As he turned from the closet, he was struck by the faint smell of ammonia. There was a dog bed beside him, probably meant to serve the ancient Labrador that Leo had mentioned. There were no obvious stains on the yellow bed. Will unzipped the liner, pressing his gloved fingers into the stuffing. This yielded nothing, except for making his gloved hands smell faintly of dog and urine.
Will heard Amanda's voice downstairs as he was zipping up the bed. She was coming up the back stairs and, from the sound of it, she was talking on her cell phone.
He took off the dog-smelling gloves and changed into a fresh pair, then returned to the girls' purses, dumping them out on the floor, searching them again. Emma's cell phone had been located on a charger in the kitchen downstairs. Kayla had her own designer bag and Visa card. She certainly had a cell phone somewhere.
He sat back on his heels, feeling like he was missing something. Will had searched the room in a grid pattern, sectioning each piece, even digging his gloved fingers into the shag carpet under the bed and finding nothing more startling than a piece of Jolly Rancher watermelon candy that crinkled under his touch. He had checked under furniture and felt along the bottom of drawers. He'd flipped all the rugs over.
Nothing.
Where had Emma been while Kayla was being attacked? What had the girl been doing while her best friend was possibly being raped, certainly being beaten and murdered? Was Will looking at this the wrong way? Having often been on the receiving end of Paul's anger at the children's home, Will knew firsthand that the Campano blood ran pretty hot. Did that sort of thing skip a generation, or was it passed down directly? The mother had said that her daughter changed lately, that she had been acting out. Could she have been involved in Kayla's murder? Was Emma not a victim but a participant?
He looked around the room again—the stuffed teddy bears, the stars on the ceiling. Will would certainly not be the first man who had been fooled by the stereotype of an angelic young woman, but the scenario that called for Emma being one of the bad guys didn't feel right.
Suddenly, he realized what was missing. The walls were bare. Emma's room had obviously been professionally decorated, so where was the art, the photographs? He stood up and checked for nail holes where pictures had hung. He found five, as well as scratches where frames had scraped the paint. He also found several pieces of tape that on close inspection revealed torn pieces of the posters from the closet. He could easily imagine Abigail Campano being outraged to find a picture of a breast-augmented, genitalia-neutral Marilyn Manson marring this otherwise perfect girl's room. He could also see a teenage girl taking down all the framed art the decorator had chosen in retaliation.
"Trent? When you have a minute?"
Will stood, following the sound out into the hall.
Charlie Reed, a crime-scene tech who had worked for Amanda almost as long as Will, was at the end of the hallway. Now that the body had been removed, the man was cleared to go about the careful cataloguing of blood and evidence. Dressed in the special white body suit to prevent cross-contamination of the scene, Charlie would spend the next several hours on his hands and knees going over every square inch of the scene. He was a good investigator but his resemblance to the cop in the Village People tended to put people off. Will made a point of specifically requesting Charlie on all his cases. He understood what it meant to be an outsider, and how sometimes it made you work even harder to prove people wrong.
Charlie pulled down his mask, revealing a finely sculpted handlebar mustache. "This was under the body." He handed Will an evidence bag containing the broken, bloody guts of a cell phone. "There's a shoe print on the plastic that's similar to the print we found downstairs, but not the shoe we found on the second victim. I'd guess our abductor nailed it with his foot, then the girl fell on it."
"Was there a transfer pattern on the body?"
"The plastic cut open the skin on her back. Pete had to peel it off for me."
Through the bag, Will made out the shattered phone. Still, he pressed his thumb on the green button and waited. There was no power to the device.
"Switch out the SIM card in your phone," Charlie suggested.
"Sprint," Will told him, recognizing the silk-screened logo on the back of the silver phone. The phone didn't use a SIM card. The only way to access any information stored on the device would be to have a technician hook it up to a computer and pray. Will said, "It must belong to either the kid downstairs, Kayla or somebody else."
"I'll rush it through the lab once we get prints," Charlie offered, holding out his hand for the phone. "The IMEI has been scratched off."
The IMEI was the serial number that cell phone networks used to identify a particular phone on the grid. "Scratched off on purpose?"
Charlie studied the white sticker near the battery casing. "Looks rubbed off from use to me. It's an older model. There's duct tape residue on the sides. I'd guess it was falling apart long before it was crushed. Not what I'd expect a teenage girl to carry."
"Why is that?"
"It's not pink and it doesn't have Hello Kitty stickers all over it."
He had a point. Emma Campano's phone had a bunch of pink, plastic charms dangling from the case.
Will said, "Tell the lab this has priority over the computer." They had found a MacBook Pro downstairs that belonged to Emma Campano. The girl had enabled FileVault, encryption software so secure that not even Apple could unlock it without the password. Unless Emma had used something simple like the name of the family dog, nothing short of the NSA could break it open.
Charlie said, "I found this over by the table." He held up another plastic bag that contained a brass key. "Yale lock, pretty standard. No usable fingerprints on it."
"Was it wiped down?"
"Just used a lot. There aren't any prints to lift."
"No keychain?"
Charlie shook his head. "If you had it in your pocket and you were wearing baggy pants, it could easily come out during a struggle."
Will looked at the key, thinking that if it had a number or address on it, his job would be so much easier. "Mind if I hold on to this?"
"I've already catalogued it. Just make sure it gets back to evidence."
"Will?" Amanda had been hovering behind him. "I talked to Campano."
He pocketed the key Charlie had found, trying to hide his sense of dread along with it. "And?"
"He wants you off the case," she said, but didn't seem to think that was worth discussing. "He says that they've had some problems with Emma lately. She was a good girl, the perfect child, then she got mixed up with this Kayla Alexander sometime last year and everything went to hell."
"In what way?"
"She started skipping school, her grades started to fall, she started listening to the wrong music and dressing the wrong way."
He told her about what he'd found in Emma's room. "I'm guessing they made her take down the posters."
"Typical teenager stuff," Amanda said. "I wouldn't trust the father so much on where the blame lies. I have yet to meet a parent who admits that his own child is the bad apple." She tapped her watch, her signal that they were wasting time. "Tell me what progress we've made."