Page 119

“Taav?”

He looked up from the floor, where he was sitting cross-legged, reading through the files as I passed them over. He’d insisted on the floor, a mug and plate of his own beside him, his right leg tucked under him as usual.

“Laptop?” I requested.

He stood gracefully and headed upstairs, returning with both the laptop and power cable. I made a point of hooking my fingers in one of his belt loops, keeping him from sitting down again. “Thank you.” I tugged him closer, and he rewarded me with a soft kiss.

“De nada.” He picked up my empty plate and mug. “Do you want anything else?”

“No thanks.”

I watched him walk back to the kitchen, where I could hear snatches of my parents discussing what they were going to do about Christmas. It was only a few days away, and Mom had already expressed concern about Elliot spending the holiday alone multiple times. But when she brought it up again this morning, Dad had pointed out that he probably didn’t want to go back to Madison for the extended Hart-Bergmann family celebration, and, besides, putting me in the car in my current condition was probably not the best idea.

The question was whether Mom was going to have the whole pack of them at our house—which wasn’t really big enough, but it had been done before—or whether we would have a more quiet holiday with just us and Elliot.

I knew what my vote was, but I’d already caused enough disruption to my parents’ lives that I was going to keep my mouth shut about it and let them figure out what they wanted to do. So I turned my attention to the laptop, doing a social media search on Keith Baker from Shawano, Wisconsin.

Keith Baker isn’t the world’s most original name, so I went through a couple profiles before I found the one I could track back to Reynolds through Baker’s wife, Georgia, who had a much more comprehensive social media presence than her husband. She had tagged photos of Reynolds and Baker at family events, a photo of herself and Reynolds captionedMe and my bro!, and dozens ofMe and the hubs!photos of herself with Baker.

The more ‘interesting’ part was that she also had photos of herself with a few other women posing at an MFM protest—not yesterday’s, but something from back in the fall, to judge by both the dates on the posts and the colorful leaves behind them. She and one of the women—named Paula Hasenfuss—were holding signs and smiling. Georgia Baker’s sign readHumans First!and Paula Hasenfuss’s simply had a pointy-toothed smiley face inside a red circle with a slash across it. The caption below talked about how she and Paula Hasenfuss had stayed up late making their signs.

The other two women were tagged as Barbara Schein and Wanda Zimmerman. They showed up in the comment sections of other threads fairly often, as well as in photos taken at cafes, parks, and other social events. But only Paula Hasenfuss appeared in any other political posts—one about campaigning for a local MFM-sponsored candidate who’d lost in the fall election and another, more recently, sharing some bullshit misinformation about how there was an anti-human agenda being pushed through the state congress.

Georgia had also tagged her husband in that particular post, as well.

Keith Baker didn’t have any photos from protests or rallies. There were several of him holding up fish with some other guys—including a Lance Hasenfuss, who, it turns out, was married to Paulaandworked for the Shawano PD.

I chased that for a while, but couldn’t link Hasenfuss to anything explicit—he was friends with Reynolds, as well, but that in and of itself wasn’t damning, since they worked together. That was a thing coworkers sometimes did, or so Caro Little-Bruneski and Dani Bowman repeatedly assured me as they tried to convince me to get a social media profile on one of the many options out there.

I actually did have a profile on almost all of them—not because I thought it was a good idea, mind you, but because there is shit you can’t access without being a member of the damn things, and I basically needed to be able to see people’s profiles. I’d be a terrible PI if I didn’t, although I’d set it up long before I left the RPD.

It didn’t have my name on it or an identifiable profile picture, so in that sense ‘I’ wasn’t on social media, but God fucking knew I spent enough time on there looking up other people. But what that had taught me was that people were often far too free with their personal information—and that if social media companies ever really wanted to start blackmailing most of the American population, they’d have plenty of fodder.

At some point, Taavi had returned to the living room, resettling on the floor with the files. He had a small notebook with him, something he’d probably scavenged from my parents, and had been making notes on it.

When I finally emerged from my social media haze, rubbing my hands over my face, he was gone again, although I noticed the little notepad and the files had been set in a neat stack on the side table where I could reach it. I frowned, wondering how I’d missed him leaving the room, and reached over to pick it up.

Bowan had injuries to her wrists—what kind?

I pulled Reynolds’s report on Mariah Bowan, finding the notation in the paperwork that had drawn Taavi’s attention. In the file, Reynolds remarked on some old injuries to her wrists as well as recent ones close to the time of death.

There were no pictures with the report, just the little body outline with the relevant bits circled.

In fact, none of the files had pictures, even though it would have been standard procedure to take them—as they had done at the scene of Gregory’s death.

I had a document running on my laptop, and I added that note to it, followed by a question about who had been Shawano’s other detective before Smith, since according to the case file, Van Buren had worked Bowan’s death. In fact, Van Buren was listed onallof them.

Seriously, the more I learned about these cases, the more they all fucking stank.

Then it occurred to me that I had a Shawano PD cop with pretty close connections not only to Reynolds, but also Baker. Hasenfuss didn’t show up in Bowan’s file, but hedidshow up on Devon Swiftwater’s and Tara Redsky’s as one of the officers who responded to the scene. He wasn’t listed for either Aaron Boushie or Gregory Crane, though.

I made a note of it, anyway.

Usually it was only the initial responding officers and CSI techs who showed up in the paperwork, even if other uniforms ended up on the scene. If somebody found a critical piece of evidence or interviewed a witness, their name would be down, sure, but if somebody just sat in their car at the end of a driveway, they usually didn’t make it into the case file.

Taavi had a few other things written down, some of which I’d also seen, others I knew the answer to simply because of all my years on homicide. And some—like his question about Mariah Bowan’s wrist injuries—were simply things we couldn’t answer with what was in front of us.

The next time I looked up was when Dad came into the room. “Mind if I join you?” he asked.