"Do you have his contact info?"
"No. We exchanged numbers then, but it was ages ago. With all the phone swapping, you had to save numbers manually back in the day. It's long gone." Violet asked, "You need him for something?" Leanne said, "I wanted to ask about the case again."
Violet sighed, wanting to encourage her to move on and understanding it was easier said than done.
Leanne was so young then, witnessing the gruesome scene of her parents' demise, which must have left her with psychological trauma.
And after all these years, with the culprit still at large, how could the family move on?
"Even if I had the number, odds are he's changed it by now." Violet tried to remember. "All I recall is that we call him Officer Wilbur."
Through a connection with a friend whose sister worked at the precinct, Leanne tracked down Officer Wilbur.
He'd retired for years. When Leanne called him, introducing herself, she half-expected him to have forgotten about a case from twenty years ago. But before she finished, Wilbur said, "Oh, it's you." They met at a coffee shop, and Wilbur dressed how you would picture a retired gentleman spending his days in the park, with thick eyebrows and a determined gaze.
He looked Leanne over with a pleased expression. "Saw your picture in the news a few days ago. You haven't changed a bit since you were a kid."
Leanne's tense mood eased a little. "You remember me?"
"I've never forgotten your parents' case."
He pulled out an old notebook, its pages yellowed, and the spine cracked. While caressing the cover, he said, "This case remaining unsolved was one thing, but another reason was the impression you left on me."
"You were only six but didn't cry when you saw us. You answered our questions calmly. Most kids your age would be terrified, unable to recall the details, but you were unnaturally calm for someone your age. The things your parents had told you, what the kidnappers said during those days, the sequence of events at the crime scene, you recounted everything with clarity."
Leanne had long forgotten the specifics following her escape from that abandoned factory, nor did she remember her demeanor before the police.
They thought she was eerily calm, but her memories of that period were only a distant haze.
She wasn't calm, just a child stripped of her parents and her sense of security, too scared even to cry.
"You provided us with many leads, and we even found one of the kidnappers, though it was his body. We investigated all his connections but found no links to your family. His death was a mystery, and that's where the trail went cold."
Wilbur regretted, "I'm sorry, child, that after all these years, we've still not caught the perpetrator."
"The one you found," Leanne asked, "Did he have a mole on his hand?"
Hanley was unrelated if the deceased was the man with the mole in his hand.
Under her gaze, Wilbur shook his head. "You mentioned this detail back then, and I did check it. No mole."
A flicker of hope in Leanne's heart extinguished.
Wilbur handed her the notebook. "This was my notebook from back then. All the details of the case are here. If there's a chance, I still hope to help find your parents' killer."
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