I smiled. “You have thought this through.”
“I’m used to having to explain Jim to others. People often don’t understand him. My husband is brilliant in many ways, but he doesn’t interact well with people. Rebecca and I realize that he can come across as awkward.” She gave me an unassuming smile. “I’ll be right back with my purse.”
At that, she turned and headed back to the trailer. Karyn hadn’t made it to the steps when Lily burst out the screen door. She held something: a long, thick, neon-orange flashlight.
“Clara, Delilah had her flashlight with her at the outhouse,” Lily said, rushing toward me. “Mine is just like it. This one. When Delilah disappeared, the flashlight vanished, too.”
She put the flashlight in my hands. It looked familiar. Why?
“This is so strange. I have the feeling I recently saw one just like this,” I whispered. “Maybe there are a lot of them around?”
“No, we just had the two, Delilah’s and mine. Naomi bought them in Salt Lake, at a hardware store. They’re special. The beam is strong and you can adjust it so that it’s wide. It’s good to use to take the little ones out at night.”
Karyn looked at me. “I guess whoever took Delilah must have taken the flashlight.”
I thought back to earlier that day. I remembered seeing a flashlight just like the one I held in my hands on a kitchen counter. At the time, it reminded me of traffic cones. I grabbed my cell phone. “Max, I know who has Delilah,” I said. “Meet me at the sheriff’s office. We need a search warrant.”
Thirty-Five
Lily sat in the seat next to me as we drove through Alber on the way to the sheriff’s office in Pine City. Behind us, Sariah and Naomi followed in the family van. As Delilah’s mother, Sariah needed to authorize the official missing person report. I wanted Naomi available to sign a statement, since she purchased the matching orange flashlights. As the Pathfinder bounced down the road, Lily held her flashlight on her lap, clutching it tight, as if it were a talisman with the power to bring her sister home.
“Can you explain what Mother meant?” I asked Lily. “When she kept insisting that someone was taking care of all this, handling it? Who was she talking about?”
“I don’t know,” Lily said. “Mother told us not to worry, that someone we could trust would find Delilah.”
“But she never said who?”
“Not to me. I don’t think she told anyone,” Lily said. I drove for a few more minutes, and my sister turned to me. “I think I do remember you, Clara. I remember you from when I was little. That I’d go to school and you were there. Teaching.”
“Lily, thank you for that.” In Dallas, no one truly knew me. Since I’d arrived in Alber, almost everyone had turned away from me as if I didn’t exist. Lily’s recognition touched me to my core. For the first time in a very long time, I wasn’t an outsider, but someone remembered: I was their teacher, their sister.
“Did you think of us while you were gone?” she asked.
After so many years separate, it felt odd to look into eyes so like mine. The moment filled me with pleasure, but at the same time it broke my heart. Since arriving back in Alber, I’d been forced to face the truth; when I fled, I lost so much more than I would have ever admitted, even to myself. “I’ve tried hard not to think of the past, because it hurts to remember. But, yes, I’ve thought of all of you. I wondered if you were happy and well. I wondered if anyone remembered me.” Alber disappeared behind us as I turned onto the highway. “What this trip has taught me is that you can leave home, but you can’t ever truly leave it behind. No matter where you end up, where you started haunts you. And the people you love? You carry them with you, whether you realize it or not.”
It was going on six thirty and the Smith County Courthouse had closed an hour earlier. I called Max, and he unlocked the door to let us in.
“I asked Judge Crockett to wait in his courtroom to sign the warrant,” he said as we rushed through the lobby. “Everything’s in place.”
We marched into the sheriff’s office, and I said, “Sariah, I’ll need the photo.”
She handed me a recent one of Delilah, a rosy-cheeked smiling kid with big blue eyes and freckles, older but not much different than the way I remembered her.
“Here, I’ll take that.” Max handed the photo off to Helen, the sheriff’s secretary. “Scan this in,” he told her.
Then Max pulled a two-page report out of a file with Delilah’s name on the front. “Sariah, here’s the missing person report. You need to sign it so we can launch the Amber Alert.”
He handed her a pen. Sariah stared down at the paper, then over at me, searching my face. Her shoulders tense, her expression pained, I understood her fear. Never before had any of the sister-wives gone against my mother. But Sariah read the document, and then scrawled her signature across the bottom. “Now you’ll look for my Delilah?” she asked, her voice unsure but hopeful.
“Yes,” Max said. “Now everyone will look for her.”
“Send out the Amber Alert and the missing person report,” Max instructed Helen. “It’s all in the system. Everything’s ready.”
“It’ll be done in two minutes,” Helen said. “Mrs. Jefferies?”
Naomi responded as well, but Helen singled out Sariah. “I’ll say a prayer for your girl.”
“Thank you,” Sariah said. “You’re very kind.”
“Do we need anything else from them?” I asked Max. “I brought Naomi and Lily in case you have any questions about the flashlight. Do you want them to sign any kind of statement?”
“I don’t think so. Not at this point. This should do it.”
At the courthouse door, Sariah turned back to me. She reached out and wrapped her arms around me. “Bring my Delilah home, Clara. Please, bring her home.”
I wanted to respond, but I didn’t trust my voice. As they walked away, I pulled myself together, turned and headed back to find Max.
Moments later, we had our heads together over the computer at his desk.
“Clara, I’ve got the affidavit for the search warrant written, but something’s bothering me. How did you find out Evan Barstow has an identical flashlight? How did you get inside his house?”
I’d prepared for this question, one I anticipated I’d be asked. I needed to walk a thin line, not lie but not tell everything. “I was suspicious, and I wanted to see where Evan lived,” I said. “I pulled into the driveway and asked to use the phone. One of his wives, Jessica, invited me inside. While I was there, I saw the flashlight sitting out in the open on a countertop. Then, at the trailer, Lily showed me her flashlight, identical to the one taken when Delilah disappeared. It’s unusual, bigger than most, and the color, that bright, bright orange. I realized that it matched the one at the Barstow house.”
“That’s all that happened? You just walked up and asked Jessica to use the phone?” Max didn’t believe me. I didn’t blame him. “Clara, are you sure you didn’t do anything I should know about to convince her?”
“Nothing to worry about,” I said.
Max stared at me as doubtfully as if I’d just told him that I’d chopped the top off one of the mountains with a penknife. “Clara, you’re a cop. If Evan Barstow is behind all of this, if he does have Delilah, the other girls, if he killed that girl out in the field, you do understand that it’s a problem if you lie to get the warrant. Any evidence we find may not be admissible.”
“Everything on the warrant is true.” On the surface, I wasn’t lying. And at that moment, I didn’t have the luxury of worrying about a trial that could be a year or more away. I wasn’t concerned about what a judge might or might not rule. Time ticked away and I cared about one thing: saving Delilah.
The arrest warrant came together easily. Making the case against Evan Barstow stronger, it turned out that we didn’t just have the flashlight. While I’d been at the trailer, Max contacted the two families in the police reports I’d found in Alber’s secret files. The first didn’t help because
the Bradshaws insisted the report on their daughter’s disappearance had been a mistake. The girl’s mother had told Max that Christina apparently did leave on her own. “Six months after they filed the report, they received a letter from her. In it, Christina said that she’d run away to Chicago with a boy and married him,” Max recounted.
The other family, however, the parents of the thirteen-year-old who’d filed a complaint, told Max that Evan was the man who harassed their daughter. For months, he watched her in the mornings as she walked to school. He trailed her in his squad car as she traveled home in the afternoons. Frightened, the girl’s mother began driving their daughter. The mother refused to let the girl leave the house alone. “They couldn’t file charges because Evan was the Alber police chief at the time. The officers refused to take them,” Max explained. “But the girl’s parents wrote down their complaint and turned it in. They wanted a record of what Evan was doing.”
Max attached a statement from the family with a copy of the original paperwork at the back of the search warrant.
Moments later, Max and I met with District Court Judge Alec Crockett in his chambers behind the courtroom. Ready to head home for supper, the judge had his black robe hanging on a coat rack. Well into his sixties, he looked like the grandpa next door in khakis and a green polo shirt. He didn’t appear to worry about breaking the law against smoking in a county building as he puffed on the scant remains of a Lucky Strike. “So this is a search warrant for the home of the former Alber police chief? He’s currently the chief in Hitchins, right?”
“Yes, your honor,” I said.
“And what you’ve got is…” He stopped talking and eyed the two of us while smashing the cigarette’s stub out in an overflowing ashtray.
“That Evan Barstow has a history of stalking young girls,” I recounted. “That Delilah Jefferies was abducted last Thursday evening. That Delilah’s orange flashlight disappeared at the same time she did, suggesting the kidnapper took it as well. That I saw what I believe is Delilah’s flashlight in Evan Barstow’s home, sitting out in plain sight on a kitchen counter.”
“Barstow’s wife let you in?” The judge’s shaggy right eyebrow rose in suspicion.
“Yes, Judge,” I said. “I wasn’t employed by the sheriff’s department at the time, and had no authority in Smith County. I went to the Barstow home as a private citizen. I asked to use a phone. Jessica Barstow invited me inside.”
“She did, huh?” His skepticism didn’t appear in the least abated. “This doesn’t sound like a lot of evidence. I’m not sure it’s enough probable cause.”
“We’re not asking for an arrest warrant, Judge,” Max countered. “This search warrant is limited. We want to confiscate the matching flashlight so it can be processed for fingerprints and DNA, and to see if there’s any evidence Delilah Jefferies has been on the property. We’ll be looking for clothes that match the description of what she wore when she was taken.”
The judge seemed to consider that. I knew walking in his office door that a warrant wasn’t a sure thing. We should have had more evidence, but we didn’t.
“You found a body today I heard, in Alber?” the judge asked.
“Yes,” Max said. “A young woman, somewhere from teenager to early twenties, Doc Wiley says.”
“And we also have two other girls besides Delilah, both local teens, feared missing. We put reports on NCIC today,” I added. “Judge, there are indications we may have a serial predator here. These cases have similarities, girls suddenly disappearing. The three we have IDs for all lived in the trailer park in houses that backed up to the cornfield.”
Judge Crockett shook his head. “Damn strange.”
The tension in the room eased when the judge picked up a pen. He handed the signed warrant to Max. “The Barstows are a powerful family. This thing could blow up on all of us,” he said. “I sure hope you two know what you’re doing.”
Thirty-Six
At seven forty-two that evening, three sheriff’s department squads and the county forensic unit descended on Evan Barstow’s home. Max and I led the charge in his county car. All the way there, I wondered if there was any chance we’d find Delilah somewhere on the property. I didn’t think so, but I hoped. When we arrived, we saw Evan’s Hitchins PD car parked out front. I watched warily as he sauntered out onto the front porch holding an AR15.
“Shit. He’s armed. How do you want to handle this?” Max asked.
“He’s not a fool. He’ll put it down,” I said. “We’ll take it slow.”
We pulled over about where I’d stopped the Pathfinder earlier that day, and the others queued up behind us. Max radioed all of them to stay in their cars. He and I got out simultaneously and Max held up both of his hands, empty, while I hung back behind the car door, my hand hovering at my side over my gun. “Hey, Evan, put that thing down, will you?” Max said. He gave a slight chuckle, like it was all pretty silly. “You know it’s not a good idea to have a weapon in your hands when the cops come calling.”
After a slight hesitation, Evan dropped the rifle to his side. “What’s going on?”
I strode over to him and handed him the search warrant. The front door opened, and all three of his wives clustered behind it. Jessica had her hands up to her mouth, appearing shocked when she apparently recognized me. Meanwhile, a dozen or more kids piled up inside the windows, jostling past each other to get a look.
“You were in my house?” Evan said, after he read the affidavit. “Jessica let you in?”
“I asked to use a phone. She was kind enough to invite me in,” I said. “As you read in the warrant, Delilah Jefferies was officially declared missing this afternoon. In the report, it’s noted that when she was taken the abductor also took a large, neon-orange flashlight. I believe it is identical to the one I saw sitting out in the open, inside your house.”
“That’s not enough to get a goddamn warrant,” Evan said.
“The judge thought so,” I answered. “Especially with your history.”
“My history?” he jeered. “You’re kidding.”
“Not at all,” I said. “Look at the paperwork at the back. It’s the report you buried at Alber PD on the teenage girl you stalked.”
At that point, it seemed that Evan remembered we had an audience, his family. “Get out in the backyard,” he shouted at his wives. “Take the kids.”
Inside the house, the women and children scurried about. Once they were gone, Evan turned to Max and me. “There’s nothing in my house to find.”
“There’s at least one thing,” I said. He gave me a strange look. “That flashlight. I bet it has Delilah’s fingerprints and DNA on it.”
“I don’t know anything about an orange flashlight,” he said. “Someone must have left it here. This is all some kind of mistake.”
“You should really tell us what we need to know, Evan,” I suggested. “It would be good to get in front of this before it goes sour on you. Taking Delilah is one thing. Murdering her is another.”
“I don’t have Delilah!” he seethed. “Stupidest thing I’ve ever heard.”
“Not for someone like you, someone who has a thing for young girls,” I said. We glared at each other, and his hand tightened on the AR15.
“Damn you,” he seethed, and I had no doubt he itched to hold up that rifle, take aim at me and pull the trigger. “Go ahead and search the house. I don’t have your damn sister. I told you that, and when this all shakes out, I’m going to bury both of you in lawsuits.”
“You’re welcome to try,” Max said. “But right now, put that firearm away before something you regret happens. Then join your family in the backyard. You know the drill. For the time being, make yourself scarce. The forensic unit needs to get started.”
“I’ll need to lock this up in the gun safe,” he said, holding up the rifle.
“Sure, Evan. No problem,” Max said. “While you have it open, let the CSI guys take a quick look inside.”
Evan frowned and stalked
off, fuming.
Once the family cleared the house, the forensic unit spread out inside. Two techs splintered off to search the barn and stables.
While I listened, hoping to hear someone call out that Delilah had been found, I walked Max and the lieutenant in charge of the CSI unit into the kitchen. There the flashlight sat on the counter, just as I remembered it. “Collect that,” I said. “Bag it. Then bring it out to Max’s car.”
“In here,” the lieutenant yelled. A forensic photographer responded. He took photos of the flashlight where it sat on the counter, then he moved to the side and an evidence collection technician took over.
A few minutes later, we had the flashlight in a paper bag. Max brought it out to his squad. We kept the bag open and looked inside, while I held Lily’s flashlight next to it. “Well, they sure look similar,” Max said. “Same size, material, shape, design, the on-off button is identical.”
“They’re a match,” I said. “This has to be Delilah’s.”
At that moment, I felt the burn of someone’s eyes trained on me. Evan Barstow, his face distorted by anger, stood on the side of the house watching us, his cell phone up to his ear. “I wonder if he’s calling a lawyer,” I whispered to Max.
The CSI lieutenant took the flashlight from us. He folded the top of the bag down and sealed it with tape. With a black marker, he noted the case number associated with Delilah’s missing person report on the bag. He jotted down that we recovered the evidence from the kitchen counter inside Evan Barstow’s home. Finally, he dated and signed the bag across the tape’s lowest edge.
“Give me that other flashlight,” he asked, and I did. He went through the same process, logging them both into evidence.
The flashlights processed, the search of the house continued, to my disappointment no one crying out that they’d found my sister. Meanwhile, a metal-sided shed a hundred yards away caught my eye. I walked over, hoping. I knew Delilah wasn’t inside when I realized the door stood wide open. I peeked in at saws, hammers, and other tools dangling from a pegboard. On the opposite wall hung a whip, horse leads, and an old buggy harness. I thought of the binding marks on the body in the field. Without touching it, I examined the black braided horse lead, wondering if it could cause such marks. My heart missed a few beats when I discovered a pile of coiled chains in one corner.
The Fallen Girls: An absolutely unputdownable and gripping crime thriller (Detective Clara Jefferies Book 1) Page 21