Dark Echoes: (Dark Falls, CO Romantic Thriller Book 7)

by Savannah Kade

In fact, Ethan mused, tapping his pencil on the edge of his desk as he leaned back deep in thought, it was possible—maybe even probable—that no one was intended to find the body at all.

  It was the rain, an out-of-season deluge, that had washed Kaylee from wherever she was originally laid and onto the trail. Even then, had Risa not had her whim of wanting to run on a relatively unused path, it might have been years before anyone found the body.

  He had another thought and began tapping away on his keyboard trying to hunt down information. Eventually, when he came up short again, he called Grace.

  “Hey, it’s Ethan,” he said, knowing his voice sounded a little curt and knowing also that Grace was used to working with people under pressure.

  “Hi. What can I do for you?” From the sounds in the background she was probably out at breakfast with Nate Ryder, the detective she’d gotten involved with when he helped solve her brother’s murder.

  Shit, he didn’t want to interrupt them but, “Is Nate there?” He had to know.

  “Ethan, let us know if there’s anything we can do for you,” Nate’s voice came over the line. Yes, she was having breakfast with Nate.

  “Trust me, I will. There’s not enough of me here to go around right now.”

  “All right, just give me a shout,” Nate said, and handed the phone back to Grace.

  “What can I do?”

  Ethan was grateful her offer sounded sincere. “I’m really sorry to interrupt.”

  “Don’t be. Nate and I know. This is our job, and this is about a missing child. Go ahead.”

  “The body was laid out,” he said, beyond caring if anyone at the restaurant would overhear. He needed something—a break, a clue, anything. “She was in jeans and a fleece sweatshirt and sneakers, the same clothes she was wearing when she left.”

  “Yes,” Grace said.

  “I don’t think he meant the body to be found,” Ethan blurted out.

  Grace paused for a moment. “Go on.”

  He explained his theory about the rains messing with the crime scene. Grace, as he went along, agreed with each point.

  “So how long,” he asked, “would it have taken the body to get unrecognizable? How long before we would never have seen those cuts?”

  Grace thought for a moment. “That’s why you mentioned the denim and the fleece, right?”

  “Yes.”

  “The hands and the face would’ve disappeared much faster,” Grace said in a low voice, now trying not to upset any diners around her. Grace could certainly get into some disgusting topics, and she had no compunction about doing so while eating.

  Again, Ethan didn’t care. “The cuts on the body would’ve been preserved much longer because of the clothing, right? The denim would take a long time to break down, right?”

  “Yes,” she said. “The body would still decompose underneath it. It’s not like shrink wrap, but the clothing would have prolonged the process, preserving evidence much longer than with exposed skin. Probably not surprisingly, the fleece would really stop it, too. I didn’t notice on the scene, but you should check for the poly-fiber content. The more poly-fiber it had, the longer it would protect the body under it from decomp.”

  Plastics, Ethan though. Made sense, but would the killer know that?

  There was a soft sound from Grace as though she was conferring with Nate for a moment. “I don’t know,” she said. “It’s entirely possible that they did, but ...”

  “But,” Ethan added in, catching on to what she was thinking. “Those are the clothes that Kaylee was abducted in, so the killer didn’t choose them.”

  “No.”

  He’d worked up a really great theory and then disproved it. Still, he was onto something, he thought. Something about the body decomposing and the cuts disappearing. He knew that if they didn’t go down to the bone, marks in and on the skin would disappear with the flesh. He just couldn’t grasp what it was about that idea, though.

  He hung up with Grace after thanking her for her help, and a movement in the bullpen outside his office caught his eye. He didn’t know why, but he wasn’t surprised to see Risa coming toward him.

  It was her worried expression that bothered him.

  Chapter Fourteen

  Ethan watched as Risa struggled a little with her crutches but managed to get his office door open before he could pop up and grab it for her. So, he was already on his feet as she came in.

  “Would you like to have a seat?” he offered cautiously.

  Risa nodded, the worried expression still on her face as she sank down gracefully despite her ankle. As he sat in his own chair, he cringed at the metal-and-faux-leather contraption he’d just had her sit on. It was an uncomfortable son of a bitch, he knew. It was ugly, too.

  Risa made it look better. She seemed to have gotten more skilled on her crutches over the past couple of days, but that didn’t surprise him.

  “Should I open the door or leave it closed?” he asked.

  “Closed,” she said, certainty ringing in her voice.

  He shouldn’t have been happy to see her, but he was. He shouldn’t have been so concerned about the frown that pulled her brows together, but he was. “What can I do for you?”

  “You’re not going to like it,” she warned him.

  Great, he thought. Well, then it wouldn’t be any different from anything else he’d heard today. “Go ahead.”

  He had no idea where she was going to start. Somehow, it didn’t surprise him that she began with Leah.

  “Leah was having dinner with her family on Sunday, and they were talking.”

  “About the case?” Ethan asked, knowing he was jumping to a conclusion but unable to stop himself.

  Risa tipped her head back and forth as though assessing how to answer. “Yes and no. Leah actually did a very good job—according to her own story—about not leaking details to her parents. She said she let her parents lead the conversation. She didn’t tell them anything they didn’t already know.”

  “Ohhh-kaaay,” Ethan drew the word out, waiting for more.

  “Apparently, the entire town now understands that Kaylee was murdered.”

  That wasn’t a surprise. He hadn’t released that information, but the family had. He’d seen it himself on the news the other night. They were pleading for any information that would help lead to the killer’s arrest. Ethan had already set up a tip line that was fielding a large number of whacked-out calls by the hour. So far, none had yielded anything that had merit.

  “Well, Leah grew up here,” Risa went on, “and they’re very worried about having a serial killer in their midst.”

  His brows went up. It felt as though his chest twisted. Everyone knew Kaylee had been murdered. She hadn’t been sexually assaulted, and that had been released as part of the news. However, no one had said “serial,” and it was something he was hoping to keep a lid on. Especially since he didn’t have any real evidence.

  You couldn’t call any death a serial killing by most standards until you had three similar scenes. Two deaths could be enough if the signature was strong. But Ethan only had one scene, so if anyone asked, he had to say “no.”

  He hated saying it, because the work that was done on Kaylee Schulte’s body did not speak of a first-time effort. The whole ugly scene reeked of someone who had a lot of planning and understanding of how the timing and necessary spaces worked.

  Most people thought about becoming a killer in the weird little twisted fantasies that people indulged. Kind of an if I was going to rob a store, I would do it this way scenario, but most people got it horrifyingly wrong.

  They had no idea what it took to keep a human being alive and hidden. Ethan knew though, and it was a mountain of effort.

  He looked at Risa. “There’s no evidence that it’s a serial killer yet.” She clearly caught and didn’t like that he’d tacked on “yet.” But he’d been unable to leave it off, not wanting to lie to her.

  “Yes, there is,” she said. “He cut her hands
and face. People don’t just do that.”

  “Could have been a cult,” Ethan tossed out.

  Risa chucked it back to him. “No way. Too clean, too easy. Anything like that around here... just no. I mean it’s not a huge city, but it’s not the backwoods, either. And with social media these days, well, gossip travels faster than lightning. There’s no way there’s a cult around here and no one has heard about it.”

  He tipped his head, and she explained.

  “Your tip line would be ringing off the hook with: ‘It must have been those Satanists over on the West side,’ and you haven’t been hearing that, have you?”

  Ethan shook his head. Shit. She was right. He was not going to be able to play off the cult story with anyone other than the most simple-minded of the town members. Not only was the “cult” as a theory a no-go, it was now not even a plausible as bait. He’d wanted something to throw out to keep people away from the real investigation.

  “Thus, it’s a serial killer,” Risa stated calmly. “But we don’t have any other local victims. Right? Does he just do kids?”

  Ethan shook his head at her and shrugged. He didn’t know any better than she did. And he shouldn’t have said even that.

  So instead of not telling her, he told her that he shouldn’t be telling her this. “If I tell you any of this, then you’re sworn to secrecy.”

  She nodded easily, too easily, and he reminded himself her day job included constant separation of things she saw on the job that she couldn’t tell about. So even though it wasn’t quite legal, he needed someone to bounce ideas off. And, hell, she had already tripped over the body. She’d been there when they’d first turned Kaylee over and seen her face and hands.

  Perhaps she’d seen something he and Dr. Lee hadn’t. Maybe as someone who lived in town more than just the past four months—like he had—she would know something he didn’t. Dr. Lee was new to the area, as well, so, though Risa was not a native, of the three of them she had the longest standing. She might know the most town history and rumors.

  Immediately, she disavowed him of any idea that she knew what was going on. What she did say was, “I don’t know this town all that well. I know which people are most likely to catch their kitchens on fire and which idiots have managed to do it three times.”

  He almost chuckled as, clearly, someone had done exactly that.

  “I know the roads in my district like the back of my hand, but I don’t know the town that well. What I do know—” she paused, “is Leah. And Leah and her family do know the town. What I know is that we haven’t seen a kid disappear like this in a long time. I know,” Risa held up a hand to stop him from interrupting, “because we put the ‘missing’ posters up at the station. Part of my job description is disseminating that information. So I know, far better than most around here, that we have our fair share of teenage kids going missing.”

  This time, he didn’t even try to say anything. He just let her continue.

  “Most of them run away, though. I’ll be honest, some of them I haven’t tried that hard to find.”

  He looked at her a little sideways, and she quickly explained.

  “I’ve been in their houses. I’ve seen the things that burned down. I’ve seen some of these kids start fires on purpose just to get out. Nobody’s taking care of them, so if they decide to take care of themselves, I’m in favor of that. Others,” she sucked in a breath, as those were harder to deal with. “I think they got themselves into bad internet connections and wound up getting trafficked or running away. I don’t know. I try to help as much as I can. But this town hasn’t really seen anything like Kaylee Schulte. At least not according to Leah and Leah’s family.”

  Which, Ethan thought, according to Risa, Leah had managed to expertly maneuver into a conversation that didn’t include the fact that Risa had found the body. According to this version, Leah didn’t leak that she knew about it, or anything else that Risa might have told her in confidence. Good friends were prone to that, he understood, and he couldn’t really fault her if she’d found some therapy telling her story to a good friend. He’d certainly done it himself.

  Hell, he was doing it right now. Sometimes everyone just needed someone to talk to.

  “The thing is,” Risa continued, “the Devs said nothing like that had happened here since Janet Deevers went missing almost fifty years ago. But that when they found her—about two weeks after she disappeared—she had cuts on her face.”

  Chapter Fifteen

  Risa watched the emotions play across Ethan’s face as she explained about Janet Deevers.

  When her friend had first mentioned it last night, Risa hadn’t known what to do with the information. She’d decided to sleep on it. It turned out she didn’t need to sleep on it very long. She’d popped awake before the sun, knowing that she had to tell Ethan.

  Risa first searched a few things on her computer, hoping to have more to add. But the search turned up very little, and she knew she wasn’t getting the whole story. Still, she told him everything because Ethan needed to be the one to decide what was and wasn’t useful.

  Now, she watched as he frowned at her. Her excitement at a possible break began fading.

  “I searched all our records,” he said. “It didn’t match anything.”

  Risa pointed to his computer. “You searched there, right? You searched AFIS or CODIS. Or whatever database you use.”

  She knew those weren’t the right letters, but she didn’t have her whole alphabet soup memorized like he and the cops did.

  “I searched actual FBI databases. We can match items found at the crime scene, toxicology reports, arrangement of the body, things like that.” He kept listing more and more things in his super-cool database, but his wording was vague.

  Risa understood. She knew the departments in most places were intertwined, and she had an idea what the problem was. “Right, but doesn’t that database depend on people uploading information?”

  Ethan nodded.

  “Well, the Janet Deevers case is fifty years old, and—”

  He held up a finger. “Give me a minute.”

  Trying to be patient, Risa held herself still while he tapped the keys then pointed at the monitor she couldn’t see. “See, Janet Deevers, right here. She is in the database.”

  Honestly, Risa was impressed. Somebody had taken the time to enter in the backlog here in Dark Falls, because that was the only way information of that age would get into the intricate FBI search engines.

  “However,” Ethan frowned, “there’s no matching information on the cases. It’s not a match.”

  There, Risa thought, that’s where it had fallen apart. Somebody had entered Janet Deevers’ name, but they hadn’t put all the information in.

  “Does your record have the cuts? According to Leah’s family, Janet had cuts on her face when they found her, two weeks after she’d gone missing.”

  Ethan looked at the screen again, frowning once more. “She was fourteen. Not much older than Kaylee.”

  “Exactly,” Risa said. “And where was she found?”

  He tapped a few more keys and stared at the screen. “It doesn’t say…I need to go pull the evidence.”

  “Anyway,” she said, “I don’t know if Leah’s mom’s memory is correct or not. But her family has been here a long time, so if anybody would know, it would be them. It seemed the similarities were pretty bothersome.”

  “Sounds like it,” he said. “Every good lead needs to be checked out. Honestly, with all the calls on the tip line, you’re the first one who’s got something decent.”

  “Well, Leah was the one with the good tip. Not me. And they only remembered because her mom was friends with Janet’s little sister. She was really young when it happened, but she remembers them talking about how Janet died. It’s possible she might actually know a few more things the general public doesn’t.” Then Risa discounted that. “It’s probably in the police report anyway.”

  “Well, you’ve given me a di
rection to look. I can’t tell you how much that’s worth.”

  Risa knew that was her cue to leave, but she stayed in the chair. Though she’d said her piece, she had a question now. “Does the timing bother you? That was fifty years ago. What kind of serial killer operates for fifty years?”

  “Well,” Ethan said, “we don’t know that it’s the same guy yet. We don’t know anything though, honestly, fifty years is a plausible time span.”

  Jesus. Risa felt that hit her square in the chest. “How many bodies could you rack up in that time? And he’s going after children!”

  Ethan put his hand up. “That’s the problem. We don’t know anything yet. That’s why this case is so damn frustrating.”

  She heard the anger in his voice, and she began to feel that though he was working frantically, he, too, felt like he was coming up against a wall. It seemed to be frustrating him more than it was helping anyone, but his irritation helped soothe hers. “All right, I’ll let you get to it. I just thought I’d share.”

  She headed out of the station into the bright light of the day. Risa resented her hurt ankle and that it gave her no chance of running today. She thought about hitting the gym and tried to figure out what activities she could do with the boot on. In the end, it was so much effort to get just a little bit of exercise that she decided against it and headed home.

  It wasn’t an hour later that Ethan called. “I couldn’t find anything. The case files were missing,” he said.

  Risa frowned. “Really? That’s—Oh my God! Did someone steal them? Is someone covering this up?” She’d had a struggle stopping herself from the worried babble that was pouring out of her mouth.

  Ethan offered some reassurance. “No, nothing that nefarious. Just a simple case of old records.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Old records get lost and misplaced all the time. In fact, it’s not just Janet Deevers’ case that’s missing. It’s the entire three years around her.”

  “Oh. How does that happen? Who can steal three whole years of records?” She’d been in the records room once. The boxes were unwieldy, and the amount of records generated by one year of police work was phenomenal.