“In a way, it is. You grow up in a small town, you’re always under a magnifying glass. Everyone knows who you are—and what you are. So no, it wasn’t the daycare lady. Tremblay also considered the possibility it was someone from out of town who was passing through the area. Saw the girl, decided to snatch her, and killed the mom in the process.”
“Wouldn’t an outsider be noticed around here?” asked Frost.
“Right now the town’s quiet, but wait till September, when classes start up at Colby and the other local college. That’s two thousand students arriving, plus all the tourists who come through here to ogle the fall colors. In a crowd like that, you never know what kind of weirdo might turn up. So yeah, it’s possible it was an outsider. Someone who came for the girl, who must’ve kicked up a fuss. Mom hears the kid screaming, tries to stop it. So he had to kill her.”
“Did forensics turn up anything useful?” asked Jane.
“Fingerprints galore, but then she’d hosted that reception for her students a few days before she was killed. And there’d been a crew working in her house weeks earlier, renovating her kitchen. A carpenter, a plumber, and an electrician. Plus the ex-husband’s prints were everywhere.”
“So we’re back to James Creighton again.”
“He still had a key to the house, so he had access. He had a motive. And he had absolutely no alibi for the night his ex-wife was killed.”
“Where did he say he was that night?”
“Out on Penobscot Bay. He owned this crappy little sailboat and he claimed he was sleeping aboard it all weekend. No witnesses, of course.”
“Of course.”
“And then there was the blood.”
Jane perked up. “What blood?”
“Trace blood on the floorboards in the upstairs hallway. Just a few feet from where the victim was found.”
“The ex-husband’s?”
“Type A negative, a match for James Creighton. He claimed the blood was from a year before, when he’d cut himself while shaving.”
“Did he have any fresh injuries?”
“He had a healing cut on his finger, claimed it happened on his sailboat. There was blood on the boat too, so that didn’t really help us. They held him for forty-eight hours while they searched his rental house and his crappy sailboat, looking for the kid. Her hair and fingerprints were all over the place, of course, but there was no Lily. Since the girl visited him regularly, all that trace evidence added up to nothing. They had to let him go, but he’s still my number one suspect.” Thibodeau looked straight at Jane. “Now explain to me what Creighton has to do with your homicide case.”
“We were hoping you could tell us,” said Jane.
Thibodeau shook his head. “I have no idea. I don’t even know where he is at the moment.”
“You weren’t keeping tabs on him?”
“It’s been nineteen years. Tremblay kept hoping that one day he’d be able to prove Creighton did it. Maybe a witness would start talking, or the man would confess. Or, god forbid, they’d find the little girl’s body. A few years ago, we thought we did find her when a skeleton turned up at the state park twenty miles away.”
“A kid’s?” asked Jane.
“Yeah. Based on their condition, the bones had been there for a while, maybe a decade or more, and they belonged to a little girl around three years old.”
“Just like Lily.”
“Right after they found those bones, I pulled James Creighton in for questioning. Ran him through the wringer. I wanted so badly to nail him for the kid’s murder, but then we got back the DNA on those bones, and they didn’t match either him or Eloise.”
“Then whose bones are they?”
“They’re still unidentified. She’s just Little Girl Doe, left out in the woods.” He shook his head. “I thought I fucking had him.”
“What happened to Creighton?”
“The high school didn’t want him teaching music classes, so he lost that gig. From there he moved around, looking for other jobs. Worked at a Gas and Go in Augusta. A restaurant down in South Portland.”
That explained all the Maine phone numbers on Sofia Suarez’s cell phone records. She’d been trying to track down James Creighton, tracing his work history job by job. The gas station. The Buffalo Wings restaurant. Had she ever contacted him? Did the burner phone she called belong to Creighton?
“We want to show you a video,” said Frost, handing Thibodeau his cell phone. “It’s surveillance footage recorded at a cemetery in Boston. This isn’t the best way to view it, but I’ll send the file to you later, so you can watch it on your desktop.”