“He was a real teacher, and the steadiest guy in the district. If he’d been watch commander, the Twelfth would have been a different place. It was Tony who encouraged me to get the training to work crime scenes.”
In the wake of the morning thunderstorm, the sun had come out with a humidity-laden ferocity. My wet T-shirt and jeans dried to an unpleasant clamminess, and the stench from the car became unbearable. Draco kept talking, though, sharing his team’s findings, so I fought back my nausea and stayed close to the scene.
Jurgens’s cell phone was on the floor at his feet, splattered with vomit but still usable. Draco held it delicately by the corners, put it into an evidence bag, then showed me the text message that he was able to bring up on the screen.
I shouldn’t have done it, Jannie, any of it, Wuchnik or the kid. Sorry to screw up your life. I’ll always love you, xxx Xavier.
My brows went up. “When I saw Jurgens, he was swinging a butcher knife at me. And Jana, his ‘Jannie,’ was screaming the street down, calling her neighbors ‘whores’ and spitting nails. It’s hard to imagine them exchanging love notes.”
Draco shrugged. “People behave differently behind closed doors. And he was probably panicking, feeling the drug and not being able to do anything. Who was Wuchnik?”
“The vampire killing, Drake,” one of the other techs said.
“Oh. Guy was found here, wasn’t he? I didn’t work the scene, but Lurie here did, right, Lure?”
The youngest of the three-man crew nodded. “Yeah, and it turned out a bunch of girls were in here dancing in the rain while the guy was having a spike pounded through him. This sounds like a confession, don’t it—‘I shouldn’t have done Wuchnik.’ Why’d he snatch the girl, though?”
“She was one of the crew dancing in the rain,” I said, “but if he was planning on killing himself, why would he bother with her?”
“Maybe he wanted to blame her for his troubles,” Draco said. “Her grandpa is the rich guy, right? If he blamed the rich for his troubles, he wouldn’t be the first, but that’s for the detectives to sort out.”
I wasn’t convinced, but there was no point in arguing with the tech team. “Arielle left home because of a text message she got, we know that much. Can you see what other texts he sent?”
Draco pulled the phone back out of the evidence locker and scrolled up through the plastic. “He didn’t write to the kid, at least not last night. In fact, he doesn’t look like much of a texter. There’s not a lot else on here for yesterday.”
“Did you find another cell phone on him?”
The youngest tech said they only found Jurgens’s personal phone. “We went through his pockets; we found the bottle he’d taken away from the Ruhetal pharmacy—it’s labeled ‘Abilify’—and his house keys, a wallet, but we didn’t find a second phone. You think there should be another one?”
“One of the girls had lost her phone here at the cemetery ten days ago; I was sure the killer found it and used it to lure Arielle here.”
“Theories are for the detectives,” Draco repeated. “We, thank God, get to deal in facts. But bear in mind, kids lie all the time if they think they’re in trouble. I’d wait to see what they say to a skilled interrogator.”
Ah, these mythical interrogators with their highly honed skills. If the detectives talked to the Ravens—the loser crybabies, as Nia had called two Vina Fields girls in one of her e-mails—the police might learn what codes or language the Carmilla club members used with one another. But what could the girls tell even the most skilled interrogator about Xavier Jurgens or Miles Wuchnik?
If the two men’s connection was simply a drug ring operating out of Ruhetal, the Ravens wouldn’t know anything about it. Not that tween girls can’t be users or dealers, but none of the Ravens had shown signs of that: the only needles they used were the ones they pricked their palms with to become shape-shifters.
But if my little brain flash about Wuchnik being a “genie” in Nia and Arielle’s minds because he was connected to Arielle’s genealogy search was on target, then Nia might well know more than she’d told me this morning. And if the feds or the local cops talked to Nia, the story would be all over the broadband waves in a trice. Leaks sprouted from the Wuchnik interrogation faster than holes in the sides of the Titanic.
I could imagine Wade Lawlor and Helen Kendrick’s innuendo-laden scripts. I don’t know about you, but my kids are home after curfew. What is it about the billionaire Salanter family and “we’re all apes” Durango that lets them think their kids are special and don’t have to play by the same rules as ours? Or words to that effect.