of figuring something out, an important detail in the photos she hadn’t noticed before. What was it? Perhaps a significant look exchanged between Glover and one of the other congregation members? Or someone who repeatedly appeared with Glover in the photos?
But she’d scrutinized the photos in which Glover appeared so many times that by now she knew them by heart. She could recite the names of all the people who appeared in those photos. In fact, she’d made a note in her list of how many times each person was photographed talking or engaging somehow with Glover. The person who seemed closest to him was a guy named Dennis Blake. He was one of Zoe’s top eight. Unmarried, aged thirty-six, worked as a sales associate at Walmart. It was likely that he was used to being managed, that he was the type who would let Glover boss him around. And Glover would have noticed it immediately.
That was what niggled at her. He was significantly more likely to be their unsub. She picked up her phone, about to dial Tatum’s number.
No.
She didn’t sense the relief of putting her finger on what was bothering her. Whatever it was, it wasn’t related to Dennis Blake at all.
What bothered her wasn’t what she’d seen in the picture. It was something that was missing.
Someone who made a point of avoiding being photographed with Glover? There were thirteen men in the photos who didn’t appear with Glover even once. She thought about each of them in turn. Nothing clicked.
The problem was, she was focused on Glover. How people related to him in the photos. If they talked to him, did he smile at them, or at their spouses, or their children? It was as if she couldn’t profile the unsub without pointing out how every characteristic related to Glover. The unsub is Caucasian like Glover, his height average like Glover. He has a mental illness, which Glover used to manipulate him. He is a follower, which is what Glover would look for in an accomplice.
The unsub was a killer as well. Maybe Glover had pried the beast out, but it had been there before, lurking. And his characteristics weren’t related to Glover at all. This was her own problem, the problem that hounded her. When Rod Glover appeared, she viewed the world differently. Through a warped lens.
After turning on her laptop, she scrolled through the entire photo collection, this time focusing on the photos in which Glover didn’t appear. Searching them for anything. Anything at all.
She found it within twenty minutes.
A photo she’d seen on the church memorial board was missing from this collection. And she instantly knew who appeared in the photo alongside Catherine.
Allen Swenson.
She found the photos that Tatum had taken of the memorial board in the church and flipped through them. Allen Swenson appeared in two of them. In one, he and Catherine stood with a group of other people, smiling at the camera. That one also appeared in the photos she’d gotten from the photographer, Finch. But the second was a photo of Allen and Catherine on a bench in the garden, talking. And that photo was missing from Finch’s photos. Why?
In fact, now that she thought about it, there were hardly any recent pictures of Allen at all. But he’d told them that he came to most Sunday services. She checked again. Swenson appeared only a handful of times, in large group shots.
She looked through the images yet again, this time focusing on the file names, making a note whenever the numbering jumped. Overall, the image numbers were consecutive. There would be a jump in the image numbers whenever the dates of the images changed, presumably because unrelated photos had been taken in between. Occasionally, one or two images would be missing, perhaps because they were blurry or unusable, deleted outright. But in the more recent folders, there were numerous missing pictures, the consecutive numbers suddenly leaping by four or five. A total of thirty-two photos were missing from the last two years.
Some photos had been removed. Was this done at Swenson’s request?
He’d told them he’d seen Catherine when he had been driving by the church. She thought back to that conversation. He’d said he had been talking to a friend. They’d never followed through on that. Which friend? Glover?
Had Catherine seen them both together in the car? If Glover thought she’d recognized him, saw that he was with Swenson, that could be enough to prompt her murder.