The Fallen Girls: An absolutely unputdownable and gripping crime thriller (Detective Clara Jefferies Book 1)

by Kathryn Casey

  “Sadly, no.”

  “We do have the dress. Someone might recognize it.”

  “Could happen,” Doc said. “But the likelihood is that this girl may take a while to identify. We haven’t got a lot here to work with. You got enough pictures?”

  “Yes.” I bent over and started zipping up the body bag. I hadn’t noticed any gunshot or knife wounds. I wondered if the doc had seen anything I’d missed. “So, Doc, any idea what we’re looking at here? How this girl died?”

  “Nah,” he said.

  “Any chance this is natural causes?”

  “I’ll need to take a good look at her,” he said. “But no. I don’t think so.”

  “I agree,” I said. “Not with those chain marks around the wrists and ankles. Not with the body buried like this, hidden behind the field.”

  “All true,” Doc said. “Most likely a homicide.”

  I felt my rage building, and I fought to keep my focus, to not let my feelings interfere. I had a murder to solve. I had Delilah to find. Giving in to anger would slow me down. I couldn’t risk that. “Can you give me an estimate on date of death? Just a ballpark on number of weeks?”

  “Well, based on the condition of this body, the advanced mummification, I’d say we’re probably looking at months,” he said. “At least two or three, maybe considerably longer. But I’ll know more once I take a good look at her in the lab.”

  Eliza disappeared five months ago, in March, and Jayme three months ago, in May. Based on Doc’s estimate, it could have been either of them. Or it could have been someone else, a girl or woman whose name I hadn’t yet heard, one never reported missing. I thought about my sister. I looked at the dead girl’s thin figure in the body bag and felt as if the universe pointed at it and shouted: Find who did this, and you’ll find Delilah.

  Doc must have had similar thoughts, that this wasn’t an isolated case.

  We’d been in the field for two hours, and the sun loomed high overhead. In the searing heat, he wiped a thin coat of gritty sweat from his forehead with a white cotton handkerchief. As he folded it to put it back in his pocket, he scanned the lingering crowd and said, “My guess is that there’s a really sick bastard in this town. The big question, who is he?”

  Twenty-Six

  The man came back.

  Delilah heard the sound of gravel crunching under a car or truck, moments later the bang of a car door. Once before, Delilah thought she heard voices, but this time they came up clearly through the vent. The girl must have left it open.

  “Please, don’t,” the girl begged.

  “You’re my wife. You’ll do as I say.” After that, Delilah heard ragged breathing and the girl sobbing. Delilah covered her ears and waited for it to be over.

  A while later, the door slammed and she heard someone drive away. She waited for the girl to say something, but heard only silence.

  “Is he gone?” Delilah asked.

  At first, the girl didn’t answer. Delilah thought she heard soft weeping. “Yeah.” The girl’s voice sounded different, hoarse and tired. “I wish… I just wish…”

  “I wish he was dead and we were home with our families.” Sariah had taught her not to desire that anything bad happen to anyone, but Delilah judged this an exception to that rule. “Are there any others in the house? Any other girls in this house with us, girls that the man took?”

  “Not now, but when I got here there were others.” She explained that when she arrived the man had two girls. One, an older girl, whose name she’d never learned. “She disappeared a few days after the man took me. I never talked to her. I saw her just once through the edge of my blindfold. She was beautiful, tall with long dark hair. The man ordered her to feed me, like he told me to feed you. She was kind.”

  “What happened to her?” Delilah asked.

  “I don’t know, but one night I heard a lot of shouting. The man was hot angry, screaming. I heard him yell that if she didn’t do as she was told he had others who would.”

  “Did you ever ask him what happened to her?” Delilah wanted to know.

  “No. But I asked the other girl. Her name was Eliza,” she said. “She said the man told her that he took the older girl up the mountain and left her there.”

  “Set her free?”

  The girl was quiet for what felt like a long time. “Maybe.”

  “What happened to Eliza?”

  The girl didn’t answer for a long time, and then said, “I’m not sure. He got mad at her one night. Just like the other time, I heard him screaming. Then, she was gone.”

  Delilah wondered what the man had done to the girls. “He must have killed them,” she whispered. After a while, she asked, “If something happens to me, I want you to remember my name, so you can tell my family about me, okay?”

  “Yeah, you said it’s Delilah, right?” the girl answered.

  “Delilah Jefferies.”

  “Would you tell my family about me? I’m Jayme Coombs.”

  Twenty-Seven

  Sheriff Holmes gave me his conference room to use, but not before I raised my right hand and vowed to protect and defend the citizens of Smith County, Utah. As he pinned a deputy’s badge on my shirt, I couldn’t help but consider the strange and unsettling fact that I’d temporarily become part of Alber again. When the sheriff officially assigned me to head up the investigation, I eagerly agreed. I intended to find the monster that had murdered the girl in the field and, I hoped, in the process rescue my sister.

  “The forensic team will be on the scene for at least a couple more hours,” Max announced as he walked into my temporary office.

  I’d gone straight to work, setting my computer up on the large oval table and emailing Chief Thompson in Dallas to tell him I’d be gone a while longer. “What about the cadaver dogs?” I asked Max.

  “They’ve arrived. We have them checking the entire area at the base of the mountain to make sure there aren’t any more bodies buried out there.”

  “You think we’ll find anything?” I said.

  “I’d be surprised, since Mr. Proctor’s dogs didn’t appear interested in any of the other areas,” he said.

  “I agree. Who’s overseeing the crime scene?”

  “The CSI unit’s lieutenant. He’ll call if anything turns up. That way, I can work with you.”

  “Okay.”

  “Where do you want to start?” Max asked. “Since you have concerns about the Heaton and Coombs girls, we can head back out to their houses, question the families.”

  I’d thought about that and nixed it. “We need the upper hand. I want them on our turf. They need to understand that I’m not some renegade cop from Dallas trespassing on their property. We’ve got a dead body. They need to take this seriously.”

  “I’ll round them up and bring them here then.”

  “Great. While they’re here, we’ll get DNA from Eliza’s and Jayme’s mothers, so Doc can compare it to the body, see if either girl is a match.”

  “What about your family? Should we bring your mothers in?”

  “Not yet. That wasn’t Delilah buried out there. My sister hasn’t been missing long enough for her to be in that condition, not even if she was killed the night she was taken.” I felt sick to my stomach thinking about the dead woman we’d found in the field, wondering about Delilah. “For now, let’s concentrate on the other girls. That body could be one of theirs.”

  “Okay,” he said. “You’re still thinking we have a series here?”

  “Yes, I am. It would be an unlikely coincidence that in a small town like this we have three missing girls and the dead one who turns up is unrelated. I’m betting that if we figure out who killed that girl, we’ll find all of the missing girls, including Delilah.”

  “Okay. I’ll get the Heaton and Coombs women and bring them here,” Max said.

  “Make sure both families bring photos of the girls. That could help Doc. And if we get confirmation they’re missing, we can get them on NCIC and send out a media al
ert.”

  “What about Delilah? I gather we still can’t do that with her?”

  “Not yet. We have the same problem we’ve had all along – my family,” I said. “You were right about the Amber Alert. We can’t do anything official until they file a missing person complaint.”

  “What are you going to do while I’m out corralling the families?” Max asked.

  “Research,” I said. “I have a hunch I want to explore.”

  “That sounds promising. On who?”

  I hesitated. I trusted Max, but I worried about how invested he was in the case. He’d brought me here and he was paying attention now, but when he allowed Gerard Barstow to sway his judgment, we wasted precious time. “We’ll talk about it later.”

  Max turned around toward the door, but then swiveled back. “Clara,” he said. I’d grabbed a chair and had my head in my computer. When I looked up at him, he seemed troubled. “It wasn’t that I didn’t agree with you about Delilah, that I wasn’t worried about her.”

  “You told me to go home, Max,” I said, not trying to hide my irritation. “If you had any concerns that Delilah could be in trouble, why would you do that?”

  “There are things you don’t know, about my situation.” Max took a deep breath. “I’m not free to think of just myself. Sometimes, well, the position I’m in…”

  He stopped talking and an awkward silence filled the room. When he began again, he looked at me as if confiding. “Clara, I haven’t told you about Brooke, my daughter. She’s…”

  “What, Max?”

  He seemed almost unable to form the words. “Things are complicated at home, my daughter…”

  Max stopped and looked at me, unable to go on.

  Weary, I rubbed my forehead. I felt overwhelmed, and it was too much at that moment to take on Max’s problems. “I appreciate your explanation,” I said, mustering as much sympathy as I could manage with my sister on my mind. “But we’re going to have to talk about this later, because right now, every minute we stand talking, Delilah and maybe the other girls are in danger.”

  Max’s eyes clouded with disappointment, and I immediately regretted not handling it better. Still, I needed him to get to work. “Right now, let’s concentrate on figuring out who that girl in the field is and what she can tell us that will help us find the others.”

  “Of course, you’re right,” he said. As he walked out the door, I heard him whisper, “Later.”

  As soon as Max left, I found the storeroom and rooted around. I grabbed three sheets of poster board. Back at the conference table, I taped them together and drew a horizontal line side to side. A third of the way from the left, I made a vertical mark and noted that Eliza Heaton disappeared in late March. Six inches away, I wrote: Jayme Coombs, May tenth. Then I wrote down the date the note said Delilah disappeared, August thirteenth, three months after Jayme’s disappearance, the previous Thursday evening. The final mark had the current date and BODY FOUND. I purposely left room in anticipation of more victims at both ends of the timeline, hoping I wouldn’t have to use it.

  I hung the timeline on the wall.

  That done, I logged on to NCIC. Earlier I’d used the site to look into Evan Barstow. I still thought he was a possibility, but this time I had someone else on my mind—Jim Daniels. Ten minutes and I had a hit, not in Utah but in Iowa.

  My brother-in-law was a convicted sex offender.

  Daniels had been arrested at the age of nineteen for the statutory rape of a sixteen-year-old. The girl’s name was Rebecca Sanders.

  Nothing further came up on Jim Daniels on NCIC, so I accessed the Dallas PD database I’d used that morning to track down Evan Barstow’s address. A few minutes scouting around, and I had a handful of speeding citations and an address outside Alber.

  On the way out the door, I texted Max:

  Change of plans. Going out. Will bring you up to date later. I may be back when you get here with the Heaton and Coombs families, but if not, wait.

  On the way to the Daniels family farm, I pulled up memories of Karyn. Coming from such a large family, one father but four mothers, I was one of dozens of siblings, the fifth oldest and the second of the girls. With so many to feed and care for, we all had to work. From the age of eight, I carried babies around on my hip and functioned as our mothers’ helper. Guided by my oldest sister, Sylvia, I sewed, cleaned, cooked, fed and diapered babies.

  Karyn was Mother Constance’s second daughter, my father’s tenth child.

  The girl I remembered wore jeans with holes in the knees under her dresses. She caught catfish in the river and gutted them while our mothers lit the campfire. Karyn could outride the rest of us by nine, bareback. Never much for studying or reading, she regularly wandered into the back shed, where our father kept his tools. She foraged for leftover wood she whittled into bears, insects and birds. One winter she carved an entire chess set, the male figures on horses or holding pitchforks and the women in long prairie dresses.

  The girl I knew would rather spend the day pretending to be a pirate high in the backyard oak tree, a rolled-up sheet of paper for her telescope, than play baby dolls.

  Mother Constance complained about her constantly. “Will Karyn ever comb that matted mess of hair? Her crowning glory is full of sawdust and straw!”

  The tin-roofed, two-story house I pulled up to was modest, and stood on a tract of land bordered by a split-rail fence painted white. A woman sat on the porch shucking peas, while a smattering of children jumped rope and played basketball.

  As at every other house I’d driven up to since returning to Alber, as soon as she saw me the woman gathered the children. By the time I parked, the yard and porch gaped empty except for a five-foot-tall statue of a grizzly carved out of a tree trunk. It had the unmistakable look of Karyn’s work.

  I punched the bell but didn’t hear it ring. I knocked. Hard. Through the door’s oval window, I saw a man walk toward me.

  The door opened. Jim Daniels stared down at me through his thick, black-rimmed glasses. Well over six feet with dull brown hair, his face tanned to match his hair, he looked like Karyn’s grizzly. I would have guessed him decades older than the birthdate on his driver’s license, which made him thirty-three.

  “You looking for someone?” he asked.

  “Yes, you,” I said. “I’m—”

  “I know who you are. Clara Jefferies. I saw you yesterday and today at the cornfield. I heard you were here, but I would have recognized you anywhere.”

  “How?”

  “Come in.” Not showing any concern, he followed me into the house, compact and crowded with furniture. Karyn’s creations were scattered around us—small, intricate carvings on tabletops and whittled birds in flight hanging on a wall. I wondered if she made the log furniture in the den.

  An upright piano sat in one corner, and around it hung framed family portraits of Karyn, a woman I assumed was her sister-wife, Daniels, and a pack of children. Mixed in I saw photos of our family growing up, our parents and brothers and sisters. The photos a ritual, of sorts—we took one every year. For a month or more before, we prepared, the girls sewing matching dresses out of yard goods Mother ordered from the general store.

  “That’s you right there, I’d guess.” Daniels said, pointing at me, one of the oldest in the lineup of young smiling faces.

  “You’d be right,” I said.

  “Karyn loves those photos.”

  “So, where is she?”

  “Not here.” I thought about what felt so odd about Daniels. He had a flat affect, a voice that could have put an insomniac to sleep, and a face that didn’t register emotion. “Karyn’s at your ma’s trailer. They’re having a family meeting.”

  “What about?”

  “You,” Daniels said. “Ardeth’s upset that you’re nosing around.”

  “Jim, I’m here because I’m helping the sheriff’s office with a case. The body found in the field. I saw you there today.”

  “It’s not illegal to watch, i
s it?” he asked. “It’s not every day in Alber that someone finds a dead body.”

  “I was curious about you, and—” I started.

  “And you ran a check on me. Found out that I’m registered as a sex offender,” he said, his voice as unconcerned as if he’d just said that I heard he raised hogs.

  “Yes.”

  Daniels walked over to the kitchen and shouted. “Rebecca, come here, please. This detective lady, Clara, needs to talk to you.”

  “Rebecca?”

  “My first wife,” Daniels said. “I grew up on a farm in Iowa surrounded by Gentiles. Not many of our neighbors knew we were fundamentalists, that we had what they’d think were peculiar ways. My parents hid it.”

  “Ah, I see,” I said. “So you were nineteen and—”

  “Rebecca was sixteen,” he explained. “The prophet called my dad and said he had a vision, and I was to marry her. We were sealed in a meeting house in Cedar Rapids. We rented an apartment and moved in together.”

  “Someone found out—”

  “Jim made the mistake of insisting that I finish high school,” the woman walking into the room said. She had a hesitant manner, which I understood. I wasn’t an invited guest. Despite that, she gave me a half-smile and said, “Problem was, I got pregnant right away. My physical education teacher asked me who the father was, and in my sixteen-year-old wisdom, I told him my husband.”

  A round woman with soft, light brown hair, Rebecca Daniels had chambray-blue eyes and thin lips that curled up at the corners. “Dad thought I was too young to marry and refused to sign the paperwork that would have allowed me to marry Jim legally. So Jim and I were only sealed in the church. We tried to get the charges dropped, but the prosecutor refused. Jim spent a year in jail. He got out just in time for our baby’s first birthday. When I turned eighteen, we married again at the courthouse.”

  “Okay.” This was nothing out of the ordinary in our culture, and while Jim Daniels was considered a sex offender in the outside world, in Alber he was simply a young husband. “I understand.”