tongue. Doc had climbed on a ladder and taken a look, and Carl’s open eyes were speckled with petechial hemorrhages, tiny blood vessels that are a sign of asphyxiation.
The hard thing to explain was that Carl’s wrists were bound with rope.
“It doesn’t scream suicide, does it?” Lieutenant Mueller said. “But sometimes things have more than one explanation. Could he have done that to himself?”
We all looked at Doc, who shrugged. “Well, it’s not unheard of. There have been cases like this in the literature,” he said. “Suicides where the victim wanted to make sure he didn’t back out, so he tied himself up before he jumped.”
We all stared at the body, wondering.
“Will you be able to tell during the autopsy?” I asked. “Is there usually telltale evidence of some kind?”
“Not sure. I’ve never had anything like this before,” Doc admitted. “But I’ll look into it.”
I thought about that, wondered who else might be able to help. “Listen, I know this guy in Texas who is an expert in knots and bindings,” I said. “How about we take photos of those ropes on his wrists, get some good ones of the knots and the position of the rope. Maybe he’ll have some insight.”
“It’s worth a shot,” Mueller said.
While the others worked on the photos, I walked over to the tree. Someone had pounded a roofing nail into the piece of paper to keep it from falling. For what wasn’t the first time, I gave it a read. All it said was: TELL JACOB I’M SORRY
Thirty-Six
While the others helped Doc lower Carl’s body out of the tree, I circled back to the trailer with the CSI unit’s IT expert, a guy named Randy Nader, a scrawny fellow who had the long, straight hair of his Navajo mother and the aquiline profile of his Armenian father. Once he had the computer on, Nader played around for a while, tried out a few common passwords to unlock it. Nothing worked. Then he picked up the keyboard and looked underneath it. Nothing there. No cheat notes with the code.
“Try Laurel,” I suggested.
He did, and it didn’t work. “Any more ideas?” Nader asked.
“Hmm. Not sure,” I said. I looked around the trailer, didn’t see anything that spurred any thoughts. I pulled up Carl’s info on my phone through the state website. We tried his driver’s license number without luck. His birthdate didn’t work either. I opened his NCIC profile on the national database and looked at his arrest on the bar fight. I gave Nader the name of the guy Carl beat up, and that did nothing. It turned out that the last four digits of Carl’s social security number did the trick, and we were on.
“What are we looking for?” Nader asked, as he loaded a program that examined the hard drive.
“Anything associated with any of the victims,” I said, then recited their names slowly while Nader keyed them in. “And in particular anything that includes the name Myles Thompkins.”
The screen filled, line after line of documents and photos. Nader flipped through, loading one after another. There were images of Jacob Johansson and his family, some posed, others candid shots, and some that resembled those in the album of Laurel, like they were taken with a telephoto lens from a distance, in secret. While Anna, her children and Jacob were in many, the majority seemed to be of Laurel.
Half an hour into the search, Nader opened a file dated the previous Saturday, two days before the murders, and images of Laurel and Myles together at the river popped up on the screen. In some, Laurel appeared despondent, holding her infant son and sitting on the rock, looking as if she were crying. Myles stood above her, his arms folded as if angry, closed off to her, glaring. “That’s the argument Naomi caught the tail end of,” I murmured.
“What?” Nader asked, but I brushed him off.
“Keep scrolling through those,” I said, and he did. Carl photographed them as they embraced, Laurel’s head on Myles’s shoulder. They walked to their cars, and Carl shot a photo of Naomi getting out of the van with little Kyle. Then Naomi staring down the dirt road at Myles and Laurel. The final photo was of Laurel holding Jeremy, not in his car seat, as she drove away.
Just like Mother Naomi described it, I thought. Then I said to Nader, “What we’re really looking for is a text file, a suicide note. It would have Myles’s name and was probably written