The Girl and the Unlucky 13 (Emma Griffin™ FBI Mystery)

by A J Rivers

  Ava falls silent, and I head away from the Stevenson house back toward the business area of town. I pull up in front of the entrance to the hotel.

  “What’s going on?” Dean asks.

  “I need you to contact the doctors and see if they have any more results from the tests they did on Ashley. Misty and Ashley granted permission for them to share anything that may be pertinent with the investigation team, so you shouldn’t have a problem getting the information. If you do, call me. Then I need you to start hunting down Allison’s ex-boyfriend Sean Melrose. See what he’s been up to for the last five years.”

  “Where are you going?” Xavier asks.

  “To the hospital where they left Ashley,” I say. “That’s the last place anyone can concretely say they saw her. That’s where the trail starts.”

  They start to get out of the car and Xavier pauses. “She can’t remember.”

  “I know, Xavier.”

  He starts to get out of the car, then looks at me again.

  “It’s your sandbox, Emma. Ava just wants to borrow a shovel.”

  Forty-One

  “It was five years ago?” asks the frazzled-looking woman I’m following down a hallway as she distributes manila folders to offices.

  “Yes. Five years ago. August thirteenth, so almost exactly five years,” I clarify.

  She nods. “I can speak with security. They have cameras that cover the entrances and the parking lots. I believe there are also some in the emergency room waiting area. I can’t be sure.”

  “Virtually all hospitals have security coverage for any non-private area where there will be patients,” I say.

  I resist the urge to point out to her that as a patient liaison, perhaps she wasn’t the best choice for me to deal with. But she’s who I have to work with right this second, so I’ll do what I can.

  “As you said, it’s been five years. I can’t guarantee they will have any information for you.”

  She finally finishes tucking the folders into the plastic holders attached to the fronts of the office doors and leads me to another part of the hospital. We go up a shadowy back staircase that doesn’t seem like a good idea for anyone, and she gestures at another office door.

  “Thank you,” I say.

  She stays behind me as I walk up to the door and knock on it. A tall woman with broad shoulders and an intense look in her eyes opens the door and stares out at me.

  “Yes?” she asks.

  “I’m Agent Emma Griffin. I’m with the FBI. This hospital might be involved in a case I’m working on and I’d like to ask you some questions,” I introduce myself.

  She looks over at the woman behind me but doesn’t say anything. Apparently, she didn’t need to, because the liaison turns and walks away, leaving me there in the hallway.

  “Come in,” the woman waves me in. “I’m Sandra.”

  “Hello,” I say and follow her into the office.

  “This is Shane,” Sandra says, gesturing at a man leaned back in one of the gray office chairs at a long table functioning as a desk.

  He’s almost the antithesis of her: tall, but willowy. He’s the kind of person who’s as if he isn’t going to have full control over his arms and legs when he tries to move.

  “Hi, Shane,” I call over. “Agent Griffin.”

  “FBI,” Sandra says.

  This instantly makes Shane sit up straighter, a nervous look crossing his face. I smile.

  “Don’t worry. I’m not here for you,” I say.

  “Oh,” he says, letting out a breath of relief. “Okay. Good.”

  That kind of reaction is always a bit of a concern for me.

  “If you’ve been watching the news the last week, you probably heard about Ashley Stevenson,” I say.

  “That girl who went missing a few years back,” Sandra says. “She showed back up.”

  I nod. “Yes. That’s her.”

  “She’s not at this hospital,” Shane tells me.

  “I know,” I say. “But she was. The night she went missing, she was here. At least, that’s what I’ve been told. That’s why I’m here. I want to know if there’s any chance you still have the security footage from that night. August thirteenth. I know it was five years ago.”

  “Fortunately, our security system automatically uploads to the cloud,” Shane says, turning to a computer on the other side of him. “Everything is supposed to be kept there for five years. So, it looks as if you came in right under the wire. You said August thirteenth?”

  “Yes,” I confirm.

  “Kind of an appropriate date,” he remarks.

  “She was also born on the thirteenth, but of June,” I say. “Superstitious people are having a field day with it.”

  “I can imagine,” Sandra says.

  “What timeframe do you want to see?” Shane asks.

  “I’m not sure exactly. If you could just give me from around six until midnight, that would be great.”

  “Give me just a minute.”

  I watch as he isolates the portion of the security footage from those hours and cuts them from the rest so he can give me a copy of just the footage from that period. I give him my email address and he sends it through.

  “Thank you,” I tell him. “This could make a really big difference in the case.”

  “You have a long night of watching footage ahead of you,” Sandra says.

  “Maybe. But I know exactly what I’m looking for. Hopefully, it won’t be hard to spot.”

  I leave the security office and make my way back through the hospital. It’s getting on toward evening, so I order dinner to pick up at a restaurant close to the hotel. I send a text to Dean to let him know, but he doesn’t respond immediately. After picking up the food, I go straight to my room and change into comfortable clothes to settle in for my cyber stakeout.

  Opening the email Shane sent, I realize there is more footage than I expected. He didn’t just send the perspective of the camera inside the waiting room. The same several hours were captured on other cameras positioned outside the entrance and in the parking lot.

  I start with the camera at the entrance.

  Almost an hour later, I’m deep in my dinner and still scrolling through footage when the electronic lock on my door clicks and Dean, Xavier, and Ava come in. I gesture toward the table near the window.

  “There’s food,” I tell them. “I just kind of ordered everything. Did you find out anything?”

  Dean goes to the table and starts filling a paper plate with a roast beef sandwich, seasoned fries, and mozzarella sticks. This is the kind of meal that’s going to earn him several hours in the gym. I’ll be right there alongside him, so I know what he’s thinking as he pops one of the deliciously orange coils of potato in his mouth and adds a drizzle of barbecue sauce to the edge of the plate.

  Worth it.

  “There wasn’t a huge amount to find out,” he sighs, carrying the food over to the couch where I’m sitting. “They did get the results of the DNA test. It is definitely Ashley. The rest of the test results were fairly predictable. Malnutrition. Some lingering effects of abuse and what you would expect to see in a long-term captivity situation.”

  “Signs of sexual abuse?” I ask.

  Dean nods. “Evidence of repeated rapes. No sign of her ever having been pregnant, though.”

  “That’s interesting.”

  “Why?” Ava asks.

  “Most predators don’t think to use birth control methods with their victims,” I explain. “Unless there is a physiological reason Ashley can’t get pregnant, the chances of her not getting pregnant over the course of five years of abuse are very slim. That means birth control was done intentionally. That sets her apart from other kidnappings that are similar in other ways.”

  “Jaycee Dugard. Elizabeth Smart,” Dean says.

  I nod. “Exactly. Those girls were taken by men who considered them as extensions of their families. Wives, in a way. They were thought of as a way to expand the family. In
situations like that, pregnancies are welcome, if not directly intentional. The children are even brought out into the world and treated well by the men who hold their mothers captive. But that’s not what happened with Ashley.

  “She wasn’t brought in as a wife figure or a way to grow a family. That takes away a lot of the religious or cult undertones as well. The evidence of the sexual abuse isn’t surprising, but from what I’ve seen of her, it didn’t look as if she was tortured. Mistreated, yes, but this wasn’t sadism.”

  “No,” Dean says. “There isn’t evidence of that kind of treatment. One thing they did note was there aren’t any deep scars on her wrists or ankles. Which means she wasn’t chained up for the majority of the time she was there.”

  “Or they used soft restraints that wouldn’t cut into her skin,” I counter. “Which would mean they didn’t want to leave marks. Combined with the use of birth control, that tells me she wasn’t just being kept by this man she calls Wolf. He was using her as a commodity.”

  “Trafficking?” Dean asks.

  I give an unconvinced shrug. “It’s possible, but it doesn’t seem as if she was taken from place to place much. She would have mentioned that. And she didn’t mention any other girls, so she wasn’t in a brothel. This is a more focused situation. Just about her.”

  “Boutique exploitation,” Dean mutters.

  “We just need to figure out what kind, and by who,” I say.

  “What did you find out at the hospital?” Xavier asks, settling onto the floor with his own plate.

  “They had the security footage from five years ago,” I tell him. “I’m still going through it.”

  “Let’s see it,” Dean says.

  “Movie night!” Xavier says.

  He scoots closer to the table and I turn the computer around so everyone can see the screen.

  “I haven’t seen anything yet that has anything to do with Ashley. But I still have several hours of footage to go through, so it might be a little while,” I say.

  We eat as I continue to scroll through the footage. The angle of the camera allows us to see everyone who was going inside, which makes it easy to spot the people who weren’t Ashley. It’s a small hospital; the waiting room was quiet in the early evening. But as the sun went down, more and more people started showing up.

  Some were visibly injured, others seemed to be ill. Some wandered in on their own and others came with groups. As it gets more chaotic at the entrance, I slow the pace I’m scrolling to make sure we don’t miss anyone going inside. Suddenly I see a familiar face glance up toward the camera.

  “That’s Vivian,” I point to the screen.

  The slightly younger version of Vivian looks the way she did in the pictures, her hair longer and her face less stern and intense. She’s on one side of a figure in a sweatshirt, a man on the other, and another girl behind them. The hood on the sweatshirt conceals the figure’s face, but I know it’s Ashley.

  “Are you sure?” Dean asks.

  “Yes. What’s the timestamp?” He notes the time on the camera and I go to the other set of footage. “This is the camera inside the waiting room.”

  We cue the footage to the seconds just before we saw the group walking through the emergency room door and wait.

  “There they are,” Dean says. “Ashley is in really bad shape.”

  That’s an understatement. Ashley is barely on her own feet. The people on either side of her are holding her up as they go through the entrance toward the chairs clustered to the side of the reception desk. The woman behind the desk is already talking to someone else, so they move right past her. They bring Ashley to the far side of the seating area and lower her down into a chair tucked in the corner.

  She slumps in it, looking as though she’s no longer conscious as she’s sitting there. She starts to slide down the edge of the chair, heading for the floor. Allison steps forward and catches her, starting to pull her up. She says something, and Vivian steps up to help her. I can only imagine how weak Allison is feeling, knowing what she has gone through not long before this moment.

  The male figure who is with them starts to walk away, then pauses and looks back at them. He seems to be trying to hurry them along. No one around them is paying any attention to what’s happening. The girls look at Ashley one more time, then walk away.

  As they’re headed toward the entrance again, the man with them looks up. The camera catches an image of his face. Dean reaches forward to stop the playback.

  “That’s Sean Melrose,” he says. “Allison’s ex-boyfriend.”

  I stare at the image. I’ve seen that face before.

  It was staring at me in the hospital hallway after I talked to Leona.

  Forty-Two

  “That’s Allison’s ex-boyfriend?” I ask.

  Dean nods. “I looked into him as you asked me to. That’s definitely him. Didn’t she tell you he was the one who helped get her into the hospital?”

  “She did,” I say.

  “Then what is it?” Dean asks.

  “I’m not sure yet. Hold on,” I say. “Let’s see what happened to Ashley.”

  We continue as the people in the waiting room got called back to the doctor and others came to take their place in the chairs. No one looked Ashley’s way. No one seemed to notice she was there. Suddenly, she stirred. Her head dropped back, then lifted. She looked around. A few seconds later, she stood up and made her way toward the door, walking out of the emergency room.

  As quickly as I can, I cue up the footage from the other camera to the right time, so we can watch her leave. She was still shaky on her feet as she stumbled out of the sliding glass doors and onto the sidewalk. It was getting close to midnight, which means the footage will end soon. The back of my neck tingles as I watch her fall sideways and catch herself with one hand against the brick wall of the hospital.

  She used it to guide her as she made her way down toward the corner of the building. Leaning against it, she slid down to sit and rested her head back. The minutes tick by. No one checked on her or even looked at her.

  She sat there for almost twenty minutes. Silent. Alone. Abandoned by the people she trusted.

  My heart breaks for her.

  Finally, she used the wall to stand back up, and walked around the corner, disappearing from the frame.

  “Is that it?” Dean asks. “Did they give you anything else?”

  “No. Those are the only cameras they gave me. They didn’t mention any others on the outside of the hospital. I’m guessing they only have them in the parking areas and at the entrances. That side of the building is just a narrow driveway,” I say.

  “So another dead end. We have her right up until she disappears. No idea what happened to her after that,” Dean says, sounding frustrated and angry.

  “You looked into Sean Melrose,” I say.

  “Yes,” he said. “I sifted through his old social media and traced some of his new stuff, but most of it is private. I can crack it, but it’s going to take some time. I was able to do a quick background check on him, though.”

  “What did you find out about him?”

  “Not much. He got in some trouble before Ashley went missing. Nothing really serious. Drinking. Some traffic stuff. Trespassing. Fighting. After this, he pretty much went off the radar. It seems as though he and Allison kept things going for a while, but then he skipped town. I didn’t see anything about his being back around town. He might not have been.”

  “He has. I saw him at the hospital.”

  “When you were getting the footage?”

  “No,” I say. “The other hospital.”

  “With Allison?” Dean frowns.

  “No.” I shake my head. “With Leona.”

  “Ashley’s sister?” Ava asks, sounding as shocked as I was to see it.

  “Yep,” I confirm. “The day Ashley came back, I noticed Leona down the hall from her room. She seemed really upset and I went to talk to her. She pretty much brushed me off, but when she was wa
lking away, I noticed the man she had been talking to. It was him. It was Sean Melrose.”

  “What were they talking about?” Dean asks.

  I shake my head. “I don’t know. I didn’t hear them. But he seemed less than thrilled that I came to talk to Leona. He didn’t say anything to me, but the look in his eyes was unmistakable.”

  “What does that mean, though?” Dean asks. “They could know each other from school. Their ages would have been closer than Ashley’s.”

  “That’s definitely possible,” I admit. “We don’t really know anything about that right now. It just seems odd to me that nobody mentions the connection. If they were friends back then, it would seem to me that Allison would have said that. We talked about how Leona didn’t really socialize. They sometimes spent time together, but weren’t exactly friends. That would have been the time for her to mention that her boyfriend and Leona were apparently on good terms.”

  “Maybe they’ve gotten closer in the time since?”

  “No,” Ava says. I look over at her and see her shaking her head. “He went through all this, leaving her in the emergency room, encouraging the girls to lie, so he could separate himself from this situation. He knew how bad it would look for him if anyone could connect him to Ashley that night. That’s not the kind of person who would then strike up a friendship with her sister.”

  She looks at me. Xavier leans closer to me.

  “Give her the shovel, Emma,” he whispers.

  “That might be true,” I say.

  “Might?” Ava raises an eyebrow.

  My eyes slide over to her. She looks stunned I’m not jumping down her throat to dismiss her theory. I have to admit, it’s a solid theory. But I don’t buy it. If this was just about Ashley’s being left in the hospital, if she’d died there, then I would agree with Ava. But it’s not. Just seeing them leave her in the emergency room isn’t enough to separate Sean from the situation.