Michael shuddered. “I somehow used a cup of salt instead of a tablespoon. It was supposed to be a cup of flour. Baxter came running over to sniff a blob of it that had hit the floor, and I swear to you he hissed at it and then fled the scene.”
Her parents laughed.
“What’s most important is that you keep trying,” her dad said, adding a tong-full of salad to his plate. “Do you remember that time when we were dating, Sabine, and I tried to make pepper chicken?”
“God, that was easily the worst meal I’ve ever had.” Her mother dramatically gagged. “Luckily he’s better in the bedroom than he is in the kitchen.”
Riley literally did a spit take, Michael nearly choked on a piece of prime rib, and her father threw his head back and laughed heartily.
It was a good day.
CHAPTER 14
Riley had just finished one of the dreaded 11 am to 3 pm Monday shifts. The Laughing Tiger had a weekly lunch special that was always extremely popular. Riley worked the evening shifts more often than not, so she usually avoided Monday Madness, as the waitresses called it, but she’d gotten roped into this one because one of the ladies, Fran, was dealing with a sick kid at home. In Riley’s usual fashion, she picked up the shift for her.
Her feet were killing her and she desperately wanted a nap, or at least a long bath and a glass of wine. She settled into her car, marveling at the early hour, and grabbed her phone out of the purse she’d tossed onto the passenger seat. In addition to a few texts from Michael, and her dad asking if she had any ideas for birthday presents for her mom, she also had a voicemail from an unknown number.
She dialed her inbox.
“Hi, Riley. This is Carter Quincy. I would be happy to meet with you. It’s currently 2:45 in the afternoon on Monday. I’m free until about 4 today if you happen to have any time. I’m in Albuquerque until then. Otherwise, we can arrange a phone conversation later in the week, as I’ll be heading back to Taos this evening.”
Riley quickly fumbled to call him back, hoping an hour was enough time for them to meet and chat. Suddenly she wasn’t nearly as tired and her feet didn’t ache quite as badly.
“This is Carter,” a man answered.
Riley’s cheeks inexplicably heated. “Uh. Hi. This is Riley Thomas returning your call.”
“Ah, hello, Ms. Thomas,” he said. “Are you able to meet today?”
“Yep. I just got off work.”
“Perfect. Are you familiar with The Roast?”
It would take her at least twenty minutes to get uptown, so she quickly put her phone on speaker, attached her phone to her dash, and backed out of her parking space before she and Carter had even ended the call. “I’ll head there right now.”
There was a prolonged pause before he said, “Sounds good. I’ll be there in a few minutes. I’m wearing a dark blue polo shirt and jeans.”
Maybe he was just as unsure about what to expect from this meeting as she was.
When she arrived outside The Roast, she sent a text to the group chat with Michael and Jade.
Riley: I just got to The Roast. The guy’s name is Carter Quincy. I just wanted you both to know the details in case I go missing.
Jade: Your sense of humor is terrible.
Michael: Agreed.
Riley: I’m hilarious and you know it.
The smell of very strong coffee seeped out of the place before she even grabbed hold of the handle of one of the heavy glass-fronted doors and cautiously pushed it open. The coffee shop wasn’t very big, and sat at the corner of a busy street, giving the building a triangular shape. Two of the sides of the triangle faced the street, each wall made mostly of glass. A long counter ran along the rightmost window, with attached bar stools, all of which were occupied by people working diligently on their laptops and wearing earbuds or chunky headphones. The other window had two bench seats in front of it, tables and chairs positioned before them. One long table was set a few feet from the bench seats and was filled with more laptop-working individuals. Given how many open books, notepads, highlighters, empty mugs, and crumb-covered plates littered the surface, Riley guessed it was a study group.
The right side of the café had a couch and a few plush chairs taking up most of the space, as well as a low, round coffee table. A Black man in a dark blue polo shirt sat on the couch, a computer on his lap and a half-consumed, widemouthed green mug of something frothy and brown on a coaster before him. A small notebook sat beside the mug.
The man must have sensed her staring at him because he looked up. A moment later, he raised an eyebrow in question. “Riley?”
Swallowing, she made her way over. He was in his late thirties, maybe early forties. She plastered on her best waitress smile and stuck out her hand. He stood when she reached him and shook her offered palm. He wore a gold wedding band.
“Did you want to get anything to eat or drink?” he asked, motioning to the large V-shaped counter that took up most of the base of the triangle. A chalkboard menu displayed the various types of coffees available, as well as pastries and a few lunch items. She was always ravenous after a shift, but suddenly her appetite deserted her.
“I’m good,” she said.
He nodded, then gestured for her to have a seat. Instead of taking the spot next to him on the two-seater couch, she slunk into one of the nearby single chairs, clutching her purse in her lap.
When he sat back on the couch, he chose the cushion closer to her, elbow propped up on the armrest. “So what is it you wanted to talk about, Riley? You said you’re interested in the Brynn Bodwell and Shawna Mack case? It’s over eighteen years old at this point. No offense, but you can’t be much older than that yourself.”
“I’m twenty-five,” Riley said. “But yeah, I was only eight or so when their bodies were discovered. I know Brynn’s discovery made national news, but I don’t personally remember it unfolding.”
“Okay … so what’s the interest in the case now? You said you might know something about another victim?”
Riley heaved out a breath. “I’m really into true crime, and—”
Carter barely—just barely—avoided rolling his eyes. “If you’re looking for an internship or something, there are better avenues to go about it than this.”
“No, no,” Riley said, shaking her head. “It’s not that. I’m not looking for a job or anything. I stumbled on the Brynn case by accident. It was during one of my late-night true crime marathon binges that I heard about Brynn’s case for the first time. I started researching it, like I do, and I came across your article. If there were other articles published at the same time connecting the two murders, I couldn’t find them. I was wondering why you were so sure there was a connection when no one else did.”
Carter stared at her for a long beat. “In your research, did you pick up on how they were killed?”
“Both were strangled. The ligature marks were consistent with nylon rope. Both had burst blood vessels in their eyes, and they were both found nude and had been sexually assaulted. The killer had washed both bodies before dumping them in two different locations in the Orilla Verde Recreation Area six months apart.”
He nodded, his shoulders relaxing a fraction. It was clear she’d actually done the research, at least.
“Right,” he said. “Shawna was found first, and since her ex was a real piece of work, they searched for evidence high and low to prove he’d killed her. Police dug into his family’s lives, his friends’ lives. The case got a lot of media coverage in Taos, but it was focused more on what a garbage human her ex was. Shawna was almost an afterthought, even though she was the one who had been brutally murdered.”
Riley softly shook her head, frowning.
“They brought the guy in for questioning after they pulled him over for blowing through a stop sign,” Carter said. “They interrogated the guy for something like twelve hours straight about Shawna’s disappearance. Did all the bullshit you hear about when it comes to pushing a perp to confess. He was so exhauste
d and hungry that they got a confession out of him for his involvement in a drug trafficking ring. When they finally dropped the bomb that they’d found Shawna’s dead body, the poor guy was so wrung out that he started snitching on fellow members of the ring, all in an effort to make sure he didn’t go down for murder. They put him away for twenty years for the drug charges, but they treated it like they’d gotten the killer off the street. His alibi for the week Shawna was missing could never be fully corroborated, since getting the timeline confirmed relied too heavily on unreliable sources.
“I’ve talked to a few people off the record, and at least among some of the department, they realize their tunnel vision meant they’d screwed up. But it was worse than tunnel vision, honestly. The community there was adamant that Rodney wasn’t the killer. Regardless of his history, they knew him better than the cops did. A killer was on the loose, and while they had their thumbs up their asses, refusing to listen to and give validity to the voices of the people in Shawna’s neighborhood, the killer got to Brynn.”
“So you think they didn’t publicly admit to a connection so the department could save face?” Riley asked.
“That’s exactly what I think happened. Plus they didn’t want an internal review to reveal shady interrogation techniques that could end up affecting Rodney’s conviction somehow. The way they treated Rodney and his family was abhorrent, frankly. People connected to him were getting pulled over and arrested for nearly every possible offense. There was a rumor about a secret informant who named Rodney as the killer, but if that person existed, the identity was never revealed—so it very easily could have been bullshit.
“None of what the cops were doing had anything to do with avenging Shawna, though. It was about wanting people like Rodney off the street. In the months after Rodney was arrested, crime in the area markedly dropped for a while. Mostly because they’d cracked down on Rodney so hard, other criminal types in the area got spooked and either left the town or laid low till things cooled off. The department was lauded for their hard work. Shawna’s name hardly ever came up. The sheriff at the time was a real jackass. He was trying to get reelected and there are rumors that he was paying people off left and right to keep any media stink out of the news. When Brynn’s murder went national, the chief was at every press conference, got interviewed on all those national shows, and outright denied a connection between the two cases. He said it was a coincidence, and that anyone claiming otherwise was undermining the investigation.”
“Pretty gutsy of you to write that article then,” Riley said.
“Or stupid, I don’t know. My editor green-lit the story, but she was also days away from retirement. No one outwardly threatened me or the staff of the paper after it was published, but the newest editor-in-chief told me to drop it. I was really young at the time, in my early twenties, and just getting started. After Brynn was found, the killing stopped. As more and more years went by with nothing to indicate this killer had struck again, it got easier to think that maybe it had been two separate killers.” He shrugged. “I’ve never forgotten that one, though. The disparity in terms of which victim supposedly mattered the most was too great—and it’s not even a case of, ‘all cops are terrible people.’ It was a case of the cops deciding that a Black woman like Shawna and a white woman like Brynn were too fundamentally different for a killer to choose them both. They swept Shawna under the rug, and plastered Brynn’s face everywhere. It’s not like this is the first time it’s happened. But when I wrote that article, I was young and … not naïve, because I’m a Black man living in the United States so being naïve to this shit isn’t an option, but I really thought if I put my best work forward, if I presented the case that there was a murderer of multiple women out there, that someone would notice or care. But no one did.”
“Did you try to get more articles written about it?”
“Yeah, I tried, but I got pulled aside a lot—constantly told that I needed to make a name for myself before I rocked the boat too hard. So I stopped.”
“And it’s not like there’s ever a shortage of awful things to report on.”
He laughed humorlessly. “For real. And the part that really gets me, is that even though Brynn got all the media coverage, she’s been done a horrible disservice, too. If they were looking at the case as a dual murder, there might have been something in that investigation that led them to the killer. That asshole could still be out there to this day. Who knows what else he’s gotten away with, all because his victims were treated based on media worthiness before they were treated like women … like human beings who were robbed of justice.”
Riley decided in that moment that he’d won her over. “I’m fairly certain he killed at least one other person. Another Black woman.”
Carter cocked an eyebrow. “Care to explain?”
Letting out a calming breath, her hands a bit clammy, she said, “I’m a psychic medium.”
Carter stared at her for a beat. “Dammit.” He shook his head, lips pursed, and reached forward to close his laptop. “I should have known this would be a waste of my time. Why would a kid know anything about this? I’m clearly still a hopeful idiot.” He slapped his legal pad on top of his laptop, grabbed both, and started to stand.
In the same moment, Riley pulled the package of prints out of her bag and tossed them onto the coffee table where they landed with a muted plop.
Carter stilled, his focus on the envelope. “What’s this?”
“Open it.”
He clenched his jaw, then slowly lowered himself back onto the couch cushion. He unhanded his laptop. “If this is—”
“Open it,” she repeated. “If you still don’t want to hear me out after you look at them, I’ll leave and never bother you again.”
He picked up the envelope, then pulled out the stack. Silently, he leafed through the pictures, one by one, his dark brows pulled together. When he got to the last one, he froze. She knew he’d reached the heartbreaking one of Shawna. She stood on a sidewalk, part of a porch behind her, reaching for her young son Malcolm who ran toward her, arms outstretched and a grin etched across his young, innocent face. While it was a picture of a woman who had been taken from this world too soon, it was also a picture of a young boy who had no idea that the person behind the unseen camera was putting actions into play that would change his life forever.
Carter’s gaze snapped up to hers. “This is Shawna.”
“Yep. That’s the only one of her on the roll.”
“What roll?”
Riley held out a hand and he passed the pictures back. Once they were in her purse, she stood and walked around the coffee table so she could sit on the other side of the couch. No one was currently in direct earshot of them, as the row of nearby patrons were all busily working. The guy on the end of the row closest to them was bopping along to whatever was piping out of his headphones. Beyond that, the coffee grinder or milk frother whirled to life every few minutes.
“Just hear me out, okay?” Riley asked.
He eyed the purse in her lap for a minute, as if he could see through the black faux leather. When his eyes met hers again, he said, “I’m listening.”
She went through the whole story for the umpteenth time. Carter did his part to listen intently, only interrupting her a couple of times, but otherwise was at least pretending to take her seriously. When she was finished talking, he appeared a little shell-shocked, so she excused herself to order a to-go iced coffee while he mulled over everything she’d told him.
As she sat down with her drink a few minutes later, Carter said, “Okay, so your working theory is, since Shawna is on the film along with this mystery woman, that the owner of the camera must be the person who killed them both?”
Riley shrugged helplessly. “Maybe? But then why is the mystery woman from 2005 on the same roll as Shawna from 2003, when Brynn presumably was the victim in between? I don’t know. What I know is, it looks like this woman, whoever she is, was being followed for a while. I person
ally know she’s dead, and that she died when she was the same age as she is in these pictures. That picture of Shawna looks like a surveillance picture, too. So it would stand to reason that the owner of the camera at the very least was following two women who later ended up dead.”
“Shit,” he said, elbows on his knees and head in his hands.
“Are you having a harder time with the fact that three women are likely dead at the hands of the same person,” she said slowly, after he hadn’t changed position for a full minute, “or the psychic medium thing?”
He sat up then and studied her. “Honestly? The second one. Because you seem very normal. But … talking to ghosts? Really?”
Riley shrugged. “You either believe me or you don’t.”
He sighed. “I guess my other question is … what did you expect to accomplish in talking to me? Did you hope I’d recognize her?”
“Or that you might have resources to find her identity or insights into who could have murdered her, since you’re one of the few people who believe Brynn and Shawna had the same killer.”
“Unfortunately, I’m all out of insights,” he said.
“Is there any chance your current editor would let you print one of the pictures and ask if anyone knows who she is?” Riley asked.
“I don’t know … that’s a big ask. Especially since I’m not going to be able to give him too many details without him thinking I’m out of my damn mind.” He winced. “Sorry.”
Riley’s gut told her Carter was a reasonable, logical guy, and even if he didn’t fully believe in someone’s ability to speak to ghosts, she knew he believed her. It was up to him to decide what to do with that. “I’ll give you a picture of the mystery woman just in case.”
“Okay,” Carter said, though he sounded deeply unsure again.
Riley pulled the pictures back out of her purse and selected one for him to keep. “You have my contact info now, so if you want to talk again, you know how to find me.”
Shuttered Secrets Page 19