A chill.
I gazed unbelievingly at the receipt.
The item Griffin had sold but didn’t buy was a book of nursery rhymes with one specific page missing.
Oh.
No.
I snatched my things off my desk. “Ralph, we’re going to need another search warrant. There’s more in Griffin’s house.”
“How do you know?”
“‘Hush, little baby, don’t say a word.’ The nursery rhyme. There was a copy of the song under Jenna’s pillow-she’s the seven-year-old we found dead three years ago. She’d been raped, then buried alive in a shallow grave. The song had been ripped out of a book. We identified which nursery rhyme book it was from but we never found the book itself.” I slapped the receipt down on the table. “Griffin sold it. But he never bought it.”
I expected an expletive but got only shocked silence instead.
“I’m going to Fort Atkinson.” I pulled out my car keys. “Have the local authorities get to his house now and hold him on something, I don’t care what, and get me a search warrant for the rest of the house by the time I get up there. Fax it to the Fort Atkinson Police Department.”
“Got it.”
“I’m coming with you, Pat,” Radar said.
“We’ll take my car.”
We hurried to the parking garage, my thoughts running through everything once again, tying threads together into one dark, terrible fabric.
You matched the semen found at the scene of Jenna’s murder to that found on Mindy Wells’s body. Dr. Werjonic is meeting the true crime author, the guy who’s writing a book about her…
I recalled the items in Griffin and Mallory’s bedroom that weren’t for sale.
A handheld mirror on Mallory’s dresser. A nice mirror. Ornate.
A diamond ring in her jewelry box.
A stuffed dog on the bed.
There’s more. Something else…
In my head, I ran through the complete lyrics to the song:
Hush, little baby, don’t say a word,
Daddy’s gonna buy you a mockingbird.
And if that mockingbird don’t sing,
Daddy’s gonna buy you a diamond ring.
And if that diamond ring turns brass,
Daddy’s gonna buy you a looking glass.
And if that looking glass gets broke,
Daddy’s gonna buy you a billy goat.
And if that billy goat don’t pull,
Daddy’s gonna buy you a cart and bull.
And if that cart and bull turn over,
Daddy’s gonna buy you a dog named Rover.
And if that dog named Rover won’t bark.
Daddy’s gonna buy you a horse and cart.
And if that horse and cart fall down,
Well, you’ll still be the sweetest little baby in town.
We had the diamond ring, the looking glass (the mirror), and, if I was right about the stuffed dog, we had “the dog named Rover.”
What else?
Oh. Yes.
There’d been a ceramic bird resting next to the Manson Bible in the living room. No price tag on it. I’m no expert on birds, but I had a distinct feeling I knew what kind of bird that was.
A mockingbird.
Which meant that if Griffin really was collecting the items from the song, we needed a billy goat, a cart and bull, a horse and cart. I doubted that he would have live animals sequestered somewhere, but if that dog really did signify “the dog named Rover,” then it was likely he had other ways of representing the other animals too-perhaps more stuffed animals, toys, or maybe photographs or pictures of some type. Who knows.
Daddy’s gonna buy you a diamond ring.
A looking glass.
A mockingbird.
I wondered what the items represented to him.
Victims? Could each relate to another victim?
Hush, little baby…
He’d called Mallory “baby” twice while we were at the house. A harmless term of endearment, yes, unless it meant something a lot deeper to him.
Radar and I jumped into my car and took off.