it’s exactly what she felt as she took a look around the Fuller home.
“Agents, I’m going to step back out onto the porch,” he said. “Make sure we don’t get any prying eyes. Holler if you need anything. But I’ll tell you right now…anything you want to know that’s not already in the reports we sent over is going to have to come from one of my other officers—a fella named Foster. Here in Deton, we’re not exactly used to cases like this. We’re discovering just how unprepared we are for such things.”
“We’d love to speak with him after this,” DeMarco said.
“I’ll give him a call and make sure he’s at the station, then.”
He left back through the front door quietly, leaving them to the scene. Kate stepped around the initial blood splatters on the carpet. There were some on the couch, too, and splatters on the wall just above the couch. A small coffee table sat in front of the couch and a few things on it seemed scattered—a few bills, an empty but overturned plastic cup, and the television remote. It could indicate signs of a quick struggle, but if so, it was not a particularly fierce one.
“No real signs of struggle,” DeMarco said. “Unless their daughter is very strong and athletic, I don’t see how she could have done this.”
“If it was the daughter, they may not have seen it coming,” Kate argued. “She could have come right into the room, hiding the gun behind her. One of them could have been dead before the other had any clue what was happening.”
They studied the area for a few minutes, finding nothing out of the ordinary. There were a few pictures on the wall, several of which were family pictures. It was the first time she saw the girl she assumed was Mercy Fuller. The pictures showed her in varying stages of age: from around five to her current age. She was a cute girl who would likely become a beautiful girl sometime around college. She had black hair, brown eyes, and a radiant smile.
They then ventured deeper into the house, coming to a room that obviously belonged to a teenage girl. A bedazzled journal sat on a desk that was littered with pens and papers. A ceramic pink pineapple sat at the edge of the desk, a picture holder of sorts with a wire holder at the top. A picture of two teenaged girls, smiling widely for the camera, was held within it.
Kate opened up the journal. The last entry was from eight days ago and was about how a boy named Charlie had kissed her very quickly while they changed classes at school. She scanned a few of the entries before that and found similar scribblings: struggling with a test, wanting Charlie to pay more attention to her, wishing that bitch-face Kelsey Andrews would get hit by a train.
Nowhere within her room were there any indications of homicidal intent. They checked the parents’ bedroom next and found it similarly disinteresting. There were a few adult magazines hidden away in the closet but other than that, the Fullers seemed to be squeaky clean.
When they exited the house after twenty minutes, Barnes was still on the porch. He was sitting in an old tattered lounge chair, smoking a cigarette.
“Find anything?” he asked.
“Nothing,” DeMarco answered.
“Although I do wonder,” Kate added. “Did you or the state police happen to find a laptop or cell phone in the daughter’s room?”
“No. Now, on the laptop…that’s not much of a surprise. Maybe you could tell by the state of the house, but the Fullers weren’t exactly the type of family that could afford a laptop for their daughter. As for a phone, the Fullers’ cell phone plan shows that Mercy Fuller did indeed have her own phone. But no one has been table to trace it just yet.”
“Maybe it’s powered down,” DeMarco said.
“Probably,” Barnes said. “But apparently—and this was news to me—even when a phone is off, it can be tracked back to the place where it was powered down…the last place it was on. And the state guys figured out it was last powered on here, at the house. But, as you pointed out, it’s nowhere to be found.”
“How many men do you have actively working the case?” Kate asked.
“Three at the station right now, just basically running interviews and digging through things like last purchases, last known places they visited and things like that. There’s one guy left behind from the Staties that’s helping, though he’s not too happy about it.”
“And you have one guy on your force that you’d consider the lead on it other than yourself?”
“Correct. As I said, that would be Officer Foster. The man has a mind like a lock box.”
“Could you lead us to the station for a quick debrief meeting?” Kate asked. “But just yourself and this Officer Foster. Let’s keep it small.”
Barnes nodded grimly as he got up from the chair and flicked the last of his cigarette into the yard. “You want to talk about Mercy as a suspect without letting too many people know about it. Is that right?”
“I think it’s foolish to rule it out as a possibility without looking into it,” Kate said. “And while we look down that path, yes, you’re right. The fewer people that know about it, the better.”
“I’ll make the call to Foster on our way to the station.”
He walked down the steps, staring down the reporter and her cameraman. It made Kate wonder if he’d had at least one bad altercation with a news crew sometime during the last two days.
As she and DeMarco got into their car, she also gave the news crew a distrustful glance. She knew that in communities like Deton, a murder like this could be earth-shattering. And because of that, she knew that news crews in these areas would usually stop at nothing to get their story.
It made Kate wonder if maybe there was more of a story here than she was seeing—and if so, what she might need to do to get all of the pieces.
CHAPTER THREE
The Deton police station was about what Kate had expected. It was tucked away on the far end of the main stretch along the highway, a plain brick building with an American flag billowing at the top. A few patrol cars sat parked along the side of it, their meager numbers a reflection of the town itself.
Inside, a large bullpen area took up most of the space. A large desk sat at the front, unattended. Actually, the place looked basically deserted. They followed Barnes to the back of the building, down a thin hallway that boasted only five rooms, one of which was labeled by a placard on the door with Sheriff Barnes. Barnes led them to the last room on the hall, a very small room set up as a conference room of sorts. An officer sat at the table inside, rifling through a small stack of documents.
“Agents, meet Officer Foster,” Barnes said.
Officer Foster was young man, probably creeping up on thirty years of age. He wore his hair in a buzzcut and had a scowl on his face. Kate could tell that he was a no-nonsense officer. He would not be cracking jokes to ease any tension and probably wouldn’t bother with small talk to get to know the agents sitting in front of him.
Kate decided that she liked him right away.
“Officer Foster has basically served as the hub for this case ever since we got that call from Pastor Poulson,” Barnes explained. “Any piece of information that has come through here has gone through his ears or eyes and he’s added it to the case files. Any questions you have, he can probably answer.”
