However, there had been other ways in. This killer could have sneaked in via one of the less direct routes, blocked or locked the main doors, and then pursued this poor woman who had been training on her own. That was creepy, Cami thought with a shiver.
"So you went home last night?"
"Yes, I went home!" He looked aghast that he'd done this. "I checked the doors, saw the lights were off, and then left. I feel so terrible now."
Connor shook his head. "By then, the victim was already deceased. You couldn’t have known. And what happened this morning?"
"Our earliest booking was for eleven a.m.," the manager explained. "So Cody went in to do the cleaning at nine, and found her there."
"She was lying by the door," Cody said, shaking his head as if trying to shake away the memory of that moment. "I saw there was a scrape on her arm, and one of her earrings had come loose and was lying beside her. Her watch was also broken. I knew immediately that this was serious, that she must have been attacked. I checked her pulse. I admit I was panicking, but I was trying to remember what to do in such a situation. There was no pulse. I called the cops, and our manager, immediately."
Cami thought that even though the two men had been traumatized and shocked, it seemed they had done everything correctly.
"Is the scene still being checked?" Connor asked.
"Yes, we have forensics there now," the cop said.
"Let's go and take a look," he said to Cami.
As Cami followed him down to the covered track, she found her own mind veering back to Ethan. The sight of him. The sound of his breathing as he struggled for air. The fear as she'd seen the gunman moving from car to car, searching for them.
That nightmare moment had changed their lives, and she felt another rush of anxiety for Ethan. Would he survive? Was it a good or a bad thing that he'd been on life support for more than a day already?
Then, Cami pushed the thought firmly aside, because stressing about Ethan would not help her now. The only thing it would do was ensure Connor kicked her straight off this case if he realized she was getting distracted by this. She couldn't afford distractions and needed to focus.
There, by the main door, she saw crime scene tape had been stretched around an area of a few square yards. Right by the doors was where she'd ended up, and Cami recoiled from the fear she must have felt.
They stopped well before the scene, and put on gloves, head covers, and foot covers. Cami hoped that if there had been a struggle, there might be some trace evidence left by the killer. But since there had been none at the other two scenes, she was worried he might have been too sneaky.
There was the earring, marked by a number that the police had placed there.
And there was the watch. It, too, was lying on the artificial turf with a number placed beside it.
Looking closely at it, Cami saw it was a fitness watch, that this athlete had clearly been using to train.
Fitness watches, like most smart devices, were usually hackable.
An idea came to Cami. Perhaps there was more evidence that could be obtained from this scene - the actual physical track of what Davina had been through.
"I'm going to see if I can get into that watch," she muttered.
She had an idea about what that number scrawled on Davina’s arm might mean.
Would she be right? It would depend what information that watch had recorded before its owner died in terror.
CHAPTER FIVE
Opening her phone and starting up the program she needed, Cami began trying to access the victim's discarded watch. The strap had broken, but the watch itself looked fine. And it had enough battery life left to last another hour or so. She guessed that the watch had simply hibernated after Davina had died, with no vitals to monitor.
What could she learn from this chilling information?
Her program had gotten hold of the Bluetooth signal. Now, she needed to go back into the stored records.
Here was the start of Davina’s workout. This was where she'd set the device to track her run.
"See here," she told Connor. "I've communicated with her watch, and look what it's showing me."
He leaned over, staring down at the screen.
"This is where her workout began," Cami said, pointing to the place. "You can see here, she was doing this very scientifically. She had alarms set for when she needed to speed up and slow down, and also notifications if her heart rate went over, or under, a certain range. So she was taking this session seriously."
"Yes, I can see the parameters," he said.
"Here's the first hour." Quickly, Cami dragged her finger along the screen, speeding past the small fluctuations. "This was a long session. I’d guess it might have been her final training run before an event."
She followed the graphs and stats as the run progressed. Clearly, Davina had been tiring. Her speed had gradually bled away yet her heart rate remained high.
But then, something had happened.
Cami gasped as she saw the speed make a steep upward jump. Davina had accelerated, fleeing along.
"She must have seen him here," she said. "She knew something was wrong, for sure. Look how she started running. Here's her speed."
"And the heart rate, climbing into the red," Connor observed.
Now, Cami was noting something else.
"She must have been by the doors here. Because now the speed is stationary. But her heart rate is still spiking."
"She was fighting with him for sure," Connor said, looking at the evidence that the watch was giving. A woman who was now not moving, but a heart rate that was still stratospheric. She'd been struggling for her life. He'd caught up with the tiring woman - not difficult along an inside track with locked doors - and had attacked her.
Then, abruptly, the heart rate froze.
"That's the moment the watch broke off her wrist," Cami said. "While she was fighting him. I guess after that, she died, but because the watch fell off her wrist, we can't see the moment of death. The struggle was a couple of minutes long, though."
She took a look at the number on the watch’s display. And in her mind, she made the connection that she’d wondered about when she’d wanted to check the watch.