by Lori Ryan
Shauna pulled a stack of cards from her pocket and handed one to each of the girls. “If either of you think of anything or hear anything on campus you think we should know about, you can reach out to either of us directly.” She looked over her shoulder as though she knew Zach would be pulling his own cards out, which he was. He handed one to each of the girls.
“My cell phone is on there,” Shauna said, and Zach confirmed that his was, as well.
“Call anytime,” he said. It never hurt to have eyes and ears on the campus reporting back to them. They needed every scrap of help they could get at this point.
Chapter Twenty
Zach and Ronan pulled in the drive of the Elmhurst Academy early the following day. They needed to talk to the head of the school. Shauna was up north in her office for the morning, catching up on what her team had been doing and getting them caught up on the New Haven side of the investigation.
Zach wished she were down here. He was getting far too used to seeing her each day.
“So,” Ronan said as Zach navigated up the long drive. “You gonna tell me what’s with you and Shauna? Is there history there or future?”
Zach didn’t answer. He looked out over the campus, thinking it looked different than their first visit. The kids weren’t as relaxed. They still walked in groups to and from the various buildings, but there was a tension vibrating in the air that hadn’t been there earlier.
“Cuz even an idiot can see there’s something there.”
Zach looked to Ronan as he pulled into one of the empty spots in front of the building that housed the head of school’s office. “We have history. Before I was a cop.”
If Ronan was bothered by the fact Zach hadn’t told him, or that he didn’t seem inclined to share more now, he didn’t say so. They walked up the stairs and into the office, asking Carville’s receptionist if he was in. After a brief conversation on the phone, she showed them into the office.
The man didn’t look good. He seemed to have aged in the days since they’d last seen him.
“Gentlemen? Do you have news?” Carville gestured at the small conference table and sat when they did.
“I’m afraid it’s questions that brought us here, not news,” Ronan answered.
Zach jumped right in. “Why didn’t you tell us you were new to the school, Mr. Carville?”
The man’s brows went up. “Well, I’m not that new. It’s been almost nine months.”
“Just under eight months would be more accurate,” Zach said.
Carville ran his hand over the smooth surface of the table in a nervous gesture Zach hadn’t noticed the last time they spoke with him.
“You see a therapist, Mr. Carville?”
This brought the man’s head back up, froze his hand on the table top, but only briefly. He resumed the gesture as he answered. “What does that have to do with any of this? It’s a good measure for any head of school or dean to take on. Somewhat like a psychiatrist, I’ve always thought.”
“How’s that?” Ronan asked.
“Well, I see it as part of the job. It allows me to do my job better if I have an outlet, someone to talk to, bounce things off where there’s a confidential relationship. It’s just like any good psychiatrist should have a therapist of their own, to help them handle things. It’s the same way with my therapist.”
“So it’s a purely professional necessity, not anything related to your personal life?”
“Sure, sure. If you want to say it that way.” Carville raised his hand in a take it as you will gesture.
“I’m not interested in how I’d say it. I want to know how you would,” Zach said.
When Carville didn’t expand on that, Zach moved on. “You left your last school when a girl made some accusations against you.” Zach glanced at his notes on his phone, though it was only for show. “When she said you made advances toward her. You hinted she could improve her grades if she agreed to perform certain favors.”
Carville sat up, hands pressed to the table. “She was a very troubled girl. There was a finding of no wrongdoing.”
“You left the school anyway?” Zach pressed, his tone letting Carville know he wasn’t convinced.
“Yes. I came here to work with an easier pool of kids. That school was the kind of place parents sent kids who were on their last chance to turn things around. It was a hard place to feel like you were making any progress, even if the stats showed you were. It was a constant struggle.”
Zach leaned in, his eyes dark and hard. He knew he could intimidate, especially with someone like Carville who just screamed soft. “I think you tried to fuck her. I think you used your position and got away with it there. It probably worked for you for a while, but things started to fall apart. You got frustrated. You came here thinking you could carry on what you were doing, but the girls didn’t cooperate here. You got angry and you lashed out.”
Carville paled and Zach could see the man was shaking. “How dare you? How—”
“You have a student group you run personally here, right?” Zach threw the question out. He wanted the man off balance and he had him close. “Future Leaders Something or Other.”
“Yes, yes. Future Leaders and Innovators. It’s a wonderful group. The students in it are chosen for their ability to lead.”
“Jonathan Sawyer was in that?” Ronan asked this, looking up from where he’d been taking notes on his phone.
“Yes,” Carville said, wariness evident, as though he didn’t trust where they were headed.
“Were any of the victims in the group?”
Carville’s mouth pinched, like he’d just tasted something sour. “Both of them.” He was quiet, his jaw tense.
Zach raised his brows and Ronan let out a low whistle.
Carville went back to rubbing the tabletop.
Zach pushed a notepad toward the man. “Write down the names of all the people in that group.”
When Carville had done that, Zach instructed him to write down his whereabouts for the times the girls went missing and the time of the murders, including anyone who could verify that information. It was time for them to check the alibis of Andrew Carville.
Chapter Twenty-one
Zach stared down at the body, the emotions running through him going beyond raging, beyond screaming and throwing shit.
“He’s not even trying to hide the bodies anymore.” Shauna looked around as she spoke.
Ronan agreed. “There aren’t any cameras and not a lot of traffic on this stretch, but the body isn’t even out in the woods this time.”
A jogger had stumbled across the body at five o’clock that morning. The girl lay by the side of a stretch of wooded road only half a mile from where Adrienne’s body had been found. Her face was smeared with lipstick. More than what had been on the other bodies. And she’d not only been strangled, her face had been beaten.
“The beating was postmortem?” Zach asked Dr. Kane to confirm his suspicion.
“Yes.”
“That’s different.” Shauna frowned and knelt for a closer look. She stood a moment later when the photographer came in to take photographs.
“Any idea on ID?” Shauna asked.
Dr. Kane nodded. “Her identification was on her. That and a few dollars. Name is Candice Jordan.”
Zach looked to Ronan who was scrolling through something on his phone. He looked up a moment later. “Not a student at Elmhurst. Missing persons report was filed by her father two days ago. She was supposed to walk home from school, but never arrived.”
“Does she have money?” Zach asked, not to make any kind of judgments or anything. He was simply looking for commonalities in the victims. Things that could lead to a hint about where this girl might have run into their killer. It was that kind of thing that could tell them who this killer was.
“Looking at her address,” Ronan said, “I would guess neither rich nor poor. Middle class, but my guess would be they aren’t paying for private school.”
“We s
hould find out where she went to school,” Shauna said. “Could be she’s at a private school on a scholarship. Maybe there’s some overlap in board members or something.”
Ronan nodded, making a note.
Zach heard Shauna’s curse and looked up to see news vans converging. Thankfully, they already had a team of officers at the periphery to keep them back. “Can we get her out of here soon?” Zach asked Dr. Kane.
She gave him a nod, but he walked over to the perimeter all the same.
“Officer,” he said, keeping his voice low, “let’s move this line back.”
The officer nodded and signaled to another officer to help him create another barricade. As they worked, the first of the reporters were moving in from where they’d set up their vans, including Ray Lansing. Zach turned away, but not before Lansing’s voice rang out.
“Detective, does this clear the kid?”
Zach didn’t ask if the kid he referred to was Sawyer. They knew it would get out that they’d arrested Jonathan Sawyer in connection with the case, even if he hadn’t been arrested on the charge of murder. Yet.
That didn’t mean Zach was going to answer Lansing. He continued turning away, not giving the reporter a response.
Lansing didn’t give up. “Is the cold case division involved because of the similarities to the Marsh Murders?”
Zach stopped and turned to Lansing. He narrowed his gaze, trying to gauge how much the reporter knew. There was always what he knew and what he was willing to ask in front of others.
The reporter gave him a flat look. Zach turned away again. The guy didn’t know anything. He was fishing.
And Zach wasn’t about to bite that lure.
He made a mental note to ask Cal Rylan if Lansing was still dating his sister, Joy. None of them had been happy about that little development after the recent case. Well, except for the fact that Lansing actually seemed to be good for her and Joy had been through too much for them not to want to see her happy. Still, every detective in major crimes felt a little sick at the thought it was Lansing that she’d chosen to bring her out of her shell.
He ignored the calls from Lansing and others as he walked back to Shauna. He didn’t look at her and he didn’t lower his head to bring his voice closer to her. He kept his gaze on the doctor and her technician as they worked to clear the scene.
Shauna raised her coffee cup to her mouth. “Does he have anyone inside the department who might talk to him?”
“Not that I know of,” Zach said. “The department is pretty tight right now. We were crucified during the James sniper case. No one’s forgotten that.”
She didn’t respond, but her jaw was tense. He didn’t blame her.
Ronan stepped up to them. “The officers following Jonathan Sawyer say he’s been at home since he was released.”
Zach bit down on the anger rising in him. “Are they sure?”
“Yes.”
“Do they know if the father and grandfather have been at home?” Shauna asked.
Ronan sent a text message, then minutes later, relayed the answer. “Yes. The whole family is in the house. They came home with the attorney after the arraignment and bail hearing. The lawyer left but the family is inside.”
Chapter Twenty-two
Shauna sat on a barstool at her family’s pub waiting for her father or mother to come through from the back kitchen. They weren’t open yet, but they would have heard the bell when she let herself in the front door with her key and would come out to see which of their children had come to visit.
Her brothers spent a great deal more time at the pub than she did, running it alongside her parents. Shauna’s visits were just that, visits. She’d waited tables and worked behind the bar as a teenager, but when she left the police academy, she went down to working the occasional shift here and there. Since earning her detective’s shield, those shifts had dwindled to none. Any time off at this point was spent sleeping in preparation for the times when a case became hot and she went back to stretches of long hours, day-after-day.
Of course, this case wasn’t only hot in the sense that it normally was for a cold case detective. Typically, she might find a lead on a case that opened things up and sent her chasing someone for days at a time, but the case itself was still cold. The crime was long over.
This case was different. Their killer wasn’t going to stop killing. Not unless they stopped him. So, she’d come by the pub to let her parents know she was still alive and to take a small breather before getting out there. They had a lot of threads out there they were pulling but each one seemed to come up empty. What they needed was a thread that led to another thread, and another. They needed something they could stitch together into answers.
“Hey my girl, what brings you in?” her father asked as he came out of the kitchen. “Doug Calhoun was by last night, said you were working a case with the New Haven guys. Didn’t think we’d see you for weeks.”
Shauna couldn’t help but wince. If it took them weeks to catch this killer… well, she didn’t want to think what he might do in that time.
“That bad?” her father asked. He came around to her side of the bar rather than heading for the bartender side and pulled her up into a bear hug.
He gave true meaning to the words, great big bear of a man and had the black Irish looks that could bring many women to throw themselves at him, even when he’d been in his fifties. Things had slowed a bit for him once he hit his early sixties, but not much. He still had to patiently tell women his wife was in the back and she’d come after him with a kitchen knife if he so much as looked at another woman.
She couldn’t tell him much about the case since it was active, but she could give him generalities. “We can’t figure out the tie between the cold case and the current killings.”
“You’re sure there is one?” he moved behind the bar and poured a root beer into a chilled mug, her standard drink when she was at the pub and on-duty.
Shauna took a sip before answering. “I am. There’s no way this person doesn’t have some connection to the old killer. Or, maybe even is the same guy.”
They hadn’t ruled that out yet, since Sawyer didn’t have the rope and lipstick. It was entirely possible Sawyer had only raped Adrienne, but hadn’t been responsible for her death. They hadn’t excluded the possibility that their killer was the same one in action thirty years before, only he was somehow acting with reduced physical capacity, leading to the change in his methods.
“Want to talk through any of it?” Her dad knew she could sometimes figure out ways to talk through a case without giving him too many details, and the act of running through it would often help her come up with answers.
“Not this time.” She’d already run through so many theories with Zach and Ronan, her head was spinning. What she needed for the few minutes she could spend here was to let her mind shut down.
Her mother came from the kitchen, a large platter with a burger and fries piled on it. Shauna had gotten her mother’s fair hair and blue eyes, with pale Irish skin that freckled and burned but never tanned.
“Oh, ma, thank you,” Shauna said, not realizing how hungry she was until that moment. She might have groaned at the sight of the food.
Her mother gave her a hug, then set the platter down and looked at Shauna. “What’s wrong?”
“It’s the case, Alva, but she doesn’t want to talk about it.”
Her mother gave her father a roll of her eyes and shook her head. “No, it’s not. It’s a man. Tell me, Shauna.” Her mother sat next to her on a bar stool and her father stilled. He didn’t like hearing about Shauna and men.
She couldn’t blame him. Her marriage and the ensuing divorce had been a nightmare. If it weren’t for her father and brothers, and a few of their friends who were cops in her ex-husband’s precinct, she would likely never have known peace from the man she’d married.
“It’s nothing, Ma, really,” Shauna said, dipping a few fries in ketchup before putting them in her mouth.
Her mother did nothing more than lift a brow and watch her. Her father slipped back into the kitchen.
“He’s gone. Talk.” Her mother said this with humor, but Shauna knew she wouldn’t relent until Shauna did, so she shrugged, taking a bite of her burger and using the excuse of a full mouth to delay her answer.
“I’m working with a cop I used to date.” As she said the words, thoughts of her “dating” Zach ran through her mind and she was pretty sure she blushed. Their dating had consisted of a lot more inside dates in a bedroom than true dates. And the sex had been hotter than hell.
She frowned. Hotter than hell was putting it mildly. The man knew what he was doing in bed. She squirmed. This wasn’t a conversation she wanted to have with her mother.
“That good, huh?” her mother quipped, and Shauna choked on a fry.
It took several minutes and half her mug of root beer to get her coughing under control. If she thought her mother might forget what they were talking about in that time, she was wrong.
“So, do you think you’ll date him again when the case is over?”
“No! God no, ma.”
“Language, Shauna.”
Shauna didn’t want to admit that the thought had occurred to her more than once that maybe Zach had changed. That maybe he wasn’t the guy she’d dated. When they dated, he wanted nothing to do with commitment or a relationship. In fact, he wanted nothing to do with being an adult at all.
The Zach she’d come to know this time around was different. He’d grown up. That much she could see.
“What was so wrong with him when you dated? I can see you like him.”
“He wasn’t at all interested in a relationship.” Shauna almost laughed. Her husband had been too interested in her, wanting to control her completely, wanting her almost too much. No, there was no almost about it. He had wanted her too much.
Zach, well, he had wanted the sex they’d had back then. She wondered now what he wanted. He had said he wanted more with her but would take friendship if that’s what he could get.