“Cecelia, you realize that there are around forty to fifty open cases of missing persons over the last three years, don’t you?”
“I know, Nick, and I know it’s going to take some time. I apologize.” I said this as sincerely and winningly as I could.
“Well, most of the open cases that are women are usually those who ran away from abusive husbands and are in hiding, or, like you suspected with the Johnston gal, they’re just crack-heads who took off.”
“I understand that, Nick, but I need to find out if anything this Matt Hensley told me is true.”
“Allrightie, my girl. Lucky for you I’m not too busy, so I’ll get on this pretty much right away.” He thought for a few seconds, making calculations in his head, and said, “I’ll do my best to try and have this for you by the end of the week.”
I thanked him repeatedly and went back to my office. Looking around, I determined this to be one of the many days when I didn’t want to sit in the office all day, so I grabbed the Johnston file and headed out to speak with Lizzie’s father, since he was first to report her missing. I had several questions for him, including the whereabouts of Lizzie’s car.
Lizzie used her father’s address as her own, but that doesn’t necessarily mean that she stayed there most of the time. Lizzie’s father, Larry Johnston, lived in Roseland, of course, on Benedict Avenue. I wondered how he was friends with a county commissioner, but other strange friendships take place every day, that’s for sure, so I didn’t dwell on the matter.
As I pulled into the Johnston driveway, I immediately noticed a maroon Buick, which I assumed to be Lizzie’s, parked there. One of my questions was already answered. As I walked up to the front door, I briefly scanned the contents of Lizzie’s car. There were piles of clothes, numerous fast food bags, and garbage strewn throughout—a clear indication of frequent travel. I knocked on the front door and it was several minutes before a tall, gray-haired man wearing boxer shorts opened it.
“Larry Johnston?” I asked.
“Yes?”
“I’m Detective Gallagher of the Richland Metro Police Department. I’m here about your daughter, Samantha.”
He opened the screen door and waved his hand at me, saying, “Come in,” in a tired voice.
I walked in and looked around, noticing that the house was extremely small, but very clean for a Roseland house. I also scanned Larry Johnston up and down, something I do when I meet new people, trying to get a feel for them. Looking at him, I decided he’d probably been a fairly nice-looking guy back in the day, but now he looked completely haggard, as if many years of hitting the bottle had finally taken their toll.
“Please, have a seat, detective,” he said softly, gesturing vaguely at the room’s furniture.
I chose a comfy-looking sofa by the window. He sat in a straight-backed wooden chair. I figured it was probably because it was good for his back.
I started things off by telling him how I was assigned to the case by Captain Kincaid, what I had been doing on it, what I had found so far, and why I was there to see him. Then I asked him, “Where have your tips about this come from? You know; the ones that you told the commissioner about? In other words, how did you hear that Lizzie was dead?”
Larry ran the long, skinny fingers of one hand through his thinning hair. “Well,” he began at last, “there’s this woman that lives down the street, at the corner of Benedict Avenue and Hanna Avenue. Anyway, her name’s Andrea Dean and she’s the gossip of Little Kentucky.” He twisted his mouth up over to one side for a moment before he went on. “Well, anyway, after Lizzie’d been gone for two days, I ran into Andrea at the gas station up the road and, y’know, asked her if she’d seen Lizzie lately. I told her I hadn’t heard from her for a couple of days.”
He ran his hand along his skull again before continuing. “Now, I’ll tell ya, once I asked her that, her face, she got a look of terror on it. That’s what it was: a look of terror. And before I was even finished askin’ her about it she started shakin’ her head and sayin’, ‘No. Uh-uh. Sorry. Not a thing. No.’ Stuff like that.”
He looked out a window for a moment, then back at me. His voice remained soft, but it had taken on a slight unsteadiness. “What really bothered me was that she shook her head no before I’d even finished asking the question, y’know? That and her looking scared to death. I could tell she wasn’t telling the truth, and, well, I got scared. I mean, I begged her to tell me anything she knew. I told her I knew she had to know something.”
He closed his eyes and breathed deeply in and out a few times, composing himself, then said, his voice quivering slightly, “It took, like, several minutes of me not lettin’ it go before she finally told me what she’d heard around town. She told me she’d heard that Lizzie had gotten herself wrapped up with some really bad guys around here. Andrea said she didn’t know who. Then she told me that she’d heard that Lizzie’d really pissed them off somehow. She said she didn’t hear directly that Lizzie was dead, but that these bad guys take care of business when they get it in for somebody.” He ground a knuckle into the corner of one eye, probably to stop from crying.
Taking care of business means people just disappear.
“Then she clammed up and wouldn’t tell me jack shit more. That’s it.”
It was after this, Larry said, that he’d called Commissioner Phillips, with whom he’s been friends since they were small boys, to ask him for help in finding his daughter.
It was clear, sitting there watching and listening to Larry talk, that the last several weeks had taken their toll on him. He seemed like an emotional wreck and looked as if he hadn’t eaten, slept, or showered in several days. I asked him if Lizzie’d stayed here most of the time, and if she had her own bedroom.
He slowly nodded, pointed to the hall, and said, “It’s the last door on the left. Look around all you want. I haven’t been in there in a couple of weeks.” Looking away, he added, “It upsets me too much.”
“I understand, I won’t mess anything up or touch anything. I just want to look around,” I said as reassuringly as I could.
When I walked into Lizzie’s room, it certainly was not what I had expected. Her room was very neat, very pink, with pictures and posters on the wall and stuffed animals on the bed. It looked like a stereotypical high-school cheerleader’s bedroom, not one of an alleged drug user mixed up with “bad guys.” I saw a lot of photographs of Lizzie and some of her friends hanging on one wall. Looking at these, I could see that Lizzie was a very pretty girl. I also noticed her high-school diploma hanging on the wall, and college textbooks sitting on her desk.
I wondered how in the world this girl got involved with the people that she did. It didn’t make sense. She goes to college. Her friends look decent. So, how and where would she meet the people she got involved with? Nothing was adding up and it was starting to frustrate me. There was nothing in Lizzie’s room of any significance, so I walked back into the living room where Larry was.
“What is Lizzie taking in college?” I asked him.
Lizzie had enrolled in college to be a nurse, but, of course, had started falling behind in her classes the last six months. She would have graduated in less than a year if she’d stuck with it.
“Tell me about your daughter, Mr. Johnston: what kind of a girl she is, things she likes to do, anything you can think of.”
For the first time I saw Larry smile. “She’s a wonderful daughter. Like they say, the apple of my eye, y’know? She never caused me a lick of grief growing up, until now.” His smile faded.
“Her mother died of cancer when she was only two-years old, so it was just us. She always got good grades, played sports, and always had nice friends until these last six months. I don’t know what got into her. I mean, I hate to imagine, but the girl living in this house the last six months wasn’t my Lizzie. She disappeared long before June,” he said, his eyes welling up with tears. “I don’t know who these people are, but they changed her. Her personality changed. She d
idn’t care about the way she dressed. And she got quiet; quit talking to me. Detective Gallagher, I only want one of two things right now. If Lizzie is alive and doesn’t want to see me for whatever reason, fine, as long as she’s okay. The other,” his voice quivering, “is that if she is, if she is dead, I pray to God that my baby didn’t suffer. If she did, I really don’t think I could bear it.” At this point, he completely broke down into tears.
I felt my own eyes welling up as I got a tissue out of my purse and handed it to him. “Mr. Johnston,” I said, putting my hand on his arm, “I’ll find out what happened to your daughter. I promise you that.”
I let Larry cry for a few minutes and stood there while he got himself back together.
“I’m sorry,” he said, wiping his eyes with his sleeve. “That happens to me more and more every day.”
“You have nothing to be sorry for,” I assured him. Then I paused before saying what had to be said. “Listen, Mr. Johnston, if you think you’re able, I only have a few more questions before I leave.”
“Of course, at least I feel like I’m doing something. Sitting here staring at the wall every day is hard.”
“I can only imagine. Mr. Johnston, did Lizzie ever mention anyone by the name of ‘Bob’ to you?”
“No. I told you. When things changed, Lizzie quit talking to me about her personal life. I’ll tell you one thing; she was getting phone calls from a guy. I didn’t recognize his voice and he wouldn’t give his name. It was definitely the same guy, though. He called a lot. Whenever I asked Lizzie who it was, she always said it was just a friend, but she usually left the house after talking to him.”
I wanted to know about the last night he saw Lizzie, about what the circumstances were when she disappeared. I had read it all in the report, but wanted to hear it from Larry. He said she was back in her room, had been for hours. He tried to get her to eat something and she wouldn’t, and when he tried to talk to her, she just shut her eyes and ignored him. The phone rang shortly after, Lizzie answering it in her bedroom. She came out about fifteen minutes after that and said she was going to walk up to the gas station to get cigarettes.
“She has a car. Was it unusual for her to walk up there?”
“No, she sometimes does on nice nights. She walked out the door, said she’d be back shortly, and that was the last time I saw her.”
“Do you remember approximately what time the phone rang? Do you have caller ID?”
He said no to the caller ID, and that he thought the call came in at about 10:30 that night. I asked Larry who his phone company was and then jotted a reminder in my notebook to subpoena the phone records of incoming calls.
I grabbed my bag and headed for the door, “Mr. Johnston, I need to take Lizzie’s car so it can be processed by the crime lab. I’m going to call a tow truck right now, if that’s okay.”
“That’s fine. I wondered if anyone was gonna do that.”
“I wasn’t aware until today that her car was here. I’m just going to briefly look through it first to see if there’s anything crucial in it. I’ll be out here for a little bit, and don’t worry, like I said before, I will find out what happened. I’ll be in touch with you as much as I can.” I headed for the door.
Following me out the door, Larry thanked me and told me the car was unlocked. I radioed dispatch and told them to start a tow truck going from the Johnston house to the crime lab.
As soon as I opened the door to Lizzie’s car, I almost gagged. The smell of dirty clothes and rotten food hit me right in the face. I told Larry my search of Lizzie’s vehicle would be brief, but when I said that I didn’t realize how brief it would be. I backed off, took a deep breath of fresh air and dove in, holding my breath, and quickly scanned the contents of the car.
I immediately saw a massive amount of gas receipts stuffed in the console between the driver and passenger seat; there had to be at least fifty. I grabbed two handfuls of the receipts and carried them back to my car, along with an empty cigarette pack. I wanted to remember Lizzie’s brand in case it became useful later. I placed the receipts and the empty pack in an evidence bag, unsealed; I wouldn’t submit them until after I’d looked at each one.
I went back to the car, sucked in my air supply, and started looking again. For what, I didn’t know. I knew I wasn’t looking in the trunk for the hidden compartment; I wanted the lab to process that for any chemical traces or prints. It was a stretch, but unless the propane tank had a slight leak, chances are there wouldn’t be anything.
Then, I saw a map of West Virginia, haggard and crumpled, lying on the passenger seat floorboard. I grabbed that on instinct, thinking it might come in handy down the road. I couldn’t see anything else worth a shit, so I backed out of the car and stood up, closing the door. I turned around to walk to my car and ran right into Larry, who obviously had been standing right behind me. I let out a quiet yelp.
“I’m sorry,” he said quickly. “I didn’t mean to scare you. I was just wonderin’ if you found anything in there.”
“That’s okay. I’m fine,” I assured him, a little rattled
I told him about the receipts, but that was all.
“You think she’s dead, don’t you?” he asked, catching me off guard with the question.
I hate it when people asked me questions like that, as if my opinion is the gospel truth. I admit that my opinions are usually pretty accurate, but I hate to tell someone what I think before I know for sure. At this point, I was pretty confident that Lizzie Johnston was dead, but I couldn’t bring myself to say that to Larry.
“No, Larry, I don’t think anything right now because I just don’t know,” was what I came up with.
He didn’t say anything else. He just turned around and went back in the house.
This is the point where it gets hard to work cases like this one, the point when the emotions start getting involved. I felt Larry’s pain, not to the extent he did, of course, but I deeply sympathized with what he was going through. I knew Larry was pretty sure that Lizzie was dead, too. He just wasn’t facing it, instead, holding on to that one percent chance of hope. It was hard to watch someone go through that.
The tow truck arrived. I left the Johnston house and headed back to the department. What little evidence I had so far—the receipts and the map—backed Matt Hensley’s story. It wasn’t much, but at least I knew some of it corroborated his statement. Merely glancing at the receipts when I carried them to my car, I saw several were from West Virginia, which confirmed that Lizzie had traveled there, as Matt had said. If, and when, the crime lab confirmed the hidden compartment in the trunk and traces of anhydrous ammonia, Matt’s credibility would climb considerably.
I needed to type up everything that Larry had told me for the case file while it was still fresh in my mind. I also wanted to look over the receipts and the map. When I got back to my office, I saw a note that Kincaid wanted to see me—always a high point in my day. Just as I’d suspected, she wanted a briefing on what was happening with the case. I’m sure she was hotly eager to phone the commissioner. I told her the basics, not going into much of the details.
She shrugged her shoulders and turned back to her computer, “Okay,” she said in a normal tone of voice, “just keep me posted.”
What is this? I thought. No bitching? If I cared, I might’ve asked her if something was wrong, but, since I didn’t, I went back to my office.
Sitting down on the floor, I spread all the gas receipts out in front of me, along with the map. I counted 56 receipts and began putting them in order by their dates. I was specifically trying to find the very last time Lizzie had bought gas, and where.
What I thought would be a minor task took me forty-five minutes to finish. The last place where Lizzie had bought gas was at a station in Ovapa, West Virginia, wherever that is. I looked on the map and found it, and, when I looked closer, I saw a small red x marked there. I found the phone number of the gas station on the receipt and went to my desk.
I call
ed dispatch and gave them the address and phone number of the gas station. I asked them to find which law enforcement agency has jurisdiction there, and to find a phone number for it as well. Who patrolled rural areas, which you didn’t need to be a mental giant to assume that in Ovapa was varied. It could be a village police department, a county sheriff’s department, or the state police. I wasn’t familiar with West Virginia law enforcement enough to know who it would be.
While I was waiting for dispatch to get back to me with the information I’d asked for, I called the gas station directly. I asked to speak to the manager, assuming he or she was there since it was still business hours.
Whoever answered, set the phone down and yelled, “Ya’ll go get Annie, she’s got her a call!”
After five minutes of listening to the employees bitch about their jobs, a female finally picked up the phone saying she was the manager. I identified myself, and began to explain what I wanted, but she cut me off with, “Ya say ya from Ohio?”
“Yes, ma’am. That’s right, Ohio,” I said, and again began to explain what I wanted.
“What parts? I got me a cousin over there somewhere,” she drawled loudly.
I was starting to lose my patience. “Annie? Your name is Annie, right? Like I said, I’m calling from the Richland Metropolitan Police Department, located in Mansfield, Ohio, which is directly between Cleveland and Columbus. If you do have a cousin in Ohio, congratulations, I’m not calling about confirming family trees. What I need to know is if you have video surveillance inside and outside of your store.”
“Jeez,” she whined, “Ya don’t have to be so snotty. All’s ya had to do was ask. We got us a video only on the outside to keep these suckers from takin’ the gas.”
“Perfect,” I told her. “How do I get a hold of the tapes covering the fifth through the ninth of last month?”
Murder Mountain Page 6