Presumed Dead

by Mason Cross

  “Is somebody else with you?”

  “I think that sounds right.”

  “Don’t bring them with you.”

  She looked at Feldman, who was studying her face.

  “Makes sense, talk to you later.”

  “It was Blake,” she said as she hung up. “He’s gone to Atlanta, wanted to speak to them about Wheeler again, I guess.”

  Just then, another ringtone sounded, not hers. Feldman reached into his pocket and took his cell out, examining the screen. “It’s the sheriff. He wants me to come up to the Connor house.”

  67

  Carter Blake

  The hairs stood up on my arms as I saw the roadblock. A blue-and-white Bethany Sheriff’s Department Crown Victoria, parked at a diagonal on the road, a sawhorse blocking the rest of the road. The older cop manning this one; the one Green had called Jerry. I knew there would be another on the north road. Green hadn’t mentioned anything about this.

  “What’s happening?” Adeline asked, no fear in her voice, just puzzlement.

  “Keep the sunglasses on,” I said. “Don’t say anything unless he talks to you.”

  I pulled to a stop and rolled down the window.

  “Back so soon,” Jerry said evenly.

  “Sheriff McGregor decide I’m not welcome anymore?” I said, trying to make it sound like a joke, rather than the genuine question it was.

  “You’re in luck. I’m not stopping anybody coming in.” Slight emphasis on “in”.

  I raised my eyebrows in a question and he just smiled in dismissal, giving the briefest glance to my passenger. “Be careful, now.”

  He moved the sawhorse and gave me a thumbs-up as I drove past. I watched in the rearview as he replaced the barrier and took up position looking back down the road.

  “What was that about?” Adeline said when we had rounded the corner.

  “The sheriff has put the cork in the bottle,” I said, wondering why he had done that.

  Green was waiting for us when we pulled into the lot at Benson’s. She looked uneasy as I got out. It seemed like she was deliberately avoiding looking through the windshield at the person in the passenger seat.

  “Are you okay?” I asked as I got out.

  “Feldman told McGregor about you and me.”

  “I’m sorry if I’ve made your life more difficult,” I said.

  She shook her head. “It’s not you who decided to be an asshole about it.” She didn’t look away from me, but inclined her head in the direction of the car. “It’s really her?”

  “Why don’t you ask her yourself?”

  Adeline Connor opened the door and got out, her gaze nervously on Green as she straightened up.

  I looked from her to Green. I had expected her to be surprised, and I knew she would have to see to believe. What I didn’t expect was for her to turn white.

  “I’m sorry,” Adeline said. “I was scared.”

  “You …” Green began. “I … Everybody thought you were …”

  “Dead, I know. I didn’t plan it, it just kind of … developed.”

  “But you ran with it,” Green said, coldly.

  Adeline’s gaze dropped to the floor.

  Green closed her own eyes and seemed to be steeling herself. Then she took two steps toward Adeline. Gently, she reached out and touched the underside of her chin, raising her head up so they were eyeball to eyeball. She spoke clearly and calmly.

  “Do you remember? Who shot you?”

  Adeline stared back at her for a long time, then she shook her head.

  “I didn’t see him. It was dark. I thought I was …” she grimaced as she realized the irony of what she was saying. “I really thought I was dead. Maybe that was why I went with it.”

  Green held Adeline’s gaze for even longer. I wondered what was going through her head. It was as though she thought she could read the other woman’s eyes like an exposure on a piece of film. Like she could reach back through the years and see the face of the killer. And then she took a step away and trained her blue eyes on me, and I got the experience of being on the receiving end. It was like being scanned.

  “I think I have some catching up to do,” she said.

  We went inside and Adeline started talking. She was a little more concise this time, more confident in recalling the memories, but nothing changed about her story. Finding the body of her father, running into the night, being picked up by Salter and Green’s father. When she started relating the shooting, Green closed her eyes, as though focusing purely on Adeline’s words.

  “I’m sorry,” she said, when Adeline finished.

  Adeline shifted in her chair uncomfortably. “Don’t be, it wasn’t your fault.”

  “The killings stopped after that,” Green said.

  “I know. I read about it in the news.”

  “Of course you did.”

  I cleared my throat, and the two women looked up as one, as though each of them was remembering for the first time that I was here.

  “Can I talk to you for a second?”

  Adeline stared at me until she worked out she was being excused, and then moved to the back of the room with an embarrassed smile.

  “The gun they found at David Connor’s place …” I began.

  “It’s a match,” she replied. “It’s the weapon that killed the four men this week.”

  I had expected as much. I had been sure Connor was being framed, but the fact it was the same gun meant he was being framed by the killer.

  “Game over for Connor, then,” I said, giving it just the hint of a questioning tone. Green didn’t blink.

  “It isn’t him,” she said. “But the gun matches, so whoever put it there is the killer. And that gives us a very short list of suspects.”

  She spoke quickly. She told me about her clandestine visit to the sheriff’s office. What she had found in the filing cabinet, or to be exact, what she hadn’t found. And then she told me about Feldman coming by, and what they had talked about. Everything they had talked about.

  After that, we both knew what our next move had to be.

  68

  Carter Blake

  The house was on the opposite side of town from Benson’s. It was almost as far apart as two places could be within the town limits, as if the two locations were at either end of a diagonal line drawn from the southwest corner to the northeast.

  Green told me about the conversation with McGregor, and how she had come to the same conclusion I had. If David Connor wasn’t the killer, then there was only one other explanation for the murder weapon being found at his place. There were only two people who could credibly have planted the gun without raising suspicion: McGregor or Feldman. She told me how Feldman had seemed to read her mind when she sounded him out, telling her he had suspicions of his own.

  I parked at the bottom of the street and approached the house on foot. The street was on a steep hill, leading up to a single house at the top which backed onto the woods. It looked a lot like the other houses in the street: one level, wood siding, a big front yard. On the side of the house was a driveway and a garage. There was no car out front.

  The yard was neat. The exterior of the house was neat too, the paintwork looked new, the gutters and the slates on the roof straight and clean. The windows at the front all had venetian blinds, most of the way closed.

  I opened the gate and approached, watching the windows for a hint of movement behind those three-quarter-shut blinds. There was no doorbell, just a knocker above a brass nameplate. I raised it and let it drop. There was no answer the first time, so I waited a second and dropped it again.

  I stepped back and glanced at the garage. Maybe the car was in there, maybe not. I looked at the windows with their blinds. Maybe someone was in there, maybe not.

  There was a path leading around the side o
f the house to the backyard. I glanced behind me to check the street was still deserted, and walked around the side. It opened onto a patch of grass bounded by six-foot wood fencing. The branches of the ash trees on the slope behind the house hung over the fence.

  There were drapes on the windows at this side instead of blinds, but no more sign of life. I reached out and tried the back door handle. It was locked, of course. Cops tend not to be careless about household security, and this one struck me as less careless than most. There was a gap at the corner of the window nearest the door. I crouched and put my eye to it. It was an office. A desk pushed up to the far wall, some bookcases, a file drawer, a map on the wall. I squinted and shifted my position to get a better view of the map. Something about it looked familiar. It was like looking at a Rorschach blot. It took a few seconds for the patterns I was looking at to coalesce into a meaningful configuration, but once they did, I could see nothing else.

  I stepped away from the window and considered. I went back to the side path and glanced down it. I could see all the way down the street from this position. Still empty. No people, no sounds of cars. With any luck, the owner of the house wouldn’t be back for a while.

  I took my pick set out of my wallet and selected one that ought to do the job, knowing if the owner was cautious enough to have a burglar alarm it would have to be a quick visit. Even if he did, I didn’t need long. I slipped the pick into the lock. Twisted one way, then the other, until I felt the tumblers click. I pushed the handle down and the door swung open onto a small kitchen. No alarm. No audible one, at least. The owner might well have other ways to check for intruders, but I could worry about that later.

  The kitchen led into a hallway, and the door to the office was right across. That door was locked, too. An interior lock, so even less of a challenge than the main door. In five seconds I had it open. I moved to the desk and the map that hung above it.

  I was right. The map showed the town and its surroundings. It was large, scale two inches to a mile. There were pins in it, and that was what had created the familiar pattern. The positions of the Devil Mountain Killer’s victims from 2002 and ’03 were marked out with blue pins. The four killings from this week in yellow pins.

  There was a small pile of paper on the desk. I leafed through it and found a one-sheet criminal record check for Jeffrey Friedrickson. The printout had the date and time it was printed on the bottom right hand corner: Sunday 25th at 17:22. Before the hunters had been killed. Not necessarily incriminating in itself, but …

  I tried the desk drawers. These weren’t locked.

  Everything in them was related to the 2002-03 killings. News clippings, copies of police reports, maps. I pictured him working late, running off copies of the relevant files when everybody had gone home. There were four notebooks too, every page used. I leafed through them. Same subject. Same neat handwriting. Notes, mind maps, diagrams. I saw familiar names. It reminded me of what I had seen at Haycox’s place, but there was so much more material here. David Connor, Roland Roussel, Isabella Green. The file with the Isabella Green material was thicker: clippings from the time when her father had been killed, of course, but also pictures that looked as though they had been taken recently, and without her knowledge. Was Green the next target?

  I felt an urge to get out of there and head back to the cabins. I gave myself another thirty seconds. I put the Green file aside and opened the bottom drawer. There was a space where something the size of a gun could fit. I pulled it out as far as it could go and found the clincher. A box, part full, of ammunition. .38 caliber ammunition.

  There was a notebook next to it with a battered brown leather cover. I picked it up and leafed through. The handwriting was different from the other notes. I skipped to the last pages with writing on them. The name Vincent González, along with his address in Atlanta. It was Wheeler’s notebook.

  That was when I heard the creak of a floorboard behind me. I spun around in time to see Sheriff Jim McGregor standing in the doorway, his gun drawn.

  69

  Isabella Green

  Isabella hadn’t suffered a hangover in years, but the way she remembered it was pretty close to the way she was feeling as she looked at the ghost in the kitchen. Nausea in the pit of her stomach, a dark, oppressive cloud in her head, a general sense of things being unpleasantly detached. She stood by the door of the small kitchen in Blake’s cabin while Adeline fussed about looking for cups, taking far longer than she needed to. Isabella watched her as she moved around, avoiding her gaze. Her dark hair tumbled around her shoulders, often swinging in front of her eyes, to be swept back by an absent flick of her hand.

  The way she explained it, it all made sense. The open door, the escape from the car, the way the bullet had been just short of a fatal wound. The big unanswered question, the one which had led to everyone assuming what had happened to her, was solved by old man Roussel. Adeline couldn’t have survived, bleeding bad and in shock, all by herself in the woods. And she hadn’t. She had help. And Roussel had kept his secret for fifteen years, taking it to the grave with him. She knew now that she and Blake had unwittingly signed his death warrant.

  But still, watching her move around the kitchen as big as life was a disconcerting experience. It was like Isabella’s eyes hadn’t quite caught up with the new information. Like she was staring at some kind of visual effect, wondering how they made it so real.

  “Do you, uh … do you have to do that?” she asked, turning to face Isabella for the first time.

  “Do what?”

  “Stare at me like that.”

  Isabella shrugged a mild apology and looked away. “You’re going to have to get used to that, Adeline.”

  “When can we go and see him?”

  “David?”

  She nodded.

  “He’s safe where he is, don’t worry about that.”

  She finished pouring the coffee and reached for the milk carton, holding it up questioningly. Isabella shook her head and she handed over the mug. Isabella thanked her and took a sip. She tried to think about everything else she needed to focus on. Like why the sheriff had closed the roads without telling her.

  “Blake said you think David killed these people.”

  “He said I think that?”

  “Sorry, I mean you as in,” she paused and indicated Isabella’s uniform. “You.”

  “David isn’t exactly making life easy for himself on that score,” she replied. “By refusing to talk … well, you can guess how it looks.”

  “Will he be sent to prison?”

  “Even if your story checks out, and even if you can convince him to talk, I don’t think he’s going to be looking at a slap on the wrist because he only committed one murder, Adeline.”

  “It wasn’t a murder though, was it? You remember what my dad was like?”

  Isabella saw the image of Jake Connor in front of her at the gas station, asking her what the goddamn hell she thought she was doing parking her bike so close to his truck. The way his eyes had lingered on her bare knees as he shouted.

  “It’s not a murder if it’s self-defense,” Adeline continued.

  “We’re a long way from establishing that,” Isabella said.

  “How much longer do you think Blake will be, then?”

  “He’ll call soon.” She and Blake had decided one of them needed to keep watch on Adeline, while the other confirmed their theory. Could it really be right? Isabella had known him, worked alongside him for years. It didn’t seem possible that he was a killer. But then you can never really know anyone, not really.

  “You don’t think it was him, though, not back then.”

  Adeline took a sip, the mug hiding her face. Her eyes stared at Isabella over the rim.

  “No I don’t,” Isabella said. “That killer is gone for good.”

  “What makes you so certain?”

  A kno
ck on the door.

  “Wait here. Do not come out.”

  Closing the kitchen door behind her, Isabella reached for her holster and pulled her gun out, keeping to the side of the hallway as she approached the front door. There was a slim window next to the door. She could see the shadow of someone reasonably tall. Blake? She opened it a crack, keeping her gun out of sight. It was Feldman. He had changed into civilian clothes, his personal vehicle, a black Ford SUV was parked outside.

  “I thought you were with the sheriff?”

  He angled his head, trying to look past her. Isabella was glad she had closed the kitchen door.

  Feldman shook his head. “He didn’t need me after all. Can I come in? I think we should talk some more about this.”

  Isabella hesitated, realizing she was already making herself unnecessarily suspicious. She wanted to ask him how he knew she would be here. Could he have followed her after she left the station? But if she told him he couldn’t come in, it would only make him more suspicious.

  “Sure.” She opened the door wider and he stepped inside.

  “You know he’s got Jerry and Carl closing down the north and south? He say anything to you about that?”

  She shook her head, and indicated the door into the main sitting area, standing in front of the kitchen door to bar his way. He glanced at the door, and she wondered if he sensed she was hiding something.

  “Your mom keeping okay?”

  “Good days and bad days.”

  He nodded.

  “So. You wanted to talk about the sheriff.”

  He smiled. “Why don’t you get us a coffee, first?”

  She hesitated again.

  “Okay.”

  Isabella got up and turned to the kitchen.

  “I’m sorry, Isabella. I didn’t want this.”

  She turned just as something hard slammed into her face, and then her ears were ringing and she was falling, and then nothing.

  70

  Carter Blake