For a moment, I believed I had misheard him. My mind was racing through every possible meaning of those words—the suspect isn’t human. I stared at Detective Whitaker.
“What do you mean?” I finally managed.
He set the evidence bag down carefully. “The lab results came back. The stain on Emily’s backpack wasn’t blood. It wasn’t anything human. It was animal fecal matter—cat, specifically.”
I blinked at him, trying to process. A wave of shame replaced it. My little girl had been terrified, her teacher had sounded the alarm, and my brother had been accused of the unthinkable—all because of a stain?
“We still had to be thorough,” Detective Whitaker said, his voice steady but firm. “Given Emily’s statement and the drawing, we couldn’t take chances. But the backpack tells us a different story.”
I thought back. Emily often brought her sketchpad and crayons everywhere. At home, our cat Daisy would climb over her things constantly. Daisy had a habit of sitting on backpacks, laundry, anything soft left on the floor. It was possible that she had left her mark—literally—on Emily’s lavender backpack.
