Criss Cross

Chapter 63

Present day

In my attic office that morning, I stared without emotion at an old copy of the lab report stating that the hair I’d dropped matched Kissy Raider’s. I closed the file and opened another that contained a copy of that same lab report as supporting evidence for search warrants at all homes and businesses owned by Mikey Edgerton’s family.

I found an evidence log noting various items discovered beneath the floorboards of Mikey’s room in a vacation home the Edgerton family maintained at a lake in western Maryland. I scanned the list until I saw:

Eight (8) locks of blond hair in specimen bags.

Eight photographs, Polaroid, of eight women, all blond.

The actual photographs weren’t in my files, but I remembered them as clearly as if I’d seen them yesterday. In every one, including the picture that showed Kissy Raider, each doomed woman was alive, bound, gagged, and terrified.

I shut the file and then the box, not needing to look further, not needing to see the DNA results that linked the eight locks of hair to Edgerton’s eight victims.

And the strand of hair I dropped? I had not lost a wink of sleep over it. Ever.

Mikey Edgerton raped and killed those women. Of that there was no doubt.

You might ask if I believed the ends justified the means, and I’d answer that in this case, yes. The families of Kissy Raider and Edgerton’s other victims got justice when he was convicted, and they got more justice when he opted for the electric chair. And the world, in my opinion, was made a safer place.

I’d picked up a burn phone the day before. A text came in over it from Sampson.

Wake the chief. She’s not answering. Bring her and meet me at Seventeenth and R Southeast. She’s going to want to see this.