Presumed Dead

by Mason Cross

  “I told myself later that I thought it was a dead cat or something, but I don’t think that’s true. I think I knew right then. Maybe I always knew. I saw there was a big shape stuffed behind the shelving unit at the far end. Wrapped up in something. I leaned over to open the blind.

  “David had wrapped him in a couple of shower curtains and taped it up, I guess he was planning to move it at some point. The tape had come unstuck at the top and it wasn’t properly sealed up, that was where the smell was getting out.”

  Adeline’s tone had changed as she talked. As the content of her story had gotten more and more troubling, her voice had adjusted in the opposite direction. She no longer sounded shaky or on the verge of crying. She was talking like someone relating a boring report at a sales meeting for the third time that day; or a woman under hypnosis. Her voice was level, matter-of-fact. She sounded younger, too.

  “I knew exactly what it was. Who it was. But for some reason, I had to look anyway. I bent down and I pulled at the opening at the top. I didn’t want to touch it. There was blood or … or something on the inside. I felt it sticking as I pulled it back. His face was wrong. I mean, it didn’t look like a person. More like a waxwork of a person. There was this … dent in the top of his head. Right here.” She indicated the spot on her own forehead absently. “There was all this sticky blood around it, his hair was matted with it.

  “All of a sudden, I had to throw up. I backed away and turned around. I tripped over something, fell down. I started crawling, just knowing I had to get out of there, out into the rain, the air. I made it to the door and got up on my knees and that was when I saw him.”

  “David?”

  She nodded. “He was standing by the back door. He had come home, found I wasn’t in the house, and knew where I had gone. We just stood there looking at each other for what felt like forever. I guess seeing him shocked the urge to puke right out of me. He came across the yard to me, holding his hand out. He was saying my name. Saying other things. I couldn’t hear him. It was like after a really loud noise goes off, that ringing in your ear. He was holding out his hands. I just started yelling at him. I don’t even remember what. I wasn’t thinking. All I knew was it wasn’t enough to get out of the woodshed. It was all around me. I had to get away.”

  She stopped and stared ahead. We passed the first sign we had seen listing Lake Bethany as a destination. Fifty miles.

  “Do you remember what you did next?”

  “Kind of. Next thing I knew, I was on the north road with my thumb out, and Mr. Green’s car had crashed. I keep wondering. If I hadn’t been out there, maybe they wouldn’t have been at the wrong place for …”

  “Someone would have been,” I said. “It’s not your fault.”

  She raised her eyebrows, as though she could understand why I said that, but it didn’t mean she had to believe it.

  “You probably want to know how I got away, huh?”

  “Yes.”

  “I don’t remember exactly what happened. Like I said, my mind was still back in the woodshed. I was barely listening to the driver’s conversation. First thing I really paid attention to was him getting shot in the face. I saw the gun swinging around to point at me. I never saw his face, he had a hood up and his face was in shadow. I just remember the muzzle looked so wide. His fingers were thin, almost delicate-looking. I think I tried to get out of the other door, I remember getting the seatbelt off, and my hand was on the door lever, then there was another bang.”

  She ran her right hand up her left arm and pushed the sleeve of her T-shirt back to reveal the edge of what looked like a large patch of scar tissue on her shoulder. It was pink and mottled.

  “I didn’t feel anything. I guess I was knocked out, or in shock or something. Only I wasn’t unconscious. I remember feeling wetness on myself, and thinking was it still raining. Then feeling everything rocking about, like I was on a boat. And then there was a big dip, like going over the edge on a rollercoaster, and all of a sudden I was outside and looking up at the sky. But the rocking had stopped, and that was all I cared about so I just drifted off.”

  “You must have gotten the door open a little way without the killer noticing,” I said.

  She nodded. “I suppose so. I mean, that’s the way it had to have happened. I pieced it all together later, when I was better. I got the seatbelt undone and the door was open a little, so when the car went over the edge, I must have been thrown out.”

  “Who found you?”

  Her brow furrowed. “Who said anyone did?”

  “You lost a lot of blood. Enough for them to assume you couldn’t have survived out there with a wound that bad, even if it wasn’t a headshot.”

  “He told me I was lucky. That was the first thing he said when I woke up. I remember it clear as day. I was in agony, no painkillers. I knew that my brother had killed my father and I had just been shot, and this guy was telling me I was lucky. Sure, time to buy a lottery ticket, right? But he was right. The way I fell kept pressure on the wound. And him happening by like that …”

  She tailed off, as though suddenly remembering she was talking out loud. Perhaps revealing more than she thought she should. I thought I could fill in the blanks myself. The more I had thought about the circumstances of her disappearance, the more I knew somebody had to have helped her. Not just because of the blood loss, but because it’s difficult for anyone to disappear completely. Much less a scared, wounded teenager who’s never spent any time away from home.

  “The man who helped you,” I said. “It was Roland Roussel, wasn’t it?”

  Her head snapped around, as though I had woken her from a daydream.

  “What makes you say that?” Her voice was suddenly on edge, her eyes narrowed behind the sunglasses. The defenses were back up.

  “Adeline,” I said gently. “He’s one of the people who was killed. He died yesterday.”

  She put a hand to her mouth. When she didn’t say anything else, I continued.

  “He didn’t tell me, if that’s what you’re thinking. I put it together. Somebody had to have helped you, and that person was either somebody not from Bethany, or somebody from town who’s kept it quiet all these years. Odds were it was the latter. There was only one person more of an outsider in Bethany than your brother, and that’s Roland Roussel.”

  She was still looking at me with suspicion, her mouth a thin line.

  “But that wasn’t what confirmed it. You did that yourself. Courage conquers.”

  Her mouth opened and then closed. She knew immediately the mistake she had made.

  “I knew it sounded familiar when you said it the other day. I couldn’t work out why, though. It isn’t an expression in regular use, certainly not for someone your age. It’s a motto. The motto of the 37th Armored Regiment, specifically. But you know that, since you read it off the crest hanging on Roland Roussel’s wall.”

  She turned her head and looked out of the window again. After a minute, she started talking again. “I don’t remember him finding me. I was all the way unconscious by that time, even though it can’t have been long. He thought it was an accident at first. Saw the car at the bottom of the ravine. He climbed down to it, went right by me without seeing. After he saw the other two were dead he came right back up, said he would have passed me by again if he hadn’t seen my arm sticking out of the bushes. He tried to wake me up, when that didn’t work he wrapped my arm up in his shirt and hauled me back up to his truck. He got me back to his place. He had been planning to take me to the hospital as soon as he got me patched up.”

  “He was a veteran,” I said. “I guess the training stayed with him. He didn’t call an ambulance?”

  “No phone. First couple of days, he couldn’t leave me. He kept saying that from time to time, ‘courage conquers’. I didn’t know where it came from. He expected somebody to come by, and no one ever did. I found out later t
hey didn’t start looking for me for a couple days. By the time I was well enough for him to leave me, I begged him not to.

  “He asked me what happened and I told him. Not about why I was running, just the attack. I made him swear not to tell he had found me.”

  “He was taking a big risk. If the cops had searched the place …”

  “We were careful. And lucky that David didn’t report me missing for a couple of days. Everybody was busy looking for Mr. Green instead. I rested up a few days and I helped him clean up with bleach. On the way to the house I had been in the flatbed, so we could just hose it down. We burned the clothes I was in and the sheets from the bed.”

  There was only one question left: “Why?”

  “Lucky. Like I said, at first that seemed like a ridiculous concept, but over the next few days, I knew it was true. Nobody else got away from the killer. It was like I had been given a new life. I thought it was better for me and better for David if I never walked back out of those woods.”

  I didn’t say anything. Maybe something else gave me away.

  “You’re thinking I’m a selfish bitch.”

  “No, I’m thinking I understand completely. But David never got over it. You don’t owe anybody else anything, but …”

  “But I owe him.” She nodded. “That’s why I’m going back.”

  66

  Isabella Green

  Isabella drove back down the hill to town. Before she reached the turn for the station, she turned into Adams Street and then pulled into the alley running behind Main Street, parking behind the dumpsters out back of the Peach Tree. She checked her watch and waited ten minutes, until she saw the sheriff’s car flash past the mouth of the alley. He was on his way back up to the Connor house, like he’d told her.

  The more time that passed, the more she believed Blake was right. The gun matching the killings only made her more certain. The person behind these new killings was someone on the inside. But who? She knew all of her colleagues well enough, but if life had taught her anything, it was that everyone conceals a part of themselves. The truth was, it was all too easy to accept that one of the other cops had killed these people.

  Out of the department, she had the closest working relationships with Feldman, Dentz and Sheriff McGregor. Start with them. The soft, civilian side of her wanted to start listing all the reasons why these men couldn’t possibly have committed coldblooded murder: Feldman had his rough edges, but he had shown her a caring and gentle side since her mother’s stroke. McGregor had been her mentor, and a good cop for thirty years. Dentz … well, Dentz was harmless. Literally. She didn’t think he’d have the organizational skills to carry something like this out, never mind the resolve.

  The professional side of her dismissed those rationalizations out of hand. Any of them could have done it. Any of them could be hiding their true nature behind a mask carefully constructed over a lifetime.

  So look at the evidence. Who could physically have done it?

  The only person she could rule out for the four killings in Bethany was Carter Blake, because she had been with him when the two hunters were killed. The more she thought about it, the more she decided that it was an opportunistic attempt to frame him. But why? Because he was a troublesome outsider, or because someone had a personal problem with him? The latter suggested Feldman. But Feldman wasn’t in charge. Feldman hadn’t been the one to veto the involvement of the FBI or anyone else.

  She moved into the station and checked the corridor and the interview rooms to make sure she was alone, then she locked the front door. McGregor’s office was also locked, which was unusual. But the master key was in the lockbox by the door, and she had a key for that.

  She opened the door. She ignored the computer. Unlike with Haycox, she had no idea of the sheriff’s password, but she didn’t need it for what she wanted to check. She went to the filing cabinet and tried the top drawer. It was locked, but she wouldn’t need a master key for this. She took two paperclips from the sheriff’s desk tidy and straightened one of them out, bent the other one into an L shape. She inserted the two clips into the lock at the top and bottom. She twisted the top clip until she heard a click and the top drawer sprang open.

  Not for the first time, she was grateful for McGregor’s fastidious approach to paperwork. She found the file section she was looking for in the third drawer. The fact that none of the men could be ruled out for any of the Bethany killings was neither here nor there – each could have been accomplished quickly, with minimal travel time. The killings of Walter Wheeler and Vincent González back in September were a different matter. Someone would have had to drive all the way to Atlanta and back, not counting the time it took to find and kill the two men.

  She had thought about this before, and couldn’t remember for certain what she had been doing on the date in question, September 29th, never mind anyone else. It hadn’t been long after her mother’s stroke, and the days had blended into one another. She had a feeling that Saturday had been one of her days off. But the shift allocation would tell her that.

  There was one sheet per week, listing shift patterns. She leafed through to September, looking for the week beginning the 24th. The 3rd, 10th, 17th were there. 1st October was there.

  The sheet for the week of the 24th was missing.

  Her head snapped up from the file as she heard a key in the front door of the station.

  Hurriedly, she slipped the file back into the cabinet and slid the drawer back in. it wouldn’t close fully, she must have stuck the locking mechanism, but she had no time to fix it now. She pushed the drawer as far as it would go and moved to the door. As she reached it, she saw she was too late.

  “What the hell are you doing?”

  Kurt Feldman was standing in the doorway, his hand halfway to his holster before he realized it was Green. He relaxed a little, but his eyes took on a suspicious glint.

  Isabella tried to keep her voice unperturbed. “I just came by to pick up my house keys. I think I left them …”

  “In McGregor’s office?” he asked sharply.

  “Yeah, I was in there earlier.”

  He stepped forward, trying to see past her. “Is Blake in there?”

  She had time to step out of his way before he barged past her. He glanced around the room, satisfying himself that Blake wasn’t hiding under the desk.

  Feldman stepped out of the office and looked at her, and for a second she felt a chill. It wasn’t just the unpleasant frisson of a confrontation with someone you know and usually get on with, either. It was more like the feeling when a stranger accosts you on a street at night. Her brain was telling her there was nothing to worry about, just a little heated exchange. But her gut was telling her to make a decision: put some distance between the two of them, or get ready to defend herself.

  “I have no idea where Blake is, as it happens, Kurt,” she said, her voice hardening. She was almost grateful for the impetus to get off the back foot.

  He seemed to sense her unease, and physically pulled back, looking away from her.

  When this was all over, they would have to have a talk. Perhaps Feldman was guilty of nothing more than an unrequited attraction to her, but it was starting to become a big problem. The next thing he said caught her off guard. She had been expecting him to say something about her or Blake.

  “You don’t think Connor’s guilty, do you?”

  She considered before answering. Was this a trick question? Did he know she had been snooping in the office? After a moment, she shrugged. “I have an open mind. Just want to make sure we don’t miss anything, just because it looks open and shut.”

  He nodded as though he knew exactly what she didn’t want to miss.

  He looked straight ahead out of the window to the empty lot out front. Then he turned his eyes to the empty chair behind the desk. “How much do you really know about him?”

&
nbsp; “About Connor?”

  “About Jim McGregor.”

  Again, she considered her words carefully. “I know he’s a great cop. Nobody knows this town better than him.”

  Feldman paused. He looked away from her before he spoke. “He wasn’t around when any of them were killed, you notice that?”

  “We don’t know exactly when Haycox was killed.”

  “We know he was killed by somebody he didn’t think he had any reason to fear,” Feldman said. “That fits with Connor, sure. But it would also fit another cop.”

  She felt her mouth go dry. “What are you saying?”

  “Same thing you were thinking. The reason you came down here, I’m betting.”

  Isabella opened her mouth to deny it, and closed it.

  “And then there’s Roussel,” Feldman continued. “Maybe David Connor picked him at random … or maybe someone killed him because they knew you and Blake had talked to him.”

  Isabella looked away from him and took a few seconds to decide what to say next. “You’re right, Feldman. I think it’s him. I don’t know why yet, but I think it’s the sheriff.” She told him about the way McGregor had resisted every one of her efforts to call in outside support. About how she had come to the same conclusion about it having to be a cop.

  Feldman nodded after she had spoken. “You know what? I’m not even saying I want to do anything about it. Everything seems to fit David Connor, and maybe I’m just fine with that.” He turned to look at her. “All I’m saying is, be careful.”

  Just then, her phone buzzed in her pocket, jarring them both out of the moment. It was Blake.

  “Where are you?” he asked. It sounded like he was in a car.

  “Where else?”

  “I’m about thirty miles away. Can I meet you at the cabin at Benson’s?”

  “Sure,” Isabella said breezily, pressing the phone close to her ear to seal as much of the sound in as possible.