Presumed Dead

by Mason Cross

  Then she straightened up and looked away from me, maybe just to give her eyes a rest from the glare of the sunset. She relaxed her posture a little, bringing her left hand down and threading both thumbs through the belt loops on either side.

  “I probably don’t have to tell you you’re making Sheriff McGregor a little nervous,” she said without looking back at me.

  “I appreciate that,” I said. “I’ll try not to cause any trouble. You can tell him I’ll be headed down to Atlanta tomorrow, if that helps.”

  “Atlanta? What for?”

  “I don’t know yet.”

  “How much is Connor paying you?”

  “That’s kind of between me and my client.”

  She bent down again and rested both arms on the sill. Her face was close enough to mine that I could smell peppermint gum on her breath. She looked amused by my evasion, rather than pissed off.

  “Fair enough. I hope you’re being compensated appropriately though.”

  “I’m used to challenging work,” I said.

  “How about impossible work?”

  “Everybody seems very sure of that. Except David Connor.”

  She nodded, but didn’t say anything.

  “Is this the part where you give me some friendly advice to move on?”

  She looked away again and breathed out through her nose. A line appeared between her fine eyebrows, beneath the strand of blond hair that had fallen out from beneath her hat. She was making her mind up about something.

  “You know what I think? I think it would be easier if I just explained to you why you’re wasting time. You can buy me a coffee.”

  17

  Isabella Green

  Just from the two-minute conversation, Isabella knew Carter Blake wasn’t anything like the other man who had visited a few weeks before.

  That guy, Wheeler, had been a proper licensed PI. McGregor had checked that out. His bona fides were in order. Wheeler had the air of a salesman, though. The kind of guy who’ll tell you whatever you want to hear for a buck. Not that Isabella had spent much time conversing with him, of course. He got off to a poor start with her, asking “Is the boss in, babe?” when she was on the desk.

  Blake didn’t come across that way at all. He wasn’t selling anything. He hadn’t pissed the sheriff off any more than he’d had to. Isabella got the impression he just wanted to do his job without causing unnecessary grief. That told her it might be worth a different approach.

  She suggested to Blake that they go to Freddie’s diner, out on Route 19. It wasn’t that she was trying to keep their conversation secret from McGregor, exactly. Discreet would be a better word. And after all, he had asked her to keep an eye on the guy. This might save the both of them some time.

  It was a ten-minute drive along the north road to the intersection with 19, and Freddie’s was a couple of miles from there. Isabella went ahead, keeping an eye on Blake’s gray Continental in the rearview mirror. She pulled into the lot outside Freddie’s, parking outside the long concrete building with the tin roof and the red neon sign that was missing the ‘I’. The lot was almost empty, just a rusting white removal van for company. That was why she had picked this place. Blake pulled into the spot beside her and got out.

  Freddie, a sixtyish gray-haired Italian whose rail-thin frame belied the calorie count of his offerings, shouted his usual good-natured greeting as they entered and gestured at her usual booth by the window. Carter Blake sat down opposite her and glanced around. His green eyes seemed to study the room like he had been told there was going to be a test at the end. His gaze lingered a second on the sole other customer, a bald guy in his forties with a long black beard, who Isabella assumed was the driver of the van outside.

  She watched Blake as he looked around. He had dark hair, was clean shaven, and those green eyes. She thought it was something about the eyes that had made her decide to handle him differently from Wheeler.

  When Freddie came over, Blake looked at Isabella, waiting for her to order first.

  “Usual, Freddie.”

  “Latte, decaf, got it.”

  Blake ordered a black coffee and Freddie disappeared into the back. Blake glanced at the menu in the little stand in the middle of the table.

  “How’s the food?”

  “Like the coffee,” she said. “Uninspiring. I like this place because it’s quiet.”

  He seemed to accept that this was an obvious attraction. “So you were going to tell me why I’m wasting my time.”

  “You first,” she said. “How’d you get involved in this? You know what happened to the other guy, right?”

  “Yeah. I’ll try to be more careful than Wheeler was.” He hesitated a second, and then spoke again. “Somebody put me in touch with David Connor. She’s a friend of mine, from an organization that works with …” he searched for the right phrase “… families of the missing. She told me his story, and asked if I would come and see if I could help him.”

  “You’re a private investigator? Like Wheeler?”

  “Not exactly. I’m kind of a consultant, but I’m pretty good at finding people.”

  “What sort of people?”

  “People who don’t want to be found.”

  “I do a little of that myself,” she said. “Sounds like a dangerous profession.”

  “It has its ups and downs.”

  “I bet. So what makes you think Connor isn’t imagining this whole thing?”

  “I haven’t ruled that out. My friend believes him, though, and she has a lot of experience working with people in his situation. She knows all about false hope and denial. She seemed to think Connor was different.”

  “And what do you think?”

  “Like I said, jury’s out. But if I had to choose … yeah. I think he’s telling the truth. The truth as he knows it, anyway. I think he believes the person he saw was his sister.”

  “Even though she’s dead.”

  “The body was never recovered.”

  “She’s dead. Her blood was all over Eric Salter’s car. Too much blood. Both Salter and—” she hesitated a little before she said the name. She could see Blake’s eyes register the half-second pause. “Both of the other victims were killed instantly. She wasn’t the only body they never found.” Isabella looked out the window and pointed at the white ash trees across the road. “It’s all woods from there to South Carolina,” she said. “There are trails, sure, but there are places out there no one’s ever set foot. Plenty of places for bodies to end up. It’s not like in the big city where all you have to do is check a few dumpsters. Out here, sometimes sure enough has to be enough.”

  “And it’s enough for you?”

  She nodded. “Enough for me, enough for the county coroner. Adeline Connor is dead, it’s in the books.”

  He considered it. “How long have you been on the job?”

  She smiled coldly. “I’m too young to have worked the case, so how can I be sure? Is that it?”

  “I didn’t mean that, I’m just interested. You’re from Bethany?”

  “Almost all my life. We moved here when I was six. We lived in Atlanta before that. My dad didn’t like the city, said it was no place to raise a family.” As she repeated the words she had heard her father say so many times, she couldn’t help but think of the irony. What had happened here a few years later had demonstrated that there was no such thing as a safe place.

  “You were around when the killings were happening then,” Blake said. “You would be what, early teens?”

  “Not bad. I was sixteen.”

  Blake didn’t miss a beat. “Only a year younger than Adeline was.”

  “That’s right,” she said.

  He considered for a moment. “Did you know her, back then?”

  “Not well. I saw her around in high school. I was the year below though, s
o …”

  “How about David?”

  “Same. I didn’t know him well or anything. Different years, and you know how it is, we moved in different circles.”

  “He wasn’t one of the popular kids?”

  “What makes you think I was?”

  Blake thought about it. “You have good people skills. That’s why we’re having this conversation, isn’t it?”

  Isabella sighed. “David was a little odd, even back then. A stoner. I think he played bass in a band, or drums or something. It was a weird family set-up. His mom had died years before, and his dad left them a few months before the murder. I guess David was the only one left to take care of her. No wonder he took it so hard.”

  “What happened to his dad?”

  She stopped and considered. Jake Connor had been known as a drunk and a jerk around town, but she had only crossed him once. She had ridden to the gas station on her bike to get candy, must have been about eight or nine. When she came back outside, she saw that Connor had collided with her bike on his way out. The front wheel was warped out of shape, and Connor was examining his bumper for damage. She remembered the anger in his eyes when he looked up and saw her, asking what the hell she was doing, leaving this piece of shit here.

  She had just turned and run, back into the kiosk. He had made to follow her, then got back in his car and drove away. Isabella never forgot the look in his eyes, though, like he was only just restraining himself from hitting a scared little girl. It reminded her a lot of the look in Waylon Mercer’s eyes.

  “He just upped and left,” she said. “He wasn’t missed.”

  Blake thought about it. “I heard David was a suspect for a while.”

  “I don’t know how seriously they looked at him. But yes, there was gossip. You know how small towns are, and high school kids. He went from being a little odd to being a real outcast. Everybody was wondering if this kid was the killer everybody was looking for.”

  “Did you wonder that?”

  She shook her head. “I didn’t think so. Still don’t.”

  Isabella watched Blake’s eyes as he took a drink of his coffee. She wondered if she had really expected to persuade him he was wasting his time.

  “He hasn’t been carrying around this idea that she’s been alive all this time,” Blake said. “He stuck around Bethany for fifteen years, and from what you’ve told me, it wasn’t for the social connections. He was still looking for her, right?”

  Isabella wondered if Connor had told Blake this, and doubted it. He had worked it out himself. Good instincts. She hadn’t exchanged more than a couple of words with Connor in years. But everybody knew what he was doing on those hikes in the winter, when the leaves and the foliage died back.

  “Yeah, that’s what he was doing.”

  “But he was looking for her body. That means he had accepted she was dead. He just wanted to find her and lay her to rest. But now he believes he saw her.”

  Isabella gave him a skeptical look, waiting for him to acknowledge how foolish it sounded. He met her gaze and said nothing.

  “So what do you do now?”

  “I’m going to go to Atlanta, see if I can do better than Wheeler.”

  She had to respond to that with a grim smile. “If you return with a pulse, I’ll consider it mission accomplished.”

  “That’s usually my baseline.”

  She finished the last of her latte and glanced out of the window at where their cars were parked. It was getting dark now, and she had spent more than enough time talking to Blake. She still had to drop the car back at the station and get back in time to look in on her mom.

  She wasn’t exactly sure why she had gone out of her way to talk to him. Something in his eyes maybe. She hadn’t gone looking for it, but Blake was the first person outside of Bethany who she had exchanged more than two sentences with in months. He seemed to sense a change in her. Perhaps she had let something show in her expression when she looked out of the window.

  “Before you go,” he said, “can I ask you a question?”

  18

  Carter Blake

  Deputy Green’s eyes narrowed. The distant, almost sad expression that had appeared on her face vanished and was replaced with the more familiar look of suspicion. I think they teach that look to trainee cops on their first day. Guaranteed to stir a guilty conscience.

  “Ask away.”

  “Was Arlo Green your father?”

  “Yes.”

  I hadn’t made the connection until the moment she had paused when talking about the other victims in the car. She had avoided saying his name, or more likely, “my dad”.

  “I’m sorry.”

  “Why? You didn’t kill him. It was a long time ago. And at least we had a body to bury.”

  I considered carefully before I asked the next question. If I thought it was going to upset her, I would have held my tongue, but she had been so matter of fact about her father’s murder that I went ahead. Because I really wanted her take.

  “What do you think happened to the killer?”

  She straightened a little in her seat and looked back at me. “The killer is as dead as Adeline Connor.”

  “You seem pretty sure of that.”

  She didn’t blink. No doubt in her eyes. “Cop’s instinct. Or maybe just looking at the evidence. Between nine and twelve murders in the space of eighteen months, and then nothing since.”

  “It doesn’t mean he’s dead,” I said.

  She smiled, but this time without any of the warmth.

  “You’re going to tell me the Devil Mountain Killer isn’t dead either now? Is this your next job after you find Adeline Connor? Maybe you want to find Elvis first though, I mean I’d love to see him in concert.”

  “I have no idea,” I said. “That’s why I asked you.”

  “Well, now you know.”

  “What if he’s locked up? What if he moved somewhere else?”

  “If he went to jail for something unrelated, it would probably be something minor, and we would have had more killings a year or two later. If he went somewhere else, we would know about it.”

  “You’re talking about the MO. The .38 caliber double tap.”

  “Yes. The killer was very consistent. Even if he changed weapons, which would make him unusual, there was nothing else with that kind of signature. And people were waiting. Obviously, I wasn’t on the job back then, but …”

  She closed her eyes, as though summoning the sense of what it was like to live here fifteen years back.

  “It’s hard to explain. A small town like this – we lost three of our own. Adeline, my dad, and a guy named Georgie Yorke the previous year. When this kind of thing happens in a city, I suppose people just get on with it. They don’t think about it the way they don’t think about muggings, or hit and runs, or poison gas attacks on the subway. But Bethany has a population of three thousand. Three people murdered out of that population has a ripple effect. Everybody’s affected. And because the perp was still out there, it was even worse. People were speculating it could have been somebody from Bethany. We were waiting. We waited years. We would have known.”

  “So what do you think happened to him?”

  “I think whoever it was walked out into the woods where no one would find him and killed himself. One more mystery. And good riddance.” And then she thought of something. “But maybe you’re asking the wrong member of the Bethany Sheriff’s Department.”

  “You mean McGregor …”

  She shook her head. “Not McGregor. Haycox has a real bee in his bonnet about the case. He keeps it on the down low, though.” She stopped as though she had said more than she had intended to.

  I thought back to the other cop I had seen at the station. He was young, quite a bit younger than Green.

  “The rookie? Did he grow up here too?�
�

  “No, he moved here last year. He knows all the theories, though. I was inside his apartment once, he has all the books.”

  “What does McGregor think about this little hobby?”

  “I think Haycox is being very careful not to let him find out.”

  “But he told you.”

  “People tell me things.”

  I nodded, wondering if he had confided in her despite the fact she was related to one of the victims, or because of it.

  “I haven’t talked you out of this, have I?”

  I shook my head. “Not at all. You’ve given me a lot to think about.”

  She sighed. “Do me one favor, okay? Keep out of trouble while you’re here.”

  “I’ll do my best.”

  The corner of her mouth twitched as she registered that that wasn’t a promise. “It was interesting talking to you. Y’all have a nice trip tomorrow.”

  “Wait a second,” I said. I reached into my pocket and took out a blank business card. I wrote my cell number on it. “In case you need to get hold of me.”

  She examined the card for a second before taking it. “Girl could get the wrong idea. I suppose you’d like my number too, huh?”

  I shot her a puzzled look. “You changed it from 911?”

  She smiled, got up and put her hat back on. She walked to the door without looking back. I reached for my wallet and realized she had trapped a bill under her coffee cup without me seeing, even though I hadn’t looked away.

  I stayed at the table as she got into the blue-and-white cruiser and pulled out of the lot, wondering if Deputy Green might prove to be a bigger problem than any of her colleagues down the line.

  19

  Carter Blake

  After I watched Green drive off, I decided to go back around to Bethany the long way, heading down Route 19 and taking the exit that led back around into town from the south. I kept going past the road to Benson’s Cabins, deciding to go into town to get something to eat. As I approached the turn for the winding hill up to David Connor’s house, I saw strong headlight beams pointed out of the entrance way.