was on the outside, as if someone had opened the window while standing outside the cabin.”
“Oh shit.”
“Exactly,” Crew said. “Someone opened Lolland’s window from the outside and snaked the gas line into his bedroom. But here’s the kicker. If Lolland had succumbed to his guilt and placed the photos around himself as a confession before killing himself, you’d expect the photos to be covered with his fingerprints.”
“They weren’t?”
“No. The Polaroid photos around Lolland’s body were covered with someone else’s prints. And the prints from the window matched prints lifted from each of the photos around Lolland’s body.”
Detective Crew reached into the breast pocket of his sport coat and removed a slip of paper. He placed it on the bar.
“This is a list of Jerry Lolland’s victims—all the kids who were in the photos, plus a few more who came forward after the story broke.”
“He didn’t take pictures of all his victims?”
“Apparently not.”
