Lucy said, “So the Todds never had closure. The parents divorced before Camille was abducted. Then Camille goes missing and they have no idea what happened to her. They had hope when Rachel went missing that the police would find her because they had to be connected-same age, same general area-but Rachel’s case turned into a media blitz, and when her case was solved everyone forgot about Camille.”
Joe took issue with that. “No one forgot. I’m a cop; I’ve never forgotten a missing kid. I look at their pictures every damn day.”
Lucy said, “I’m trying to get into how the Todds felt. How Kip and Alexis turned their confusion and grief into a conspiracy to murder.”
“What you’re saying,” Sean interjected, “is that they felt Camille was forgotten because Rachel’s case got all the attention.”
Lucy nodded, then continued, “Look at this second scrapbook. It wasn’t until after the autopsy that the record keeping became messy. When Kip originally started, he felt a kinship to Peter, until he found out that Camille had been alive the whole time. While Rachel was already dead, all the police and FBI were focused on finding her, not Camille. It doesn’t matter that there was more evidence and more witnesses to Rachel McMahon’s murder; they’re looking at the investigation from the outside.
“Dominic Theissen was the public face of the FBI. He’s the one who verbalized the seventy-two-hour window. The Todds think that the police gave up after seventy-two hours and presumed she was dead.”
Joe said, “In the police reports, it looks like they felt she might have drowned. The creek was running high and kids playing close to the banks have slipped and fallen in the past, washing to shore miles downstream.”
Lucy nodded. “With Rachel, everything appeared to have been done right, and with Camille, everything appeared to have been done wrong-from the Todds’ perspective. Officer Stokes, who later became a detective, had been the responding officer to both crime scenes. Theissen spoke for the FBI. Tony Presidio was the FBI case agent-because initially, they believed the cases were connected. But Tony stayed with the McMahon case all the way through. Camille became a cold case, passed on to another agent when Tony moved to D.C.”
“That doesn’t explain Hans,” Noah said.
“He wrote the profile.”
“How would they get that report?” Joe asked.
Noah responded, “Not difficult. It’s not a classified file. Alexis Sanchez may have accessed it from Quantico.”
“You don’t know?”
“It would have been in Tony’s files,” Lucy said. “I think that’s why she wanted the McMahon file-for the newspaper articles that talked about Camille’s kidnapping. She didn’t want Tony or me to make a connection to either her or Kip, now that the FBI had interviewed him.”
Suzanne said, “If Tony had connected Rosemary Weber’s murder to McMahon, he may have seen the Todd name in the files, and traced Kip Todd back to Camille. Kip wasn’t hiding.”
“But Alexis was, using her married name, lying about her marital status.”
“But why now?” Joe asked. “It’s been fifteen years.”
“It started ten years ago,” Sean said. “Two things happened. Peter moved back to New Jersey, and Rosemary Weber published Sex, Lies, and Family Secrets. Peter was harassed in high school.” He pulled out his laptop and showed the group files he’d downloaded. “Kip Todd was a junior when Peter was a freshman. Same high school. But Kip, who has a degree-not in literature like he told you but computer engineering-hacked into the school system and deleted all his files. When Patrick was in Newark he grabbed a physical copy of the yearbook. And there’s Kip. It’s the only record that he went to the school-if you call them and ask, there are no computerized files. And Patrick followed up-all physical copies were destroyed after they were digitized.”
“When did he do it?” Lucy asked.
“When Peter was in Syracuse,” Sean said. “At least, that’s my educated guess.”
Lucy suspected that Sean knew for certain but that he hadn’t found the information through legitimate channels. She worried that someday his hacking skills were going to get him in trouble, but she had to admit that they often came in handy.
Lucy said, “They lost track of him when he ran away. Kip graduated from high school. Peter got his GED, then he went to college a year early. Kip would have been in college at the same time, and since Peter hadn’t legally changed his name or hid his identity, he was easy to find.”
“And Alexis got close to him? To psychologically torture him?” Suzanne shook her head. “They’re sick.”
“They’re methodical sociopaths.”
“What I don’t get is how Alexis beat the FBI background check,” Joe said. “Don’t you guys run your new agents through a vigorous system?”
“Yes,” Noah said, “but she didn’t lie about anything. Just because her sister was murdered doesn’t disqualify her from being an agent. When she interviewed, she lived in Denver, she was married, she had a daughter. All that was true. When she and her husband split, she amended her file. It’s all there, in her file, but unless you know what to look for, it’s not going to raise any concerns.”
“Why go through all that trouble to become an FBI agent if you’re only going to leave in the middle of training?”
“My guess?” Sean said. “They wanted information they couldn’t get without being an insider. Either on their sister’s murder investigation, or maybe they believed after Peter disappeared from Syracuse that the FBI knew where he was.”
Noah concurred and added, “Also, I don’t think Alexis planned on killing Tony so soon after killing Weber. But when Tony himself went to New York, she panicked and poisoned his Scotch.”
“Do we have a confirmation from the lab that his Scotch was definitely poisoned?” Lucy asked.
Noah shook his head. “We’re waiting on more tox reports. Right now, an ERT unit is combing through her dorm room looking for trace evidence. If she’s guilty, we’ll find it.”
“Why kill Rosemary now?” Lucy mused out loud.
“Because,” Joe said, “Rosemary was looking into the Theissen subway accident. The day before she was killed, she requested the autopsy report, the police report, and all security footage. Maybe Todd thought she’d see something that would nail him. Though we can’t confirm from the security tapes that Todd was the person who tripped Theissen, he fits the general description.”
“Theissen’s death set the chain of events into motion,” Suzanne said. “They’d quietly taken out Theissen. They may or may not have poisoned Bob Stokes. Kip Todd is keeping an eye on Rosemary-maybe he got the internship to see if she had information about Peter. Or maybe just to get close to her before he killed her, like Alexis got close to Peter.”
Noah asked, “Did they conspire to kill Theissen? Or was that the brother acting alone?”
“They had to be working together,” Sean said.
“Why?”
“The only way Alexis could have known Tony was working with Suzanne was if her brother tipped her off.”
Suzanne said, “They’re both looking very guilty.”
Lucy considered the facts they knew and all the conjecture and speculation. “I’m having a hard time figuring out which one of the siblings is dominant. Traditionally, it’s the male partner, but he was much younger when Camille was kidnapped. How his mother and his older sister responded to their grief would have a huge impact on him. He may have put himself into the protective role, that he needed to look out for them because he couldn’t protect Camille. Yet, Alexis went into the lion’s den-she was one of us. She ate with us, studied with us, lived with us. She kept up the act at all times. That shows an intense and controlled personality, capable of extreme emotional restraint.”
“I’ve looked at this security footage a dozen times,” Joe said, “and she wasn’t trying to kill Peter. I think she wanted to disable Sean.”