“Oh, Lord. Look how many Troy Johnsons there are on Facebook,” Ray moaned. “Let’s do the less common names first.”

“Laura King doesn’t remember a Troy,” Mason announced. He pulled out a chair and parked next to Ray, studying his screen. Ray had already crossed two Troys off the list and put question marks by two more. “What’s with the question marks?”

“It means I can’t see a photo. Either they’ve posted pictures of their favorite sports team as their primary photo, or a dog or something. They haven’t been ruled out,” Ray replied.

Ray clicked on a name and a small photo of a man’s face popped into view against a larger photo of a snowy mountain range. The man was Asian. “I wish they were all that easy to eliminate.” He drew a line through another name and passed the information on to Zander.

Each line felt like one step closer to finding Ava.

Please don’t let us be too late.

He didn’t want to consider the possibilities.

“What about this one?” Ray opened a picture of a man standing at a river, holding three huge fish on a line. His face was shadowed by a hat brim but his white grin was huge.

Mason stared. “I can’t tell. He looks tall, but there’s nothing to compare his height to. Any other pictures?”

Ray made a few clicks. “No. No images of people. Just fishing and outdoorsy stuff.”

“Put him on the maybe list.” Frustrated, Mason turned back to the murder book from Colleen’s death. He flipped to the autopsy section, preparing his stomach to study her pictures and read the dispassionate statements from the medical examiner.

His jaw clenched as he studied the photos. Colleen had been burned. The examiner theorized that the murderer had thought he could eliminate the evidence or body by fire. It takes a hell of a lot of heat to burn up a body. Most people don’t realize that a cremation takes over two hours at more than fourteen hundred degrees.

Teenagers wouldn’t know that. A teen might think a simple fire could get rid of all his problems.

He turned through the autopsy report, looking for the hand-labeled diagram of Colleen’s injuries, wanting know what the ME had seen on her back. The stark outline of a female form was labeled with abrasions on her back and the backs of her legs.

No blanching in a daisy pattern.

The medical examiner noted that lividity had formed in her lower extremities, concluding that she had been hanged soon after her death. She hadn’t lain still in one spot like the current victims. Mason frowned. So why had their killer created the daisy pattern on the backs of his victims if it didn’t match anything in the original death? Seeking something that referred to daisies or a similar pattern, he sped through the rest of the medical examiner’s notes.

Colleen’s wrists had been slit, but the cause of death was attributed to strangulation. Petechiae had formed in her eyes and her hyoid bone had been broken. Both were common results of strangulation.

She’d been sexually assaulted.

But by whom?

All of them? One of them? He scanned further in the report. The medical examiner had found one semen sample.

Mason’s stomach unclenched a bit, relieved that the girl had been spared the indignity of what could have been a gang rape.

Christ. She suffered rape, strangulation, and burns, and I’m pleased she was raped only once?

He shook his head. In this job, he took his relief where he could find it. Sometimes the minuscule victories kept the worst cases from tearing him apart.

Semen sample? “Was the DNA from the semen sample put in the system?” Mason asked Kenner.

He nodded. “We never got a hit. I assumed a DNA profile had never been submitted from the rapist in another crime.”

Mason grimaced. Which one raped her? Their suspects had pretty clean histories except for Derrick Snyder. But even his past crimes didn’t guarantee a DNA sample had been processed. Or entered correctly. The system wasn’t perfect.

He continued to read. Colleen hadn’t had the ball gag, but she’d had a large rock in her mouth. There were fresh chips in her teeth believed to have been caused by the placement of the rock or her biting it. Mason rubbed at the back of his neck, imagining the rough grit of rock against his molars. How long had she been conscious? The report stated that Colleen had been dead before the slitting of her wrists or the attempt to burn her.

Two more small victories for Mason to cling to.

Were they trying to disguise it as a suicide? All the different abuses to her body spoke of someone panicking, or a group with too many ideas about how to cover their crime. No mention was made in the murder book that more than one perpetrator had been present. He read through the last notes from the lead detective, inferring that they’d been seeking one man.

They were so far off.

But who would have guessed that this heinous crime might have been done by a group of high school students?

27

Zander listened with his phone tucked between his ear and shoulder, scribbling on a notepad, excitement rising in his stomach.

One of these has got to be right.

“Okay. Send it to me in an email, too,” he told the agent at the other end. He ended the call and turned to the three men in the Yamhill County conference room. Detective Kenner and Ray were eyeing him with cautious optimism, but Mason looked tense with concern. The man hid it well, but if Zander was half out of his mind with worry about Ava then Mason was triple that.

“We’ve got two good leads from the Troys on that camp list. Both these guys are thirty-five, have long histories of living in this area, they’re over six feet tall, own white vans, and own rural property.”