Total pages in book: 123
Estimated words: 114419 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 572(@200wpm)___ 458(@250wpm)___ 381(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 114419 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 572(@200wpm)___ 458(@250wpm)___ 381(@300wpm)
“Deck of cards?” Sienna repeated, her breath catching.
Roy Freehan nodded, squinting again. “Yeah. He . . . he was sorta tall for his age, I think, though not remarkably so. Dark haired, like I said. Quiet. I only really remember him because of those cards. They stood out. I wondered why he carried them around. No one really paid much attention to him, and for the life of me, I can’t recall his name. But he’d stand around, staring into nowhere, shuffling those cards, you know, like some kind of security blanket. At the time I might’ve thought he was in one of the special-needs classes, but . . . yeah, I saw him get into Sheldon’s car a few times. I remember because he dropped the deck of cards at my feet once, and I helped him pick them up. He met my eyes while we were down there on the pavement. It was the only time I remember him meeting my eyes. Do you think . . . do you think he was asking me for help? Oh God.”
“Hey, are you okay? You look exhausted,” Kat said, sitting down at her desk across from Sienna.
Sienna gave her a weak smile, picking up the cup of coffee she’d just poured, her second in two hours. “Yeah. I’m okay. I didn’t sleep great last night.” Or the night before that . . . or the night before that.
“That’s because you’ve been working yourself ragged since you walked in the door. And I don’t mean this morning. I mean since the first moment you walked in the door.” Kat rifled through the messages that had been left on her desk while she was out.
“Not a lot of choice,” Sienna said, then took a sip of the coffee, hoping the continuing doses of caffeine would work on both her low energy and the headache she couldn’t shake. She quickly updated Kat on her conversation with the science teacher, Roy Freehan. She still felt disturbed by the interview. Do you think . . . do you think he was asking me for help?
“Did you have him look through the yearbooks?”
“Yes, but he didn’t recognize any of the kids as the one he mentioned.” The one boy they’d found in the yearbook named Daniel Forester had turned out to be presently living in Cleveland and working as a morning newscaster. There were enough clips of him online that he had a solid alibi going back months. Not that Sienna had thought that potential lead would pan out anyway.
“So our Danny Boy never showed up on picture day,” Kat murmured.
“No,” Sienna said. “Not any of them. So now I have Xavier going through the class lists and marking the names of boys who didn’t appear in the yearbook.”
“Good thinking. Hopefully there are only a few. We might have gotten lucky, and that will end up being a great way to narrow things down.”
“Yeah . . .” And that was exactly what they needed to do. Narrow things down. Because right now, the information they’d gathered felt overwhelming. Sienna’s mind shuffled through the evidence they possessed, the clues and writings they’d been given, and the profile Dr. Vitucci had presented as she tried to figure out an avenue they hadn’t yet taken that might lead them closer to Danny.
“Oh, by the way, we got the full forensics on the items tested in that first vacant house,” Kat said, handing Sienna the report. “Nothing,” she said dejectedly.
Sienna took it and glanced through. No prints. No DNA. No surprise. She skimmed down a little farther. The first aid kit they’d found in a drawer was just that, the contents of the corroded bottle identified as iodine, a common product in a first aid kit, not out of the ordinary. “Damn,” she muttered, even while something pricked at her brain. She bounced her knee. What was it?
Something . . .
She picked up her notes, scanned through them, and stopped at the spot where she’d made a note of the periodic table of elements Danny Boy had mentioned. Something about the callout had caused her to write it down, but at the time, it hadn’t meant anything. “Kat, is iodine on the periodic table?”
Kat looked up from her computer screen. “Off the top of my head? You’re asking the wrong girl.”
Sienna smiled, then opened a search engine and pulled up an image of the periodic table of elements. It sure was. Her knee bounced faster. Its symbol was I, its atomic number 53.
He’d left that there. It’d been one of his clues. She was suddenly sure of it. But by itself, it meant nothing.
Her knee bounced, head throbbing as she desperately tried to focus. There was something to this.
That house was the second location where Danny Boy had left clues for them. The first had been under the overpass where Reva Keeling’s body had been posed. She opened her notes, found the report on that scene, and skimmed through it. Nothing else had been found other than the clues left with the body.