Ryan walked next to Hawkins as they followed Pauling out onto the lawn. The garden shed was right across from the boy’s room, really only a dozen or so feet from the window. Pauling fitted a key into the lock and swung the door of the shed open. Inside the dim enclosure there was a wide assortment of garden tools, shears and mowers and shovels lined every surface, nothing seemed out of the ordinary. Tucked along the side of the shed was a tall metal ladder. Hawkins slid the ladder out and carefully examined each rung.
“This is what it tells us,” Hawkins murmured, continuing the conversation had never been interrupted.
She leaned in and sniffed the top rungs of the ladder, then lightly touched the grease marks.
“He used your ladder for this, and then returned it here when he was done.”
“My God,” Pauling whispered.
Hawkins looked up. Ryan followed her gaze a saw a tiny piece of fabric snared on a pair of hedge shears, right next to where the ladder was stored.
“And it looks like he left us a gift,” Hawkins pulled out a camera and snapped a few shots before bagging the scrap and tucking it away.
“Do you have a bag, Stone? And a swab?” she turned to Ryan, acknowledging his presence for the first time since they’d arrived.
“Yeah, here,” he passed her down another evidence bag and a sterile cotton swab.
He watched as she knelt and swabbed a small drop of blood on the floor and picked up something small and white; from where he was standing, it looked like a pebble. She passed the swab over to him and pocketed the bag.
“Alright, I think we’re done here, I’ll send the crime scene techs over to take a second look,” she said, straightening and stretching her back.
“Who has the key to this shed?” she asked as Pauling relocked the door behind them.
“Umm, the gardener does, I do… I think that’s it. I mean, it’s just a shed, there was no reason to give it to anyone else. But there was also no reason to secure it very well.” Pauling stuttered as he spoke, it was clear that this was all too much for him.
“Thank you for your help, Mr. Pauling. You should go back inside, try and get some rest,” Ryan said softly.
“No, I should be here. I should…”
“I am just going to walk the rest of the property. You’ll only be in the way,” Hawkins broke in harshly. “Go inside and let me do my job.”
Pauling opened his mouth as if to protest but seemed to think better of it. He turned silently and began walking back toward the house. A few steps away, he paused,
“Please, bring my son back to me.”
“We’ll do everything we can, Mr. Pauling,” Ryan reassured him gently.
Pauling nodded slowly, and the headed back to the house, without another word.
“You know,” Ryan turned to Hawkins as soon as he was out of earshot. “You could try being a little bit nicer, I mean, the man’s son is missing.”
“You wanted him back inside, didn’t you? Now he’s back inside.”
“But you can’t treat people like that! Don’t you have any compassion at all? He’s the victim here!” he was upset by her callousness.
“Compassion?” she was deadly calm. “I doubt compassion is going to help him. I am not here to be his friend; in fact, I’m not here for him at all.”
“You aren’t here for him, eh? Oh, of course not, I should have known!” he shouted sarcastically. He was livid now. He sympathized with Pauling’s pain and this woman didn’t seem to give a damn what happened to him or how much she hurt him. “Then what are you here for? Glory? Career advancement? Kicks?”
He was trying to get a rise out of her, but she didn’t bite.
“No, that’s why you’re here,” Hawkins shot back quietly.
He flinched slightly at the blow. She wasn’t wrong.
“Then why? What are you here for?”
“Alex Pauling,” she replied simply. “You said Grayson Pauling is the victim? He isn’t. The victim is a 7-year-old boy. I am not going to delay this investigation and risk that boy’s life just to coddle his father, influential or not.”
Hawkins turned and began to walk across the lawn toward the security fence. Ryan stood silently, her words stung, mostly because they were true. He was the one angling for the promotion, the one who was more concerned with impressing his boss by placating Pauling then with finding a missing child. She acted cruel, but it occurred to him that he might really be the heartless one here. After a moment, Ryan noticed that she was already pretty far across the lawn, so he shook off his reverie and rushed after her.
“Better now?” Hawkins asked mockingly.
“What did you pick up in that shed?” he asked, dodging the question. He had no good excuse for his behaviour, so he didn’t plan on trying.
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“Oh that,” she pulled the bag out and dangled it in front of him.
Inside, he could see a very small white object.
“Oh my God, is that a child’s tooth?” Ryan was horrified.
“It appears to be one of the lower central incisors and it is definitely a deciduous tooth, so it must come from a young child. We’ll have to type the DNA to be sure it is Alex’s, but it does seem likely.”
“So, the blood, the tooth, does that mean that he’s been injured?” he asked.
“It certainly is a possibility,” Hawkins considered. “But this tooth wasn’t knocked out of his mouth. See, look at the root, it is mostly gone already,” she held the bag closer so he could see. “It is clear if you look closely that this tooth wasn’t knocked out, it fell out. He is at that the right age, after all. Maybe it got a bit of help, but even a small amount of force could have caused him to lose this tooth.”
“Oh, it’s a baby tooth!” he realized. Why couldn’t she just say that? “But what about the blood?”
“Well, based on the proximity of the blood and the tooth, they are probably related, but I can’t be sure how until we get the DNA results back. It really depends on whose DNA it is.”
“You think it might not be Alex’s?”
“Well,” she tucked the bag away again. “All I am saying is that we can’t jump to conclusions. But either way, this still tells us a couple of very important things.”
“Really?”
“Of course,” Hawkins looked surprised, as if she expected him to have already noticed everything she had. “I mean, just the evidence from the shed itself was very revealing. The torn piece of shirt, the blood and the tooth, they all indicate that there was a struggle of some sort in that shed. More importantly, if we take that into consideration along with what I saw inside the house, it tells me that the impression I had about this case from reading the file was clearly wrong.”
“What do you mean?” Ryan hadn’t seen anything particularly unusual, certainly nothing that would dramatically change his initial assessment, so he wasn’t sure where she was coming from.
Hawkins ignored the question entirely. Her attention seemed to be focused on the metal fence that ringed the yard. They had been walking steadily toward it this entire time, Hawkins watching the grass as if she was following some invisible path that only she could see. Now they were finally standing in front of it.
“The security system is off, right?” she asked him.
“Yeah, why?”
But she had already grabbed the fence and vaulted to the other side. He scrambled after her.
“You mind sharing with me what’s going on?”
“The intruder scaled the fence here.”
“How can you tell?”
“Because I’ve been following his trail across the lawn,” she said matter-of-factly. “The lawn is mostly pristine, smooth and recently mowed, but one strip was clearly disturbed, I just followed the trampled grass from the shed. It is lucky for us that the local cops and press hadn’t gotten there yet; too many people would have erased it. You can see that this was where the suspect was waiting.”
As she spoke, Hawkins pushed aside the grass carefully with her foot and Ryan could see what she was referring to; among the freshly trampled grass was a collection of cigarette butts, all smoked down to the filter. It wasn’t uncommon to find discarded butts at a crime scene, where the perpetrator had lain in wait for some time before acting.
“And this, of course, is further proof that I was wrong before. Which just goes to show, you always have to see the scene for yourself,” Hawkins sighed heavily.
“Wrong about what? You never explained.”
“Oh, right,” she replied absently. “I meant I was wrong about this being a professional job.”
“Why would you think that?”
“You saw what I saw. It looked like a professional job at first, they had all the codes, deactivated the security system, turned off the cameras, got in and out quickly, left false clues… The broad strokes were true but look at everything we saw just now. I mean, leaving cigarette butts where we’d surely find them, leaving blood, a piece of his shirt, being unable to fully control a seven-year-old child? Very amateurish.”
“Then how do you explain the rest?” Ryan asked.
“I can’t, yet. Maybe they had… help. Advice from someone.”
“Like someone who gave them the alarm codes and told them the best place to enter?” Ryan surmised.
“Exactly,” Hawkins seemed pleased by his comprehension.
“So, our man waited here and then hopped the fence?” Ryan pondered.
“That’s how it would seem. But it’s funny…” Hawkins mused aloud.
“What’s funny?”
“Well, he had to disarm the security system and the cameras to get in unseen, right?”
“Right…”
“And there is only the one keypad outside the house, right?”
“Yeah, by the front gate, in the guard shack.”
“So, he would have had to do it there. That’s all the way on the other side of the property. He wouldn’t have deactivated the system and then stood here for, well I guess it would have taken at least an hour, maybe 2 to smoke all of these cigarettes, depending on how quickly you smoke. Even a complete moron wouldn’t risk deactivating the system and then waiting around for that long. He had no way of knowing how much time he had before Pauling discovered that the system was off. He would want to be fast. Does it make any sense that he would do this?”
“No,” Ryan mused, perplexed. “But what if he deactivated the system after? I mean, maybe he stood here and cased the property, then went back, turned off the system and came back here to go over to the shed. It isn’t a brilliant move, but you said it yourself, the guy was probably an amateur.”
“Still, it really doesn’t make sense that the man would stand here, smoke all of these cigarettes while he waited, then walk all the way around the property, deactivate the alarm system, and then walk back over here. It might make sense if, as you said, it was so he could case the area while he waited, but look around, the vantage point here is terrible, you can’t really see anything. The trees and shrubs block out most of the property. It is the easiest path to the shed, but it would be a terrible place for surveillance. No, no one is that incompetent.”
“Hmm, you might be right,” he murmured. “You are thinking he had a partner, then. Someone who punched in the code and then told him when to go in, when the time was right.”
“Very good,” she praised, though he couldn’t help but feel it was somewhat mocking. “It looks like this was a valuable trip out, then. I am going to walk the rest of the property now.”
She handed him the evidence she had collected,
“Could you take these over to the crime scene guys and tell then to examine the shed and this area here? I’ll meet you back at the house.”
“Alright,” he took the items. “But only if you promise not to drive off without me.”
“Oh, come on,” she pretended to be hurt. “Do you really think I would stoop so low?”
“Yes,” he replied without hesitation. “In fact, give me the keys, or I’m not going anywhere.”
He held out his hand expectantly, Hawkins grudgingly dropped the car keys into his outstretched palm.
“Well, you may be terrible at reading a crime scene, but you certainly read people well enough,” she grinned mischievously.
He laughed out loud; she really had been planning to ditch him here. He hadn’t been sure until that moment. It seemed he needed to keep his guard up around her. Tucking the keys in his pocket, he walked back toward the house to rejoin the other agents. Glancing back over his shoulder, Ryan saw Hawkins heading toward the front gate, eyes glued to the ground. He wondered what she saw that he didn’t.