Page 8 of Shadow of Justice
“It’ll take me some time,” Gus said. “I’ll have to pull all the evidence boxes from the archives. This thing was twenty-two years ago. God. I can’t even believe that. Anyway, her body … what was left of it … was found leaning up against a tree in a seated position. Her hands folded on her lap. Her legs crossed. The injury was to the back of her skull. Coroner theorized she was hit while she was turned away from her attacker. She was put up against that tree later.”
“So there were two crime scenes?” Sam asked.
“Probably. We searched Fischer’s apartment and his car. The apartment was clean. But there was blood all over the trunk of his car. But the lab couldn’t pull DNA from it. The best we could get was blood type. B positive. Same as Ellie’s. But same as Dane Fischer’s.”
“They’re cousins,” I said. “None of that’s conclusive.”
“No.”
“I thought I had probable cause to arrest him. But Halsey punted.”
Phil Halsey had been the prosecuting attorney in that era. He hired me twelve years ago. Now, he was long gone. His violent death still haunted my dreams from time to time.
“He wouldn’t have had a choice,” I said. “He never could have gotten a conviction on what you had.”
“I just don’t get it,” Gus said. “Fischer left town after this all went down. He pretty much had to.”
“Ellie Luke’s family thinks he killed her too?”
“I think so,” Gus said. “Her dad told me he knew it in his gut. I was worried he was gonna take matters into his own hands when I told him Fischer wasn’t going to be charged. That was one of the worst days of my career, having that conversation with him.”
“The case went cold,” I said.
“As ice,” Gus agreed.
“It wasn’t your fault,” Sam said.
Gus turned gray. He buried his face in his hands. “Unless I was wrong this whole time.”
“One thing at a time,” I said. I walked over to Gus and put a hand on his shoulder. He went rigid beneath my touch.
Sam’s desk phone buzzed. He went to it and picked it up. “Yeah, Stephanie.” He paused. “Good. Thanks. We’ll be right down.”
“Everything okay?” I asked.
“Jaffee got the warrant signed,” he said. “We can legally open the box.”
Gus bolted to his feet. I felt my stomach drop. The box. I’d already seen enough to understand the fear Hayden Simmons must have experienced when she opened it.
Gus flung Sam’s door open and charged down the hall. Sam and I had to practically sprint to keep up with him.
Five minutes later,we stood in the property room. Each of us wore latex gloves. Hayden Simmons’s box of horrors sat on the table in front of us. Deputy Jaffee had a digital camera, ready to photograph every phase of this.
Gus opened the box and pulled out the first item. He laid it on the table. It was a gold earring. An intricate, dangling circle with tiny heart cutouts and some kind of stone. The second item was a plastic baggie with a lock of dark hair inside of it secured by a purple ribbon. Next, Gus used a small set of tongs to pull out a pair of women’s panties. Pink cotton with a daisy pattern. He laid those on the table.
“They look clean,” I said. “I don’t see any bloodstains.”
“We’ll have BCI analyze all of this,” Sam said.
“Of course,” I said. “Was Ellie Luke wearing underwear when she was found?”
Gus shrugged. “I don’t think so. I’ll pull everything I have. But the mate of that earring was found next to her body. That I remember vividly.”
“Christ,” Sam muttered.
But there was more in the box. Gus pulled out another baggie, this one larger than the one containing the lock of hair. This one contained a stack of 4x6 pictures. Maybe twenty of them.
I pulled out a chair and sat down. Gus opened the baggie. One by one, he laid the photographs face up on the table in front of us. Every picture was of Ellie Luke.
