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TWENTY

Although Ellie didn’t have the autopsy results yet, which would offer a more detailed MO, she called Laney. “Still working on the autopsy, but initially I can tell the girls sustained multiple injuries during that fall. I’ll also assess whether there were old injuries, as in abuse. The bruises around the girls’ necks and on their arms suggest they’d been held or possibly pushed.”

So it was looking like murder. “TOD?”

“Judging from my preliminary exam, I’d put time of death in the early hours of November 26.”

Ellie signed. She’d discovered their bodies later that evening which meant they’d been lying under the falls for hours. Poor babies.

“Thanks, Laney, keep me posted.”

Ellie hung up then searched police databases for reports of children aged six to ten who’d been dumped in the wilderness .

There were records of a young boy left in a park near Amicalola Falls but police had solved the case—a pedophile who lived three blocks over from the kid had murdered him. Another case involved a teenage girl who’d jumped off a ridge near Red River Rock, but her death was due to suicide. Two stabbings caught her attention. One: a five-year-old but the police investigation proved her seventeen-year-old brother stabbed her with a fork in a fit of rage on a camping trip because she ratted him out to their parents for being under the influence of LSD. The second: a twelve-year-old girl stabbed with a hunting knife by her uncle when she attempted to defend herself against a sexual assault.

Derrick poked his head inside her office. “Anything yet?”

She shook her head. “You?”

He explained about the injured woman in Coal Mountain Hospital. “I’m going to talk to her.”

Ellie nodded and filled him in on her conversation with Laney. “I’ll check recently released prisoners and mental patients for ones who committed crimes against children.”

“Good idea.”

His keys jangled as he pulled them from his pocket and left her office.

Hoping the woman was the twins’ mother, Ellie turned back to her computer and searched reports of recently released prisoners charged with child murders starting in Georgia then expanding to the neighboring states of North Carolina, South Carolina, Alabama and Florida.

She decided to check out their names. First there was Homer Wilson, released from Hayes State Prison. Incarcerated for the homicide of a girl he’d met on the internet. Ellie phoned his parole officer. “Do you know where Mr. Wilson is now?”

“Dead,” the parole officer said. “The father of the girl he murdered shot and killed him outside the courthouse the day he was released.”

Ellie’s jaw tightened. “Okay, thank you.”

She hung up and found the parole office for the second prisoner, a man named Jimmy Bambini. Serving ten to twenty years. His victim had not been a child or even a female. He’d stabbed his wife with a kitchen butcher knife.

Striking him off the list, she turned to Larry Modelle, convicted of killing his nine-year-old daughter. He’d dumped her body in the woods near the river. His conviction had been overturned two months after he was incarcerated due to a technicality with parole waved.

Ellie gritted her teeth. His last known address was north of Coal Mountain. His job—he transported farm animals to petting zoos. There was a petting zoo at Winterfest in Emerald Falls.

Hope sparked inside her. He could fit the profile of the killer they were searching for.

She entered his address into her GPS and stood, ready to track him down, when Cord phoned. She quickly connected, “Tell me you found something, Cord.”

“I did. Not certain it’s related, but in a mine not far from the falls, I found signs someone had holed up there.”

Ellie wanted to believe it was their killer, but a lost hiker or hillbilly or homeless person could have sought shelter there. “Any sign who it could have been?”

“No, although I found a bloody hunting knife in the dirt. It has hair strands on it as well. Not sure if the blood or hair is an animal’s or human’s.”

The fact that he’d found it so near Emerald Falls raised her suspicions.

“Bag it and bring it in to go to the lab.”