Empty Promises

blond hair. John Nordlund bagged these into evidence.
    The detectives took hair samples from members of the household. Arnold Brown was asked to supply samples from his head and pubic area and he did so without argument.
    They noted what appeared to be blood spatters on the wall of Brown’s room, which was located directly across the hall from the children’s bedroom on the ground floor. Both rooms were close to the back door that led out to the yard. The detectives photographed the spatters before they carefully lifted blood samples from the wall with swabs moistened with a sterile water solution.
    Something about Arnold Brown niggled at them; they sensed that he was experiencing something more than grief. He was nervous, but that was to be expected. He looked young for twenty-four. He still had that gawky, unfinished look that teenagers have. He was medium-tall, medium-built, brown-haired. He had just lost his niece, a child he said he was very fond of, but his reactions were slightly off, and his demeanor was flat. Still, people deal with grief and shock differently. Maybe they were looking at Arnold so closely because he was the one new element in the household’s composition; he had been visiting for only three days.
    When they questioned him more closely, Arnold Brown grudgingly revealed that he was in Washington State on a travel permit from the Oregon State Department of Corrections. “I’m on probation,” he said quietly.
    “For what?” Nordlund asked.
    Arnold said he had a conviction for first-degree burglary because he’d been found inside a roller rink after it was closed.
    Nordlund knew that it took more than that to be convicted of first-degree burglary, but he said nothing. “Anything else?” Nordlund asked.
    Arnold admitted that he also had a juvenile record because of an assault, but he declined to be more specific. Nordlund didn’t press him—they would check on his record later.
    Arnold’s hands were scratched and they had curious red pressure marks on them, creases that were not quite bruises.
    “Where did you get those?” Danny Melton asked.
    He stared at his hands and said finally, “I must have gotten those from the blackberry bushes.”
    John Nordlund took pictures of Arnold’s hands; they would be part of a growing photographic record of the scene where Jannie Reilly had lived and died. Among the photos were shots of the house, the yard, and the body of the victim.
    Asked what clothes he wore the evening before, Arnold said he had on his Movin’ On jeans when he walked the dog, but had changed into the cutoffs he wore now. He readily agreed to turn over his cutoffs and jeans to the detectives so they could be tested in the crime lab. He couldn’t find his jeans in his room, but then he finally dug down into his backpack and pulled them from the bottom. “If they have blood on them, it would be Jannie’s from her getting hurt at the playground today,” he said.
    They knew that Jannie Reilly’s body had no cuts or abrasions on it—nothing beyond the mark on her neck. Arnold was protesting too much.
    The homicide detectives had yet to find the weapon of death—some cord or rope that might have caused the deep groove in Jannie’s neck. They searched the backyard in the gray light of early morning, scanning it for anything that looked out of place. Eventually, they found a wire cord near the fence. They thought it might match the cruel indentation on the small victim’s neck. But Dr. Eisele looked at it and shook his head. No match.
    It seemed more and more unlikely that someone could have crept into the Reillys’ house during the night. The windows were either locked or had screens firmly in place, with enough dust and spiderwebs to show they hadn’t been removed and then replaced. The doors were locked with dead bolts. The killer almost certainly had known where Jannie and Max slept. In most homes, the children’s bedrooms are upstairs rather than in the basement, so someone had to know the layout of the Reillys’ home.
    The early suspicions of Don Cameron’s crew only grew stronger as they worked the crime scene. It was too coincidental that Arnold Brown just happened to go upstairs for a glass of water during the night and discover that Jannie was missing. In the dark of the children’s room, how could he have seen that? Further, if a stranger had entered the home during the night, why hadn’t the Reillys’ dog barked?
    The focus of the investigation kept