Page 36 of The Sinner's Son

“Or we just need one irrefutable fact,” Alec said with a wry smile.

“Why do you look like Sylvester after he just shoved Tweety Bird in his mouth?” Sawyer asked.

“Because I have an ace in the hole.” Alec pulled a second laptop over and typed frantically for a few seconds. “Here. Come look.”

Sawyer rounded the conference table and dropped into the seat beside Alec. On the screen was a collage of photographs taken of objects, mostly hair accessories and jewelry that had likely belonged to young women. Sawyer’s blood rushed fast enough to roar in his ears. He turned his head and stared at Alec. “Is this what I think it is?”

He nodded. “I took pictures of everything inside Andrew’s treasure trove before I handed it over to the FBI, and it’s a damn good thing I did. They solved the straightforward cases, which were the ones that had newspaper articles or computer printouts about the victims wrapped around their trinkets.” Alec tapped the screen. “These items were loose in the bottom of the box, so I figure these murders occurred before Andrew fine-tuned his process.”

“Possibly,” Sawyer agreed.

He catalogued several unmatched earrings, wondering if the mates had been left on his victims. There were a few charms and pendants without their necklaces or bracelets. Had those been left behind too? There was a golden tassel that had likely come from a graduation cap. Any identifying number or high school mascot or name had been removed from it, making it extremely hard to match up. There was a peachy-pink strip of velvet with an old-fashioned cameo in the center. Andrew had collected scrunchies, banana clips, headbands, and brightly colored butterfly clips.

Damn, there were a lot of treasures in that box. Did any of them belong to the same person, or did each single item belong to a different woman? If the latter were true, Andrew Bishop was likely the most prolific of all serial killers. He and Alec were on good footing, so Sawyer thought it was best to keep that thoughtto himself. Instead, he said, “Even if we could tie one of these to Monica, how do you plan to connect the others? How do you even know where to look?”

“The easiest places to start are the ones like this—locations where Andrew lived, both during my parents’ marriage and after. I started with you because of your commitment to solving cold cases,” Alec said. “Andrew kept exceptional business records for four decades. His log entries detailed everything I need to track his movements. Andrew had meticulously documented who hired him, what he hauled for them, and the destination for the shipment. He’d noted the daily hours he drove and every cent he spent on business expenses. He’d kept accordion files with receipts to back up the entries.”

“You found all of that with the souvenirs from his victims?” Sawyer asked.

“No. The FBI found the business records when they served warrants on his property. The trinket box provided the just cause to get the warrants after they interrogated me for eight hours and accused me of being the killer.”

Sawyer crossed his arms over his chest. “You haven’t talked publicly about that before, have you?”

“Nope,” Alec said. “I’m not sure I will either. If I think objectively, I can understand why they were skeptical about my accusations.”

Sawyer nodded slowly as he recalled the circumstances that kicked everything off. “Son gets summoned to a hospital to see his estranged father after his heart attack. While he’s in surgery, the hospital staff hands the man’s belongings to the son, which includes a set of keys to the dad’s semitruck. Either boredom or curiosity got the best of the son, who uses the keys to access his father’s semitruck. He snoops around in the private sleep quarters and stumbles across a serial killer’s treasure box.”

“Plays out like a Hollywood movie, doesn’t it?” Alec asked. “It was just as likely that I was bitter about the estrangement with Andrew and tried to pin my murders on him.”

“Except it wasn’t a script. Why aren’t you bitter toward the FBI if they accused you of murder and ignored your insistence that there were likely more victims?”

“The simple answer is that I might need them again in the future,” Alec replied. “Blasting them on my social media platforms won’t curry any favors with them. And they could’ve dragged out my Freedom of Information Act request for a really long time, but they complied quickly and thoroughly once they closed the case. The photographs they took of the remaining trinkets are better than mine, and now I have copies of his trucking manifests. It’s unlikely the agent assigned to Andrew’s case would have been permitted to spend countless hours mapping his movements across the country, hoping to link victims to the unmatched trinkets in his box. I have the time and determination to do it, so I will.”

Alec cocked his head to the side. “And it was curiosity that prompted me to drive to the truck stop and snoop around in Andrew’s truck. I hadn’t seen him in nineteen years. He was only a few hours away and hadn’t bothered to reach out. He’d put a slip of paper in his wallet that named me as his next of kin and provided my cell phone number. That wasn’t something I ever provided to him, so Andrew had sought a way to reach me but didn’t. I wanted to know why.”

“And did you get your answers?”

Alec shook his head. “I never spoke to Andrew. He was in surgery when I arrived at the hospital, and I never went back after I found his stash. We maintained no contact during his stint in prison before his death.”

“Do you regret that?” Sawyer asked. “I’m sure you have so many questions.”

Alec conceded the point with a slight nod. “But I wouldn’t have trusted a word that came from his mouth. I’ll let the evidence do the talking for him.”

“Fair enough.” Sawyer checked his watch and noticed that Ricky had been recording their conversation. Frustration flared in his gut, but he reminded himself that he’d agreed to this, and he had the final say on what got aired. “Just warn me next time.”

“And ruin the take or let you hide your genuine reactions behind a professional veneer?” Ricky asked. “Never.”

Alec offered a sympathetic smile. “You get used to it.”

“To the recording equipment or Ricky’s orneriness?” Sawyer pressed.

“Both,” Alec and Ricky said in unison, then followed it up with a dual “Jinx!”

“Our call with Talia starts in eight minutes,” Sawyer told them after a shared laugh. “She strikes me as someone who would arrive early, so I’m going to sign in.” He pointed to Alec over his laptop. “We don’t record any part of this call without permission, understood?”

Ricky gave him a two-finger salute before typing furiously on his keyboard.

Alec scooted closer so they could share a screen. Talia had already joined the call and agreed to both video and audio recording when asked.