Sally Massinger was a very pretty little girl, with blonde hair and blue eyes. Nick could vaguely make out a certain acquaintance's features in her face.
"You don't need to be so scared. We just need to know where this watch came from," he asked as gently as he could.
"I... I found it," the little girl stammered through her sobs.
The Black headmistress beside her mercilessly exposed the clumsy lie. "Sally, that's not what you told Ben. You told him you took this watch from your dad."
There was no need for a good cop, bad cop routine with a girl who had only just started middle school. All Hancock, a big Black man, had to do was stand in front of her to frighten her badly enough that she admitted stealing the Rolex from her father's drawer.
What followed was simple. Inspector Raynard went to the courthouse in person and obtained a search warrant from a judge, while Nick and Hancock took patrol officers to surround a house in southeast Portland.
The man of the house, an ordinary-looking, middle-aged white man, was handcuffed and escorted into a police car. Wu led the remaining officers in a search, working from lists of items missing from the murder scenes sent over by the police departments in Phoenix and Albuquerque.
Meanwhile, as expected, Nick met a familiar stranger: the woman of the house. She looked almost exactly like Root-or rather, Lila, the female researcher from the world of Cabin in the Woods.
Well, the woman before him clearly looked considerably older than Lila, and her figure was somewhat different too. Dressed in clothes for lounging at home, she looked much more like a married woman.
"Is it her? This Lina Massinger should be the person we're looking for, right?" Watching the