Evil Next Door by Amanda Lamb Read Free Book Online Page B

being relevant to the case were pretty minimal. Still, he had a dead girl at the medical examiner’s office that he was obligated to find justice for. He wasn’t going to take any chances that potential evidence might be contaminated, not even by the chief of police.
    He said Perlov looked at him and must have seen the rage in the eyes of a “tired old fat man” and decided touching the phone wasn’t worth setting off the firestorm that would surely follow. Whatever the reason, ultimately she backed away, and so did he. They both had bigger fish to fry. Their petty differences would not derail their common goal of catching a killer.

Stranger Than Fiction
    In the early stages of an investigation everything is considered evidence. Nothing is ignored because until a working theory of the case is developed, anything might ultimately have something to do with the crime.
    Investigators kept circling back to their puzzling discovery of the underpants on the bush not far from Stephanie’s apartment. It looked like someone had been running by and had tossed a bagful of underwear in the air. The empty red duffel bag lay in the dirt near the bush. What were the chances that women’s underwear just happened to end up on shrubbery the same night a woman is raped and murdered in a nearby apartment?
    “That caused us all kinds of concern. What does this have to do with anything?” Morgan recalled his thoughts at the time.
    Investigators discovered that the local hotel chain had given out as many as six thousand of those particular duffel bags to guests as a promotion in the past year. They also discovered that a flood at one of the hotels had soiled about a thousand of the bags. The damaged bags had in turn been offered to any employee who wanted them; the rest were thrown away. With the sheer number of bags given out, it was simply impossible for investigators to track where this particular one had come from.
    Officers quickly determined that an adolescent boy who lived in the apartment right next to Stephanie’s was responsible for leaving the underwear on the bush. Initially, the thirteen-year-old boy told investigators he found the underwear in a Dumpster in the apartment complex parking lot. But after more questioning, the boy admitted to having stolen the underwear from the apartment complex laundry room. In a strange twist, the boy’s bedroom was found to share a wall with Stephanie’s, but there was no indication that any of the underwear had belonged to Stephanie Bennett or either of her roommates. The boy swore in multiple interviews he had nothing to do with the murder. While Morgan thought the boy was a “budding pervert,” he believed him. He didn’t think the kid was capable of committing such a serious crime. But this left the never-ending question in Morgan’s mind—who was?

CHAPTER TWO
    False Leads
    Summer 2002
     
The function of wisdom is to discriminate between good and evil.
    —CICERO
     
     
     
     
     
     
     
     
    On May 27, 2002, the Raleigh Police Department released to the public a sketch of a man seen in the vicinity of Stephanie Bennett’s apartment. They didn’t refer to him as a suspect in the murder, but simply as a man whom they “wanted to talk to.” The person pictured in the composite was thin with short brown hair, narrow features, and glasses. The sketch, like most composites, was so nondescript it was almost comical. It could have been any young white man.
    To be fair, the first composite in a case often looks a little cartoonish, because people have tenuous memories at best when it comes to recalling someone’s exact features. Ten people could see the same person and describe him in ten slightly different ways, depending on their vantage point, how long they had observed the person, and what built-in biases they brought to the table.
    This picture of a man, drawn in charcoal on a stark white background, looked more like the guy who might mow your lawn or change the oil in your