Traces of Guilt

by Dee Henderson

  Ann taped up another photo. “Grace’s uncle, Kevin Arnett, was an age-and-gender-specific pedophile who likely killed Grace’s parents to gain legal guardianship of her. Grace was a blue-eyed, blond two-year-old when he first saw her. Her parents disappeared three days later. Kevin molested Grace from age six to twelve. When she hit puberty and wasn’t as attractive to him anymore, he grabbed Ashley Dayton to recreate his six-year-old perfect princess. It’s probable he killed Ashley that same day. The child is likely buried on the uncle’s land.”

  Evie agreed with the whispered word from Caleb. She looked over at Gabriel, his face now gray with shock. Grace would have been at school with the Thane brothers, likely attended the same church. This was a girl they all knew well.

  “Ann,” Gabriel said softly, “when . . . ?” He didn’t need to finish the question.

  Ann was visibly in pain when she sighed and said, “Grace told me the specifics of the abuse two years ago. I knew as soon as she described what had happened to her that this Dayton case had its answer.

  “Grace doesn’t know about this child, and it’s too soon for her to learn of this. She’s still coping with her own history. Knowing her uncle abducted, raped, and killed a child because he didn’t want Grace anymore—something she was relieved about at the time because her abuse was over—is going to devastate her all over again. She’s not ready to deal with this child’s death. She’ll blame herself.”

  Evie had met Grace once at Ann’s, remembered a woman in her twenties with a quiet poise, knew the friendship with her went back years. The fine line Ann had been walking was the kind of thing any friend would struggle with, but an officer of the law more than most, with the needs of the living and the dead colliding. Ann could no longer help the child who was gone, couldn’t arrest the uncle who was dead, and so she’d done what she could to help the living victim.

  Evie watched the silent communication between Gabriel and Ann, their attention locked in a rich conversation without words. She felt a faint envy at the many years and shared experiences underlying that friendship. Ann would need his support, and Gabriel was offering it.

  “Why has Grace come back?” Gabriel asked Ann.

  “She doesn’t know about this missing child, but Grace is trying to deal with what she does suspect. She just asked Josh to help her search her uncle’s property for human remains. She’s looking for her parents.”

  Gabriel winced and closed his eyes briefly.

  Ann let that statement stand for a moment before she continued. “The odds Josh can find those remains after so many years is admittedly low, but he’ll be walking the property to find whatever can be discovered. If Ashley Dayton is buried on the uncle’s land, Josh and his dogs will find her. We let Josh do his work, and we’ll support Grace however we can if there are discoveries out there.”

  She paused, sighed, and added, “If we do find the child’s remains, we’ll help Grace to face this. If we can’t find the child, we keep this probable answer to the Dayton case to ourselves and her parents. What we tell them needs to stay pretty high level unless we can formally close the case. I don’t want them seeking out Grace. If we can’t find Ashley’s remains, we don’t tell Grace about the case.”

  “We’re not going to cause further pain to a living victim, Ann,” Gabriel agreed, speaking for the group. “Not when it’s Grace Arnett.”

  Ann nodded at his reassurance.

  Even though Evie didn’t personally know Grace or the uncle who’d done this, she could imagine what others in this room were dealing with. She shook her head, trying to get her concentration back, to see what had to be done first to work the case now laid out in an entirely new pattern. She studied the map on the wall. “Can someone describe the property? What are we dealing with here?” Evie asked.

  “About two hundred acres,” Caleb replied, getting up and moving over to circle the area with a marker. “Most of the land is leased out and planted with corn and beans, but Carin Lake cuts into it on the west side. The shoreline and woods here”—he indicated the spot with the marker—“are on the property. There’s good hunting in these thick woods. Probably twenty acres or better of timber are going to have to be searched. The house here,” he said, using the marker again, “is set back from the road a distance. I remember there being a barn or two. The estate trustee kept the house together enough that the roof didn’t leak and the windows were still solid, but it hasn’t been lived in since Grace moved away. I don’t know what Grace has done with it since she reached eighteen and the property was distributed to her.”

  “It’s the same,” Ann said. “The house is basically as it was and still unoccupied. Any evidence that remained out there, we’ll find and collect. When we’re done, Grace plans to demolish the house and barns, turn the acreage back into tillable land, and sell the place. She’s got an offer from the man now leasing the farmland. She’ll make a separate arrangement for the wooded acres and the access road with one of the hunting groups in the area. She doesn’t plan to come back here again once this is done.”

  Evie thought Grace’s plan to return it to farmland, cut any connection to the place, was the best decision she could make, given the history there.

  Ann rubbed the back of her neck, walked over to the crime wall, took down the two photos, and returned them to her briefcase. Evie watched her lock it, understood the gesture.

  “I’m convinced Kevin killed Grace’s parents to gain legal guardianship of her,” Ann said as she straightened, turned to the group. “Whether we can prove that and find a way to close the cold case on her parents’ disappearance is difficult to say at this point. But they came to Carin to visit family, vanished from their hotel on a Friday night—a car and two adults—leaving their daughter with a cousin who was babysitting while they went out to eat. They wouldn’t leave a child they loved. They were murdered that night. It’s likely the uncle concealed it all by hiding the evidence on the land he owned. Now, twenty-five years later, we’re going to try to find that proof. And in the process hopefully locate Ashley Dayton as well.

  “We need to make sure the search doesn’t leak. Nothing gets written down, entered into a computer, formalized. We leave the initial work to Josh, reevaluate once he’s done. And we keep news of the missing child away from Grace for as long as we can.”

  “Ann, does Josh know the full picture?” Gabriel asked.

  She shook her head. “Not yet.”

  “He’s going to have to know.” At Ann’s nod of agreement, Gabriel pulled out his phone and walked to the other side of the room to make a call to Josh.

  Evie knew Josh couldn’t walk beside Grace on that property and not know they might locate the remains of a child, not know the farmhouse was a place that haunted Grace with the memories it stirred. She watched Gabriel as he spoke with his brother. His father had been sheriff while this was happening, Gabriel was the sheriff now. Evie didn’t think any of the Thanes would be the same after today. A child had been abused on the periphery of their lives for years, and they hadn’t seen it.

  Looking spent, Ann came back to the table and sat down. Evie refilled Ann’s coffee, would have put her phone in her hand and told her to call Paul if she thought Ann would step aside for a few minutes right now. Evie got a brief look of thanks and knew Ann was at her limit.

  Evie realized she was the only one in the room not getting personally whipsawed by the revelations and mentally stepped in to take over, started making notes on what had to be done next. There was a high probability before the next two weeks were over that the Dayton girl’s disappearance would be closed with the discovery of her remains. It wouldn’t be a celebration when they closed the case. They would have a success, but at a very heavy price for those who knew the whole truth.

  “We need to take another look at her uncle’s hunting accident,” Caleb said.

  “Yes,” Ann agreed, sipping at the cup of coffee.

  “Arnett’s death looked like a hunting accident,” Caleb went on. “He w
as shot from an angle indicating the bullet came from above, from the deer blind. He wasn’t wearing anything reflective or bright. Someone mistook him for an animal and fired, then ran from the scene. At the time it didn’t play any other way. An anonymous call came in of a shooting accident. We couldn’t trace cellphones as well back then, but it seems likely it was called in from a road out that way—once whoever did it was away from the scene. What prints could be recovered from the blind were people you’d expect to have used it, and those folks had reasonable alibis for the time in question.”

  “Grace didn’t kill him,” Ann said quietly. “I’d lay money on that. It probably was just what it appeared, a hunting accident.”

  Caleb gave Ann a reassuring nod. “Actually, Grace was with Josh when her uncle was killed—riding their bikes over by the ice cream shop and then to the library. Grace was the one girl Josh didn’t mind knowing that his affection for books ran as deep as hers. A deputy met up with them at the library so we could keep Grace away from the scene.” Caleb sighed. “This hurts, Ann. Hurts really bad. It surely takes a lot of courage for her to come back. How is she?”

  “Still in deep pain. Quiet. Facing that past. Dealing with it. Moving too fast through the memories, in my estimation. I’d say she needed another year before taking this step. But I haven’t been able to shift her from this course. She’s facing it, trying to get through it, get it done and behind her.”

  “I never saw it.” Caleb shook his head. “Not in her uncle, not in her. I noticed Grace around town most weeks. Growing up without a mom or dad. The sadness was in her eyes most of the time. She was a quiet girl. But I took it as that. I never once suspected this, and no one told me anything even in confidence that they had questions. I would have acted, Ann. God is my witness, I would have believed her.”

  “I know, Caleb. I know.”

  “If my boys had seen anything, if she had said anything—”

  “She didn’t, Dad,” Gabriel said, rejoining them. “We would have gotten a clue from something she said, I promise you that. We all liked her, Josh most of all. Grace didn’t let us in, not to this secret. Not to this darkness.”

  “Josh coming in?”

  “He’s with Grace now, on the way over to the property to have a look around, lay out a search plan. I didn’t tell him much. He’ll come by here afterwards, and we’ll tell him.”

  “How’s he sound?”

  “Determined.”

  “He’s a good man when it comes to doing what has to be done,” Caleb said. “Did she choose Josh, Ann, or did you?”

  “When it became apparent I couldn’t change Grace’s mind about coming back, I suggested Josh and his dogs as the next step. I figured Josh being a friend would help matters.”

  “Good thinking. Whatever we can do for Grace now, we’re going to do,” Caleb said firmly, nodding at each of them around the circle.

  Gabriel sat down by his dad. He’s in pain, Evie thought, coping, dealing, but in emotional pain.

  “Who else in the county was a victim?” Gabriel asked. “It’s unlikely Grace was his first.”

  Caleb looked ill at the remark. “We’re going to have to figure that out now, Son, however painful it is to ask the questions,” Caleb replied.

  Ann shook her head. “Grace, then Ashley, may have been his first near home. Kevin Arnett was a careful man. He hid what he was, and did it well if it turns out no one in the community ever suspected him. He spent four years grooming Grace before this started so he could ensure she wouldn’t talk. I’m thinking there may be signs early in his life, before he was eighteen, but after he became a man . . . I think he was carefully hiding who he was. You’re going to find his other crimes away from the area, not in this county.”

  “I hope you’re right, if only so I have one less weight to grieve over tonight,” Caleb said. “It’s bad enough it was Grace.” He looked over at Gabriel. “Depending on how things go, you’ll need to alert the adjacent counties in case they have their own unsolved cases. . . .”

  His voice drifted to a stop, and Gabriel said, sounding thoughtful, “There was a felon in our county, a registered sex offender who disappeared abruptly. His body turned up about eighteen months later, behind the truck stop off Highway 19. Wasn’t that roughly about the time Grace’s uncle was killed in the hunting accident?”

  Caleb thought back and nodded. “Guy named Frank Ash. He worked with scrap metal at the junkyard. His focus was on young boys, liked to pull them in via their curiosity about sex.

  “He didn’t show up at work for a week, on the run before we got a call, toward the end of May. His cabin had the feel of someone gone a while—belongings still there, trash gone bad, milk spoiled. We worked it as a probable murder, but couldn’t find his body, couldn’t nail down where he’d been. We did turn up two boys who admitted he’d molested them after his prison release. We looked hard at their families and figured that was where our answer was, but couldn’t prove it with what we had.”

  “Frank Ash disappeared in May. The next year, July, the Dayton girl was abducted,” Caleb said. “Grace’s uncle got killed that fall. Frank’s remains turned up behind the truck stop the following year. I remember we had guys still working that scene when the Florist family disappeared, so it would have been the same week in August. It was a busy few years. The entire department practically lived on overtime.”

  Evie carefully listened to the overlap of crimes, got up and went to the timeline on the wall, picked up a marker. Frank Ash gets out of jail, she wrote, molests two boys, disappears and is presumed murdered. Ashley Dayton is abducted, Grace’s uncle killed in hunting accident. Frank Ash’s body is found, Florist family disappears.

  Evie turned to face Caleb. “Frank’s body . . . when it was found, he’d been dead a couple of years?”

  Caleb thought over her question, and she saw his eyes widen. “Dead a couple years, likely back to the May when he disappeared. Shot in the chest three times. Are you thinking—?”

  “No way did Deputy Florist kill Frank Ash and Kevin Arnett.” Gabriel’s hand moved to rest on his father’s shoulder.

  Evie heard the certainty in Gabriel’s statement, faced him and said, “You’ve got two dead child molesters in Carin County and a deputy who abruptly disappears the week a murdered body turns up—”

  “Evie,” Ann interrupted. Evie looked her way and saw Ann shake her head slightly. Not, Evie saw, that she didn’t agree with her, but there was a time for everything and this wasn’t the right time. Evie set down the marker and stepped away from the crime wall. The sequence on the board was what it was, and to her it looked like one long crime.

  “I’m not saying we don’t look,” Gabriel said, his hand on the table fisted with stress. “But we know Scott Florist. This isn’t him. Not shooting a man and dumping his body behind a truck stop. Not shooting a man from a deer blind. Scott’s the guy most likely to have been trusted by the boys, to have heard about Ash, the one most likely to go arrest the man and toss him back in jail. If anything, I could see it going the other way. If Frank Ash wasn’t dead, I’d have him at the top of the list to have killed Deputy Florist and his family.”

  “No, Gabe, Evie’s right to wonder,” Caleb said to his son. “She’s just off on the core question. We’ve got two sex offenders in Carin County during those years. Did we have a third?” He looked back at the timeline, then again at Gabriel.

  “Think about it,” he went on, walking over to the crime wall. “Someone in the county is afraid Frank Ash is going to get arrested and say to the cops, ‘I’ll give you someone else who likes kids.’ Someone in the county knows Arnett is molesting his niece, he’s worried when it’s going to become known, and neighbors are going to start looking sideways at each other. Every child is going to get asked by their parents if anyone’s touching them. A third guy is out there and wishing the other two weren’t stirring up questions.

  “Deputy Florist worked in the schools, he coached Little League, he was good with kids.
Somebody got worried Deputy Florist was the one most likely to figure this out. So kill Frank Ash, Kevin Arnett, then kill Florist and his family to make sure he’s covered his tracks.”

  Ann got to her feet and began pacing the room.

  Evie wanted to accept Caleb’s summary. One killer simplified everything. “A sex offender hides his behavior, but kills if he must,” she said slowly, thinking it through. “This is too many murders. He would have tried to leave the area before it reached this point.” She studied the sequence again. “Another idea. If it wasn’t Deputy Florist being a vigilante, killing the two people abusing kids and then leaving town abruptly with his family, what if that idea of a vigilante is correct? Someone in the community, maybe a victim of Frank Ash who’s grown up? Kill Frank Ash out of vengeance, realize Grace is being abused, and kill the uncle to help her. He thinks Deputy Florist is getting too close to seeing the truth. One person in the community who took out two bad people in vigilante killings and then had to kill the deputy and his family to stay under the radar.”

  Evie looked between Caleb and Gabriel as they considered that possibility. Gabriel slowly nodded. “A victim carries a lot of anger around. Murder isn’t a stretch. But a panic murder of a deputy and his family? I don’t see it, Evie.”

  Ann walked back to rejoin them. “I’m not saying don’t explore down that road, Evie, but step back for a moment and look at something.” Ann picked up a marker and moved to an open sheet of paper. “We’ve got a dead offender who likes older boys, a hunting accident that kills one who likes younger girls, a deputy and his family who disappear. Each crime a year apart. We want them linked because it simplifies matters, but look at the facts. They are different victim sets, different MOs. We’ve most likely got three years of random crimes, not one linked event.