Heads Will Roll – Chapter Seven

NOT EDITED

Three drops of blood. The rest of the school had been clean, but the basement had held blood. Bo pulled his homemade blood tester out of his camera bag and plugged it into his phone. From there, he swiped a test strip through one of the blood drops and inserted it into the tester.

“Do you… do you think it’s hers?” Rick asked from behind him.

“I’m technically required to repeat this test in the lab with the ‘official’ method to confirm or deny that,” Bo said. “But with that said… no. This blood belongs to someone who is AB-negative. Bonnie was listed as B-positive in the file.”

“You can already tell that?”

After a moment, Bo nodded. “Blood type, I can get you in about thirty seconds. Sex and race take a bit longer, and I have to verify it all in the lab before I can put anything in my report as actual evidence.”

Rick pointed at the device plugged into Bo’s phone. “You’re telling me you upgraded that thing to plug into your cell phone instead of be its own little thing, and you still haven’t patented it? Or registered it?”

Bo offered a sheepish smile. “Jamal’s been pressuring me to for years.”

“Yeah, and everyone else who knows about it,” Bridget said from the bottom of the stairs.

“I like… this,” Bo said, setting his phone in his camera bag while it continued its testing of the blood. I like my life the way it is, and I like my job the way it is. I don’t want to be the inventor or the innovator or the guy who pushes forensics forward. I just want to be… the guy. A guy. The lab geek. I’ve given Jamal permission to patent anything I create and market and distribute from there, but he won’t.”

“Because he doesn’t think anyone but you deserves the credit for your inventions,” Bridget reminded.

“I don’t need credit for it. I just want to… use it.” Bo cleared his throat as he pushed himself to his feet, hands moving back to his camera. “Besides, with how long it took science to accept that washing your hands before performing surgery was good for your patients and that actually taking fingerprints and blood from crime scenes was good, I don’t think any of my… inventions, if you must call them that, would take very quickly.”

Jeff, who leaned back against the wall near Bridget, snorted. “That’s probably fair.” He nodded toward Bo’s camera bag. “Still pretty cool though.”

“Thank you.” Bo turned his camera back on. “I’d like to do a thorough documentation of the basement, including photographs, and a full sweep for further evidence. In the meantime, Jamal’s people should have gotten my lab equipment brought to the Ellepath station. If you want to head back there with Bridget, she’ll make sure everything’s good to go so I can get right into it when I’m done here.”

Jeff pushed away from the wall, hand shooting up into the air. “I call Bridget.”

Bridget laughed. “I thought you had a girlfriend?”

“Psh, on and off. Totally mentioned that earlier,” Jeff said as he headed up the stairs. “And between you and me, she’s currently big mad at me for canceling plans two days in a row.”

She snorted, rolling her eyes before following him up the stairs.

“He’s a good guy,” Rick said once they were both out of the basement.

“Hmm?”

“Jeff. He’s a good guy. A bit of a slacker sometimes, and probably the closest thing this town has to a playboy, but a good guy.”

“Well then, as long as he and his girlfriend are ‘off’ again, I’m sure Bridget will enjoy our time here in Ellepath.” Bo offered a soft smile. “She’s always had a thing for pretty playboys.”

Rick chuckled, thankful his mind had allowed him this brief distraction. “She’ll like Jeff, then. Bastard tried to sleep with Heidi when we first came to Iowa.”

Bo snorted. “And this man is… your friend?”

Rick couldn’t help but roll his eyes. “Unfortunately. But hey, he’s since grown as a person and has limited himself to single women.”

“I suppose that’s an improvement.”

“I take what I can get with people changing who they are. It doesn’t happen as often as you want it to, y’know?”

Bo nodded. “Unfortunately,” he echoed.

Rick scratched the side of his head, eyes following Bo as he walked around the basement, blue eyes scanning every centimeter of the place. “What about you?”

“What about me?”

“Bridget likes pretty playboys. Jeff likes, well, most single women. I’m married. What… about you? The last time we met, you were a teenager, so it, y’know, would’ve been inappropriate to ask if you were married at the time.”

Bo chuckled. “I suppose it would have been, yes. It’s… just me, for the most part.”

“Have any plans to change that?”

Bo offered a shrug. “Bridget and I have a contingency plan of sorts, in regards to having children. IVF. The main parts of that are already said and done. Outside of that… I don’t know. Most of the people I’ve taken any inkling of an interest in haven’t exactly returned the favor. Bridget is probably the only person who ever would, but we tried that way once upon a time, and we just work better together this way.”

“Well, for what it’s worth… raising a kid with your best friend someday isn’t that bad of a plan.”

A little smile tugged at one corner of Bo’s mouth. “That’s the hope.”

“She seems like a nice gal.”

“She is. Aside from my parents and the analyst I usually work with, she’s… the only person who has stuck around longterm in my life. I don’t think I could find a better person to raise a child with, friend or otherwise.”

“I’m glad you have in your life. I know, uh, when I was still there with the LAPD, you were having a pretty rough go of it. I’m glad some of that has changed.”

“Me too,” Bo said after a moment. “There are a couple hairs over here. The likelihood that they’ll give us DNA or be noteworthy is relatively low, but…”

“But you’d rather have them and they prove useless than not have them and risk leaving something useful behind,” Rick said.

“Ah, I see you still speak a little bit of my language.”

Rick chuckled softly. “Yeah, a smidge. The years of working little more than drunk teens trespassing and small cases of vandalism may have lulled me into a false sense of security, but the detective brain’s still back there somewhere.” He nodded toward Bo. “And you, Jesus, it’d be impossible to totally forget you and all your weird little quirks. Which is not an insult. Your weird little quirks invent shit and solve cases like no other. If you and your quirks didn’t exist, Bonnie wouldn’t have… a Goddamn chance of ever being found alive.”

“I have… certainly pulled a miracle or two in my time with the LAPD. I only hope I can do the same here,” Bo said as he lifted his camera to photograph the hairs.

“If anyone can, it’s you. I know you’ve gotta be sick of hearing that, but none of us are saying it to blow smoke up your ass. We’re saying it because we know it’s true. You’re the best there is, Bo.”

Bo offered that awkward little smile Rick had seen plenty of times during their LA case together. He was relatively certain it was Bo’s attempt to ‘appease’ anyone complimenting him without necessarily having to accept it in order to move past it. “When we’re done here, I’d like to pay a visit to Miss Young’s mother. I’d like to do a once-over of Miss Young’s bedroom, just so it can be crossed off the checklist. I’ll also take the opportunity to collect hairs from her hairbrush to compare against these. I should also be able to collect a few fingerprints to run against anything we find in here or in her car. Which… I assume hasn’t been located?” he asked.

“No, but we put out a BOLO for it.”

“In and out of town?” Bo asked.

Rick nodded. “Yeah, and Jeff and I were planning on doing a pass through Webster in the cruisers, see what we can see. If this guy dumped her car, I can’t see him going much further than that. Unless he had an accomplice, he’d have to walk back home afterward.”

Bo lowered his camera to his chest as he glanced up at Rick. “How far away would that be?”

“Webster? About ten miles.”

Bo nodded as he picked up the first hair with a pair of tweezers. He put it into an evidence bag and sealed it shut. “Even if you’re consistently running six-minute miles, it’s still an hour to get back home, assuming that ‘home’ is here in Ellepath. And that ‘home’ is where Miss Young is being kept.”

“How likely do you think that is?”

“Six-minute miles, or the location of Miss Young?” Bo asked.

“The location.”

Bo rose to his feet, evidence bags in hand. “It’s hard to say for sure. Some unsubs take their victims home, some take them to an abandoned location, some take them to the woods. In a town this size, you don’t exactly have a ton of abandoned buildings, right?”

“Not that I know of, but Jeff would know for certain. He grew up here. Knows this place, its secrets, and all of its backroads like the back of his hand.”

“Good.” Bo set the evidence bags in his camera case and pulled out a clipboard. On his little sketch of the basement, he marked where the hairs had been located. “Abandoned buildings, empty houses, wooded areas, old sheds, old cellars… Anything you could contain a person in with a chance of nobody seeing them is a place that needs to be checked out.” Bo cleared his throat. “It’s also possible her car is being kept at the kidnapper’s house. Or… wherever she’s being kept. If the location has a garage or a big enough shed, the car doesn’t have to be dumped anywhere. That’s unfortunately something we’ll have to factor in too.”

“Lot of factors.”

“I know.”

“And so little time and man power to cover them all.”

Bo nodded. “Yeah. It’s not… ideal. But it’s doable, in some regard. We’ll make it work. I’ll go over this whole entire town with a fine tooth comb if needed. We’ll make it work, and we will cross every damn T and dot every damn I until we find her.” He gestured around the room with his camera. “In the meantime, a second pair of eyes would be nice, if… you want?”

“I can do that.”

“Wonderful. If you see anything, no matter how benign, let me know.”

“Will do, lab geek. Will do.”

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