Paradise Falls

by Jacobs, Jonnie

  “Pickup is Friday,” Hank said, “so the backpack could have been dumped right after Caitlin disappeared, or any time in the last four days. But the kids say the backpack was close to the top.”

  “So not that long then,” Rayna said, thinking out loud.

  “Looks that way. Kind of spooky, isn’t it?”

  “Right. What about the kids, do they know Caitlin?”

  “They say they don’t. They aren’t from around here. The must never listen to the news, either, because they didn’t know there was a missing girl. They live out of a ratty old VW bus plastered with liberal-left bumper stickers.”

  “But they were trying to buy CDs?”

  “Yeah, go figure. I guess even vegan pacifists need their creature comforts.”

  Rayna used a corner of the towel to wipe a rivulet of water running down her neck. “Where are you? The station?”

  “We’re still at the mall. You want us to wait for you here?”

  “Yeah. I just got out of the shower. Let me get dressed and I’ll be on my way.” Her hair could dry itself, although given the weather, it would be a cold process.

  “I’m talking to a naked lady?”

  Rayna hung up without bothering to answer.

  ~~~~

  The Dumpster in question was near the loading dock at the east end of the mall. Rayna spotted two patrol cars as well as Hank’s unmarked car. Hank got out to greet her when she pulled up. Fritz Burns followed from one of the black and whites.

  “We separated the couple,” Hank explained. “One in each of the cruisers. Backpack’s in my car. I took a quick look inside, but I didn’t want to disturb any prints that might be on it.”

  “Any witnesses who might have seen it being tossed?”

  “We canvassed the nearby shops,” Fritz said. He was wearing reflective sunglasses, despite the overcast sky. “Nothing.”

  Hank rubbed his palms together against the cold. “It can’t be a coincidence that her backpack ended up in more or less the same place as Karen Holiday’s purse.”

  “My thinking as well. And if Seth Robbins hears about it, you can be sure he’ll use that information to fan the fires.”

  “You think we can keep the details from the press?”

  “Let’s hope so.”

  An unfamiliar white Camry screeched to a halt next to them. Neal Cody got out of the driver’s side and crossed to Rayna with fire in his eyes. “You must have received an F in ‘plays well with others’ in grade school.”

  “I was going to tell you about it. I just didn’t expect you’d be into grunt work.”

  Hank was giving her a curious look so she made the introductions.

  “Pleased to meet you,” Hank said, extending his large, bony hand. “Don’t mind Rayna. Her bark’s bigger than her bite.”

  “That so?” Cody smiled. “I’ll bear it in mind.”

  Rayna turned to Hank and shot him a piercing look.

  He shrugged. “Well, gosh, Rayna. It’s true.”

  “Oh, for God’s sake.” Working with Hank was sometimes an exercise in patience. The saving grace was that he was a good cop and despite his goofy social awkwardness, she was fond of him. “What are you going to do about the young couple?”

  “They’re being cooperative,” Fritz said.

  Hank scratched the balding dome of his head. “Still, using a stolen credit card is against the law. And on the off-chance they know more than they’re saying, a little time down at the station might refresh their memories.”

  “Good move.” Rayna looked around the largely empty parking lot. Only a handful of stores were open at this hour and most of the cars were clustered around the Wal-Mart entrance, which was some distance from the Dumpster. Even later in the day when the lot was close to full, there’d be few cars parked at this end. Whoever dumped the backpack would have had an easy time going unnoticed.

  Cody peered into the back of Hank’s car. “Did you have a chance to examine the debris in the Dumpster around the backpack?” he asked. “Could be the guy who pitched it there also tossed something of his. A grocery receipt, maybe, or some junk mail. Not likely, but it’s happened.”

  Rayna could tell from the expression on Hank’s face that he wasn’t thrilled with the idea of searching through garbage.

  “We did that,” Hank grumbled, “but we’ll take another look just to be certain.”

  “I’m going to head out to the high school,” Rayna said, “unless you need me here.”

  Hank glanced at Fritz. “No, we’ve got it covered.”

  Pretty-boy Fritz, Dumpster-diving. That should be a sight. Rayna considered sticking around to watch. Instead, she turned to Cody. “We got an okay to search Caitlin’s locker.” She paused. “I suppose you want to be there, too.”

  Without waiting for an answer she climbed into her car, and was surprised to find Cody climbing into the passenger seat next to her.

  “What about your car?”

  “I’ll pick it up later.”

  Rayna opened her mouth to protest—she hadn’t intended to offer him a ride —then, feeling defeated, started the car’s engine.

  “Are you expecting her locker to tell you anything?” Cody asked after a few minutes.

  “No, but it’s worth checking.”

  “What about her computer? You’ve looked at that?”

  “Yes. And yes, she’s on Facebook. We’ve got Cliff Leavitt, our tech guy, looking into it further.” After a moment she added, “Karen Holiday had Facebook, too, but so does just about every kid who’s not living under a rock.”

  “Hey, I wasn’t criticizing, just asking.”

  The way you’d ask a child if he’d done his homework. Well, she’d just have to get used to it. You couldn’t fight the FBI. Rayna kept her eyes on the road. Cody must have picked up on her mood because he was quiet for the remainder of the short drive to the school.

  ~~~~

  Rayna parked in the visitor parking area near the main entrance. The student and staff lots were full of cars, but the hallways were largely empty. Rayna knew that would change the moment the bell rang for passing period. Probably seconds before the bell rang, if past experience was any indication.

  Chuck Morgan, the principal, waited for them in his office. He was a fair-complexioned man whose face and arms were doused with freckles. Rayna had dealt with him extensively last fall when Karen Holiday disappeared. He was straightforward and cooperative, which made her job much easier.

  She introduced him to Cody as they walked to Caitlin’s locker, where Morgan opened it with a master key.

  It was practically empty, which didn’t surprise Rayna, given the load of school books in Caitlin’s backpack. What did surprise her was that nestled among the few remaining textbooks and lone hairbrush was an iPod nano.

  “She must have forgotten it,” Rayna remarked.

  “Most kids are glued to theirs,” the principal noted wryly, before adding, “Of course we do have strict rules against using phones and other electronic devices during class.”

  Rayna leafed through Caitlin’s books, turning up nothing of interest. “We’d like to talk to the assistant volleyball coach,” she said. “Rusty? A student teacher?”

  “Right. Rusty Hanson. I believe he’s got a history class at the moment, but the period ends in ten minutes.”

  “We’ll wait.” Rayna closed Caitlin’s locker. “Did Karen Holiday have Mr. Hanson as a teacher?”

  “No, Rusty didn’t come on board until after the winter holiday. Why?”

  “Just asking.” Although she was sure the principal was smart enough to figure out the implications of the question.

  “What’s Rusty like?” Cody asked.

  “He’s a good teacher. Knows his stuff and gets along well with the kids. We’ve had nothing but favorable feedback.”

  The bell rang and Morgan walked them to Rusty Hanson’s classroom, the three of them dodging a steady stream of students along the way. The teacher was young and athletic lo
oking, with thick sandy-brown hair and a square jaw. He looked like a teacher who would be popular with students. And a fantasy idol for a segment of the female population.

  Morgan made the introductions and left them alone.

  “What can I do for you?” Hanson asked with an easy smile. He sat casually on the edge of his desk, one leg on the floor, the other hanging free, while Rayna and Cody remained standing.

  “We wanted to ask you about Caitlin Whittington,” Rayna said. “I understand you coach girls’ volleyball.”

  “Yes. It’s terrible, her being missing. All the kids are upset, especially the girls on the team. And the staff, too. It’s been hard on everyone.”

  “Do you have any theories about what might have happened to her?”

  “No. I understand there was another girl last fall. The consensus seems to be that the disappearances are related.”

  “That’s one theory,” Rayna told him. “But it’s far from certain.” She looked around the classroom. A poster of the American presidents through Bush, a wall map of the thirteen colonies, and an enlarged replica of the Declaration of Independence. Standard fare, but there was also a bulletin board of contemporary political cartoons and slogans.

  “How about Caitlin’s personal life?” Cody asked. “Was there anything that raised red flags with you? Maybe something she said or a conversation you overheard?”

  “I try not to get involved in the personal lives of my students. It’s one of the things they warn us about in the teaching program. You want to be friendly but not too friendly.” Hanson gave them an embarrassed laugh and eased himself from his perch on the desk. “Especially being a guy and all. Too many chances for a misunderstanding, if you know what I mean.”

  Rayna wondered if he’d raised the point in order to deflect suspicion from himself. “She recently broke up with her boyfriend. Ty Cross. What do you know about that?”

  Hanson hesitated. “Nothing directly. Like I said, I try to keep a distance between myself and the kids. But I did overhear some of the girls talking. None of them seemed very sympathetic. They seemed to think Caitlin was crazy for breaking up with him, and that she had no call to be upset about it since it was her own doing.”

  “Was she upset?” Cody asked.

  “Yeah. Maybe she was having regrets, I don’t know. But she’d been upset before they broke up, too. I remember one day in particular. She was worthless at practice. She couldn’t concentrate, kept missing shots, and then left in tears, saying she felt sick.”

  “When was this?” Rayna asked.

  “A few days before the big breakup, I think.”

  Around the time of her encounter with Rob Hardy. Rayna clearly did not have the full story on Caitlin’s breakup. Whether or not it had anything to do with her disappearance was another matter.

  “We understand she might have been involved with someone older,” Cody said, with a meaningful pause before continuing. “You wouldn’t know anything about that, would you?”

  “No, like I said, I didn’t really—” Hanson stopped mid-sentence and looked at Cody through narrowed eyes. “What you’re really asking is if I was involved with her, isn’t it?”

  “Were you?”

  “Jesus.” Hanson’s jaw hardened as he looked from Cody to Rayna. “My teaching supervisors were right. Everyone’s on a hunt for misconduct. I’ve got nothing more to say to you.” He turned his back on them and began wiping the chalkboard.

  “Have it your way,” Cody said with a hint of implied menace. “We’ll be in touch.”

  When they were outside in the hallway he turned to Rayna. “What do you think?”

  “Testy.”

  “Can’t say I blame him.”

  “He never did answer the question,” she pointed out.

  “No, but there’s not a lot to go on, either. We don’t even know for a fact that Caitlin was involved with someone older, do we?”

  “There’s a lot we don’t know,” said Rayna, worried they never would.

  Chapter 17

  Grace sipped her coffee and watched Jake stir the second packet of sugar—real sugar, not the diet stuff—into his own cup, then top it off with cream. How did he avoid gaining weight? Jake was as lean as the day they’d met seventeen years ago. Probably as good-looking, too, although she had trouble seeing him objectively. There were simply too many memories—good times gone bad, tenderness turned ugly, dreams left unfulfilled. She sometimes wondered if those glimmerings from the past colored her feelings for better or worse. Not that it really mattered. She and Jake shared a bond that overrode everything—the bond of a child.

  Especially now that Caitlin was missing.

  Jake looked up and their eyes held, momentarily eclipsing the strife and distance of their divorce. Grace was happy to see him, even if the meeting was something of an afterthought on his part. Jake had finally agreed to take the polygraph test and had phoned to suggest they get together for coffee since he’d be in town.

  “It’s hard to believe this is really happening,” he said, resting the wooden stir stick on a paper napkin. They had one of the small tables along the wall and seemed to be the only people in the coffee shop having an actual conversation. The others were lost in books or busily typing away on their laptops.

  “Hard to believe what’s happening? The polygraph?”

  Jake gave her an odd look, and Grace realized she’d insulted him. “I was talking about Caitlin. Did you really think she wouldn’t be first on my mind?”

  “I wasn’t sure what you meant.” Grace had thought he might have been referring to the test. It wouldn’t be the first time Jake put himself first.

  “At times it’s almost surreal,” he continued. “I know she’s missing but it’s so totally unbelievable I can’t get my mind around it. And other times it’s so real, the panic grips me like the jaws of some horrible prehistoric creature.”

  Grace reached across the table and touched his hand, feeling a twinge of guilt for her unkind thoughts a moment earlier. She’d never doubted that their daughter’s disappearance worried Jake, but she wasn’t sure he felt it the way she did. To see the emotion that boiled beneath the surface, to know that Jake was as lost as she was, made her feel less alone, and in that way, stronger.

  “I understand,” she said, her throat tight. “I know exactly what you mean.”

  “It’s like I’m two different people. One going about my day, taking care of business, and the other frozen with fear.”

  “Do you think she’s still alive?” Grace asked quietly.

  He picked up the stir stick in one hand and snapped it in two. “The cops asked me the same thing.”

  “What did you tell them?”

  “That I have to think so. I can’t let myself imagine she isn’t.”

  Grace wanted to believe it, too, but she had far less control over where her imagination took her.

  “You don’t?” Jake asked, after a moment.

  “I don’t know. Sometimes, yes. Sometimes I can actually hear the sweet lilt of her voice saying `I love you, Mom.’ I can picture her coming home. I can feel myself hugging her.” The sensation felt so real at times, Grace was sure Caitlin had to be standing beside her. “But other times when I try to conjure up that sense of optimism, I’m left with nothing but heavy despair. It all seems so bleak.”

  Jake tossed the fragments of the stir stick onto the table. “I wish to God I had a sense that the cops were making progress.”

  She raised her eyes to his and found there a common ground forged of sorrow. “Waiting is harder than I ever imagined.”

  He took a sip of coffee and set the mug back on the table, gripping it with both hands. “It’s been four days now and nothing. The longer she’s gone—” He stopped himself, pressed his thumbs together. “What do you think happened?”

  “I have no idea. I think about it all the time. It could be there’s a connection with what happened to Karen Holiday. Or maybe Karen’s disappearance is unrelated to Caitlin’s
.” She traced the rim of the ceramic mug with her thumb. “I hope they’re unrelated.”

  “Why?”

  “Because the chances of Caitlin being okay are better that way. When I think of a serial killer grabbing her, I . . .” Tears welled in Grace’s eyes. “I can’t handle that. I can’t.” She reached into her purse for a tissue. “Oh, God. I can’t handle any of it. There’s nothing that prepares you for this.”

  Jake squeezed his eyes shut and was silent for a moment. Then he sighed and looked at Grace. “What do the police think? Have they shared much with you? I have trouble getting more than half a dozen words out of them.”

  “Maybe that’s because until now they didn’t see you as cooperating.” The words were sharper than Grace intended and she felt bad about that, but she saw no need to apologize.

  “Are you referring to the polygraph?” Jake leaned forward on the table, fixing her in his gaze. “There’s a reason the results aren’t allowed in a court of law, Grace. Those tests aren’t foolproof.”

  “They must be reliable or the police wouldn’t use them.”

  “They don’t use them to eliminate people, despite what they say. They use them as leverage on those who trip up. They like nothing better than to catch a potential suspect failing the thing.”

  Grace had a horrible thought. It had never occurred to her that Jake might actually be a suspect. “Is that why you didn’t want to take it? You were afraid they’d think you had something to do with Caitlin’s disappearance?”

  “Welcome to reality, Grace. That’s exactly what they’d like to think.”

  Another cold thought struck her. “Did you pass it?”

  “They didn’t share the results with me, but they didn’t hold me, either.”

  “I told them you couldn’t have been involved.”

  “Thank you.”

  The comment had a sardonic edge to it, and Grace couldn’t tell if he’d intended that or not. “I doubt you were ever a serious suspect,” she said. “It has to have been a stranger, or someone Caitlin crossed paths with.” She told him about discovering her auto mechanic on the sexual-predators website.

  “Jesus. I hope the cops have him on their radar.”