by RJ Scott
I nodded. “That was my first thought, but it could be that he just knew the sinkhole was there and considered it was the perfect place to hide Casey.” I caught a movement. Drew bent his head, and I hated that we had to talk about his brother as if he was a chess piece and part of a puzzle that needed solving. “I’m sorry, Drew, for your loss, for what we have to do.”
Drew looked right at me. Sudden fire lit his expression, and his tone was fierce. “Whatever it takes.”
There was a moment of silence, and then Sawyer rustled the papers. “Pastor William Kirkland, known in town as Pastor Bill, would preach at church about what he called Hell’s Gate, which is a colloquial local name for the largest of the sinkholes and the one where the remains were found. He would tell kids at church that Hell was at the bottom, but it was generally acknowledged by parents that this was just his way of keeping us safe.”
“But now you think otherwise?”
He glanced at me and nodded, and I knew better than to dismiss the gut instincts of a local man.
“Beverly said Casey escaped,” Drew interjected. “But from where? And was she in her right mind at the time? She told me she didn’t know about the girls. I assume she means the remains we found whom so far have all tested as female. She also said that the pastor told her Casey shouldn’t have run. Also, it was clear she thought the pastor was consumed by guilt but that he took money to keep quiet.”
I digested everything. “We need to get onto that money trail.”
“We have requests in,” Sawyer said and sounded defeated. The FBI being involved meant a certain amount of red tape could be torn aside, and this was at least one thing I could do for him.
“I’ll expedite them.”
“She told me the pastor was the first of the secret holders to go to hell.” Drew’s voice had a dead quality. “And you know how much that makes me look at every single person in town?”
At this point I didn’t have to be the one who said that small towns are a network of families, run on old hurts and new connections and probably full of secrets.
“I know.”
“What sticks out is that what Beverley said implies there are others involved in this,” he said as if he needed to hear himself say it out loud.
“We’re here to help find connections.” I left out the “if we can” part because I was determined that we would locate every guilty party, find out what had happened to the women whose remains we’d found, discover the full story behind Casey McGuire, and understand how Adam Gray fitted into all this. The team I was part of wouldn’t leave until we did.
“What we want to…” Drew began and then stopped talking, and I couldn’t fail to see Logan moving subtly closer, his hand touching Drew’s hip, warning him, gentling him. I filed the observation away, along with the rest of what I gleaned from Logan’s and Drew’s body language. “Okay,” Drew finally offered, although I could see the focus in his expression and knew it was only a momentary pause in Drew’s search for why Casey had been on that road, in the dark, running back to town.
“We’re setting our team up at the hotel. We’ve taken all the rooms so we have space to work, knowing you’d be overwhelmed in this small space.”
Sawyer bristled at my comment about his department being small, but then smiled ruefully, and relaxed. I’d been stating facts. Apart from one room with desks, a secure room for arrested felons, a filing room, kitchen, and two small offices, this place wasn’t big, more used to small-town crime than a murder spree or two.
“There are three of us assigned to work this case so far. The first, Special Agent Avery Kerridge, will be arriving soon, but until she does, Drew, concerns about civilians working with the team on what has become a federal issue is in your case outweighed with your local knowledge. I respect your place in this, and I’ll be happy to work on that premise, but there are boundaries and certain privacies that need to be kept between just us in this room and my team. Agreed?”
I held out my hand to him, and he took it, his grip firm. “Agreed.”
We spoke about everything so far, and by the time I’d eaten muffins, cookies, and drunk two more department coffees, enjoying the buzz, I had a thought map that was as confusing as the board in Sawyer’s office.
“First is talking to the families of the women so far identified.” We’d started giving files names, including the one that had only come in yesterday, so I was staring at blank pages as much as the cops in the town were.
Sawyer cleared his throat. “Okay, Jessica Bowyer and Angela Rowlandson are the only two that have an obvious connection. They were both students at Penn State, both from Buffalo, but the connection is tenuous as they were in different classes and disappeared four years apart. I’ve got a call in with the student admin, but we’re talking administration information from over forty years ago.”
“I’ll get the investigating teams to work that for us.”
“There’s another connection,” Logan said. “Melissa also attended Penn State, from Corning, but she dropped out after a few weeks, and it looks like she took a wrong turn to drugs.”
I tapped the file in my lap. “So could it be that Penn State is a common denominator? We should pull any relevant information, cross-reference everything, and track down families, interview anyone we can, who they were, had they visited Lancaster Falls. In addition, while on the surface, the deaths of both Casey McGuire and Adam Gray seem as if they could be outliers, we need to approach them with the same level of investigation.” I chanced a brief look at Drew, who caught my glance and nodded. I didn’t want to talk about his brother’s death as part of a checklist of things to do, but I knew he wanted to know what had happened to Casey. “Do you have anything to add, Drew?”
“Why did my brother end up in Hell’s Gate? The other bones so far have been ID’d as female, so why him? Also, how does this connect with the Kirklands and their murder-suicide?”
I loved the puzzle side of this job, stripping away the trauma and the grief and focusing on the details. That analytical part of my brain was certainly inherited from Grandpa Toby, down through his daughter, my mom, who was a genius at crossword puzzles.
One of the first things I’d learned in my training was to be able to separate facts from emotion, and that might have come across as harsh or unfeeling, but the recruits were all told at the same time that to let the job overtake our lives would end up destroying us. So I had to encourage Drew with tact and respect to examine things past this focus.
When it was obvious we’d covered as much as we were able, Sawyer leaned back on his desk, arms crossed over his chest. “There’s one coincidence we can’t ignore. The fact that the Hell’s Gate sinkhole is right next to Adam’s land, and the cave and tunnel complex extends down past his cabin to the rockfall at Iron Lake.”
Outside, the heavens had opened, another storm hitting the town, destroying any hope of finding anything outside at Adam Gray’s place, even if we’d left everything covered as best we could. Only failing light had stopped us from searching, but there was a whole cabin there to work our way through. The town didn’t have the manpower to close everything down, but I’d managed to get three local agents to cover tonight, and there was a specialized team arriving in the morning, coming straight from the Philly case that my boss was still working on. It was a shitty indictment on the world that there were so many cross-county border murders that had to be investigated at a federal level.
I tugged out the sheet of information on Adam. “Former Army, widowed, veteran with PTSD, isolated. Is there anything else you can add that would link him to murders committed in the seventies?”
“I remember visiting his place when I was a kid.” Sawyer pulled out a chair and slumped into it. “Back then, it was a tangled mess, but he didn’t have it fenced off the way it is now. There was the occasion when we were watching him, not older than six, and Josh was going to steal his bandana. It wasn’t a high point of our young lives when he chased us off with a broom.”
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“A broom? Not a gun.”
“Not that I recall. When we were teenagers, maybe thirteen, fourteen or so, we used to cross the corner of his land to get up to the old Dwyer cabin, or the Ghost House as we liked to call it.”
“I remember that,” Drew added. “He was old even then, at least to us.”
“We stayed at the cabin one night I—me, you, Josh. Remember—remember how Adam was patrolling his border where it butted up against the cabin along with two of those big dogs, German Shepherds I think.”
“Dogs, fatigues,” Drew agreed, “and a gun, I recall that.”
Not a broom then. A gun. In the space of eight to nine years, he’d escalated to a gun.
I filed away the words they used like patrolling and border. Maybe he was an eccentric loner who didn’t want to connect with the world, or maybe he was the king of his own place, looking after what was his, territorial, armed. Had the women in the sinkhole strayed onto his land? Had Casey somehow been involved? Not that any of that made sense—why would any of them wander onto Adam’s land?
“You recall Josh and the poison ivy…” Sawyer began.
“Yeah,” Drew finished, and I waited for more, which Sawyer gave me.
“Josh fell into poison ivy, and he was in a real mess, and we panicked. The closest person was Adam Gray, and he was patrolling as always, and it was him who told us to take Josh to the hospital. Adam didn’t actually say another word to us, though, after that, just waited for us to start walking away before he vanished back into the forest.”
I lost myself in the circular thoughts of where we were going with all this and who was best for what task. “We should start by getting back out to Adam’s place in the morning. I want to take a good look at his cabin and the surrounding area. My colleague, Avery, will take point on building the family picture. When she’s due could you arrange for someone—”
“Tate will be in the office, get her to go there.”
“Okay.” There really was nothing else to say. “Let’s get some sleep. Tomorrow is another day.” I waited until Drew and Logan left, until it was just me and Sawyer in the room, and I shut the door so we could talk frankly.
“What is it?” he asked in a worried tone.
“Peter Sandoval.” I couldn’t miss his instant frown.
“What about him?” He sounded defensive, and I immediately jumped on that chink in his armor.
“He stopped me in the street, gave me his card, said he wanted to help.” I held back on the fact that he said that the PD under Sawyer couldn’t help him or that he was tipping into pathetic and needy. “Tell me what you know.” I took a seat, indicating I wasn’t leaving until I had the full story.
“There’s an underlying problem in Lancaster Falls.” Sawyer moved to the window, staring out at the rain, but I didn’t press him for an explanation because I got the sense it would be coming soon. Patience was the watchword when it came to getting information out of people. Or so Grandpa Toby had told me when I’d first left college with my degree in criminal justice and applied to work for the FBI.
After the longest time, he turned and sat back at his desk and picked up a pencil as if he needed something to fidget with as he spoke.
“Peter Sandoval was taking kickbacks to overlook certain actions taken by various people living in town. Bribes. He embezzled money from the department.” At this point, he tapped the pencil on a notebook to one side. “Over a quarter of a million dollars in the space of the last twenty years. Our independent forensic accountant sent data to us, which arrived late yesterday, but it’s a matter of making a case to arrest him.”
“But you haven’t?”
“No, I could go out now and call him on what he’s done, arrest him, but that would mean the money trail goes dead because there’s more to this than meets the eye. For one thing, there were payments to the church, which puts him squarely in the orbit of Pastor Kirkland or his wife, or maybe both of them. Why do you think he would steal money from the PD to give to Pastor Kirkland, for Kirkland to then send it on to anonymous accounts?” He waited for me to put two and two together.
“Because he’s one of those who Kirkland was blackmailing for their secrets?”
“Bingo. So what is the secret? What dark secret was it that made our former captain became so entwined with the pastor? Also, in other news, a vast amount of the money ended up in the Lancaster Falls bank in several differently named accounts. Said bank is owned and managed by Joe Dwyer, who is connected at the hip to our mayor Gerald Stokes.”
I scribbled notes. “Sandoval, Dwyer, Stokes, and Kirkland? You think they are all connected with the financial misdemeanor? Or worse, there is blackmail here?”
“Dwyer and Stokes are old money in this town. Add in Sandoval, and there is a distinct old boy network that runs the place or at least ran it all the while Sandoval was in charge. He overlooked evidence, twisted stories. I have a complete dossier on the things he’s done, but an arrest means losing a strengthening link to be made between him and our mayor and the owner of the bank. What if one of them had something to do with Casey disappearing? Why wouldn’t it be the pastor who was being blackmailed? Why is the money going in to the church and also the bank?”
“And are you thinking that this old boy network connects to the remains in the sinkhole? To the women we’re identifying?”
Sawyer nodded. “If I listen to my gut, then yes. You should take this,” he murmured and handed over a memory stick. “The audit results, the information I’ve gathered, the summaries I’ve made that need to be checked. I’d be grateful if you cast your eye over it, and maybe there is a profile to be made based on what is on there.”
I genuinely thought he expected me to look at the data and offer a solution, but how could I see something he didn’t? He was a good cop, and he might have been overwhelmed with the chaos in his town, but he was keenly observant, and I admired that.
“I’ll read through it all, and then we’ll talk.”
As I jogged back to the hotel, between rain squalls, splashing through puddles that would soon disappear when the sun shone again, I answered a call from Maggie. My feet and the hems of my pants were wet, I was hot, but none of that mattered when Grandpa Toby’s caregiver needed to speak to me.
“Hey,” I said to Maggie, just as I reached the door and let myself into the hotel. Josh was sitting at the reception desk, ledgers and notebooks opened in front of him. He looked up at me and nodded.
“If you know anyone who wants soup…” she deadpanned.
That was one of my Grandpa’s things. He was fixated on heading to the grocery store and buying soup to the point where he had a pantry full of cans and Maggie removed ones from the back every so often to keep things in order. It wasn’t as if Grandpa recalled how many cans he had, nor that he’d bought them the day before. He’d built an impenetrable wall of tins, and if there was one gap, he got agitated. He also refused to go out if it was too cold because he wouldn’t wear a scarf, or too hot because he hated hats. There wasn’t a lot of sense in what he did, but in his lucid moments, he could recall memories of me as a child and of his dead wife, my wonderful Grandma Louisa.
“Shit, Maggie, did he sneak out again? How can we work this out?” Do I need to go up there and work on security, maybe a better alarm?
“No, we went together, and he bought another six cans of soup, but that isn’t the reason I called. It’s because he actually had a really good day today, told me that I should call you and tell you that he’s proud of you. That you should know that.”
My chest tightened, but at least the adrenalin rush subsided. Those words meant a lot to me, more than anyone could know. My mom as happy with my choice of career, but there was also Grandpa Toby who’d always been there for me, along with Grandma Louisa when she’d been in my life.
I had so much to say right there and then, so much love welled inside me, but the emotions were trapped in my chest.
I was choked and lost for words for a mo
ment, and then I caught Josh’s gaze, and he smiled at me. That broad, easy smile reached his eyes, and somehow I found a strength in his quiet support.
“Can you tell him, when he’s next… can you say that I love him and I’m proud of him too?”
“Of course I will.”
“Is he…? What is he doing now?”
She paused, and that simple act told me everything I needed to know. “The lucid time didn’t last long, and he’s sleeping right now.”
“Thank you, Maggie. I owe you one hell of a lot.”
“I know this isn’t a good time, Josh, but we really need to talk about assisted living.”
I knew that. In my heart I knew it. “I know. I promise that we’ll talk seriously when I come back.”
I just wished I could’ve been there for him every single moment, but if I could find out what had happened to the only case he’d never been able to solve, the disappearance of the woman he loved, then that was my way of showing I loved him and that I wanted him to have peace in the end.
Eight
Josh
“There’s food in the kitchen if you want to eat,” I said after Lucas had finished the call. He appeared wiped out as if he’d received the most awful news, and what I really wanted to ask was if he was okay. That wasn’t my place, but I could at least feed him.
“Thank you,” he murmured, snapping out of wherever he’d gone.
I went into the kitchen, and he followed.
“Are you okay?” He sounded concerned.
“Yeah? Why do you ask?”
“You’re limping.”
“Football injury from school, aches some days, should have stuck to Math club.” I wanted to change the subject because he was way too sympathetic, and I would break down in a minute and ask for a hug. “It’s just pasta and sauce. It’s easy, and I wasn’t sure what time you were getting back. Is that okay?”