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

by Savannah Kade

  Not paying attention, Ethan gulped down the remaining half mug of lukewarm coffee. The dregs stuck to his tongue. It definitely seemed like that kind of day. Last night had been much better, but the instant his phone had rung this morning his world had turned to shit.

  He wished they’d found this body sooner, and he almost blamed himself for that, but he couldn’t. This one wasn’t his fault. Still, he wasn’t running low on “crap that actually was Ethan’s fault.” Not yet.

  It seemed the section of woods where Risa had found the body of Kaylee Schulte had become a bit of a stomping grounds. That didn’t surprise him. It had been a week since Risa tripped and triggered this investigation. Officers were no longer parked at the scene, though the crime tape remained up around the square of ground where Kaylee’s body been found and across the entry to the trail where Risa had been running. He had learned several days ago that people had been visiting the spot and making it into a memorial. In fact, he’d expected nothing less. Even the report that the yellow tape had been torn down twice didn’t surprise him. But now the visitors had been fanning out.

  He didn’t think they’d been actively looking for more bodies. But what did he know? People had left cards and flowers inside the border of the crime tape. Even now, that made him shake his head. People wanted him to solve crimes, then they actively hindered his investigation.

  He also suspected many of the people who came by—whether or not they added to the memorial—were really lookie-loos. On the one hand, he faulted them for what were essentially vulgar activities. On the other hand, he understood that was just the way people were.

  He wished he could’ve searched that area of the woods when Kaylee Schulte had first gone missing. But they hadn’t looked that direction at all. He’d aimed the search parties where they’d most believed she would be found… if she’d been in the woods of her own accord. She hadn’t.

  When she’d first gone missing and everyone had turned out to search, he and the rescue team had instructed them that they were looking for a child who’d wandered off. That expectation had been one of a girl alone, cold, hungry, maybe sick, and regretting her decisions. Not one who’d been kidnapped and then murdered, so they hadn’t been looking in the right place.

  The national forest area around Dark Falls was large. And honestly, if he hadn’t positioned the searchers where he had, he would’ve had a whole team of suburban moms and dads coming across the rotting corpse. The people were volunteers. They’d been hoping to find a live child, and though he’d had several psychologists on hand, knowing exactly how this could go down, he couldn’t say he wasn’t sorry that they hadn’t found her then.

  Now he was fairly certain they’d found Missy Harrison. Another girl missing, but this one for almost twenty years. Or at least that’s what he thought. Whether it was the Harrison girl or not, there was no way he could discount that there was a fully decomposed body of a small child on a table in the morgue. Grace had already called to say her initial visual assessment suggested a match.

  Also, the body was in a location similar to the one where Kaylee Schulte was found. It was—as best they could tell, since it had been there a long time—fully clothed and laid out like a starfish.

  Shit.

  He was disturbed. He didn’t know how long she’d been there but… twenty years? The size of the skeleton, the clothes, the way it was arranged?

  He had a serial killer on his hands. One who killed children.

  Ethan prayed he was wrong but just then his phone rang, and he jolted. Not usually one to startle, it was an odd feeling and he didn’t like it. Then again, what had he liked about this day?

  Looking at the screen, he saw Grace’s name pop up, and his heart sank like a rock. He knew what she would say, but he aimed for politeness. He’d fucked up enough today, alienating Grace wouldn’t help him any. “Hi. I’d love to tell you that I hope you are having a good day, but I imagine it’s not any better than mine.”

  “Oh no, this is a shit show, Ethan. Is it a serial?"

  “You know I can’t officially say anything…” that should be answer enough.

  “So, that’s a yes.”

  He sighed again. “Did you manage a match or a rule-out?”

  Grace’s next words started on a sigh. “I’ll give this information over to a certified forensic odontologist for the official report, but you can get working. This is Missy Harrison.”

  Chapter Twenty-Seven

  Risa looked across the table at Leah. “Well,” she said, “I feel like shit. I should feel good today, but it’s the opposite.” She used her straw to stir her soda, which didn’t need it.

  “That sucks,” Leah commiserated. Leah’s love life was only slightly better than Risa’s on a normal day. Though right now, Risa couldn’t decide if “nothing happened” was better or worse than “everything happened, and then he ghosted.”

  “Yeah. You know what? It really does. I really liked this guy, and it’s—” she looked at her watch, “—almost one. He’s been gone since before six a.m. this morning, and…”

  “And nothing,” Leah filled in, her tone indicating her own level of disgust with Special Agent Ethan Eames. “I wish I could do something more.”

  “Maybe introduce me to the love of my life?”

  Leah laughed. “Yeah, I’ve got my own to work on. But if I hit on the secret ingredient, you’ll be the first one I tell.”

  Risa could only smile. She didn’t know why she’d thought this time would be any different. Her history with men was not stellar, to put it mildly. She kept her high school boyfriend through to college, but he left when she’d gone into fire training academy. Apparently, he thought the dream that her entire family followed their passion for wasn’t worthwhile. He’d also seemed to think that she wasn’t serious about it, though she had professed a love for the job from a young age. He claimed that he was worried about the danger to her, but Risa suspected he simply hadn’t liked the idea of being with a female firefighter.

  She’d gotten over him, though. Things like that took a while, but she found it was easier to get over a man when he turned out to be an asshole. She moved on to date another guy at training academy. But, once the instructors had lit into her, that had been over, as well. It hadn’t been made any easier for him when Risa was assigned to the fire station he’d desperately wanted to work in.

  They’d both worked in the Cheyenne Fire Department, though in separate houses. When the two trucks would work the same fire, his bitterness could have put out the blaze all on its own.

  Risa hadn’t had much luck since then. Just some casual stuff, just the one firefighter in Dark Falls. That was when she realized she had a thing for men with that kind of job. So, she clearly hadn’t learned anything, had she? Ethan might not be a firefighter, but that apple had not fallen far from the tree.

  “Leah,” she leaned onto the table, “the next time I do this, you have to stop me.”

  Leah almost laughed. “You are aware of just how infrequently you do this? If I stopped you, you’d never get laid.”

  Risa laughed at that, too. Was that what it was? Did she fall for these guys so she could get some sex? “What you’re saying is I just need to find some hot casual guy?”

  “Maybe,” Leah shrugged. “Then again, what do I know?” She held up her left hand, showing off the finger that no longer held the engagement ring. “It’s like the blind leading the blind. All right, honey. I’ve got to get going. The office actually expects me to clock my hours for my paycheck. It’s so pedestrian,” she mocked as she smiled.

  “I know.” Risa was glad to finally be laughing. “I’m so glad you planned this today. I really needed it.” She was still busy trying to convince herself that Ethan Eames was an asshole and she should get over him.

  Sending her friend back to work, Risa waited to cover the check. By the time she’d finished at the diner, she made a decision not to go home. With her bad ankle back in its boot and her other foot in the one stupi
d kitten heel, she told herself none of that mattered. The one guy who liked the way she looked apparently hadn’t liked it enough to stick around, and the other one hadn’t mattered enough for her to even care when they broke up. Her final tally was one boot, one kitten heel, no men. Score settled.

  No longer on crutches and no longer stuck at home, she was still stuck out of work for another day until she could go back to desk duty tomorrow. Sitting around today would only leave her restless and trying to figure out what the hell had happened with Ethan, so Risa decided to make herself useful.

  She hoped she could just show up at the library. Luckily, when she walked in, she found smiles behind the front desk.

  “Cara, Alan. I can see Carol’s out today…” she let the words trail off, only then realizing she shouldn’t have said it out loud. But she could not imagine Cara and Alan being as happy as they were today with Carol breathing down their necks.

  Alan turned to her, his expression suddenly somber. “Shut your mouth, girl. Carol dropped dead of a heart attack yesterday.”

  Risa stopped cold, her heart freezing at her massive blunder, but in that moment Alan and Cara looked at each other and burst into giggles.

  “Of course she didn’t,” Kara said. “She’s far too ornery to die. You know this!”

  Risa paused a moment, then laughed. “Not prepared for a practical joke from my friends today, but thank you for the reset on my heart rate. Can I at least make myself useful?”

  The other two looked at each other and then at her. This time, it was Cara who leaned across the counter at her. “Sorry, hon. When Alan and I are the only ones here, this place runs like clockwork. It’s Carol who dicks up the works.”

  Of course, it figured she’d get herself out of the house and then not have a place to go. “All right, guys. I appreciate it.”

  She was turning to leave when she had a thought. Maybe she could be useful anyway. Maybe Ethan Eames was an asshole, but maybe it wasn’t all about him. Kaylee Schulte had been an innocent child, and she deserved some closure. As of right now, the only other case Ethan had been able to match to it was Janet Deevers from almost fifty years ago.

  “Can I use the microfiche room, just do my own research?”

  Cara tilted her head. Alan tilted his to match, leaving the two of them looking a little like Tweedledee and Tweedledum. Risa didn’t say so. “Of course you can, honey. It’s a library.”

  Thirty minutes later, Risa was sitting in front of the bright screen, her eyes scratchy but her heart stunned. She’d found another one.

  Ester Holtzclaw had disappeared seventy-five years ago, and her body had been found with knife marks on it.

  Janet Deevers going missing fifty years earlier. That a killer might have operated for that long—and gotten away with it—was worrisome. But Ester Holtzclaw? Seventy-five years ago?

  Risa could only pray she was wrong, but in her gut she knew she’d found another case. The feeling she had of being watched just became even more concerning. She would have told a certain FBI agent about it, if she was speaking to him.

  Chapter Twenty-Eight

  Risa stared at the screen in front of her. Why hadn’t Ethan found this?

  Then again, she thought, the FBI search engine was cutting edge, but it was only as good as what it was fed. The Ester Holtzclaw case was from seventy-five years ago.

  Risa was looking at newspaper archives searching for “knife.” The stories sounded strange, though she always thought this with older newspaper articles. The writing itself indicated that it was from a different time. Word use was different, sentence structure was longer and more complicated. Also, what was important to people seventy-five years ago was not quite the same as what was important now.

  In fact, Ester Holtzclaw’s initial “missing” story was relatively un-alarming. She’d been fourteen years old, and though the official police report had wound up in the newspaper, it barely garnered a two-inch mention on the back page. The notice could not have been more buried. That a missing child wasn’t a priority in itself was concerning to Risa—not that there was anything she could do about a seventy-five-year-old case now.

  On top of burying the story, the paper wasn’t even really concerned about the missing child. It was simply a note from the police letting the townsfolk know that if they saw Ester, they should tell her to call home. Apparently, when a child went missing back then, no one suspected that someone might have preyed on their kid. It seemed clear that they all believed Ester had just up and run off.

  Maybe the era Ester lived in had just been more naïve, but the biggest worry seemed to be her mother saying that she was concerned Ester was probably eating “that junk food.” Her mother also suggested she was gallivanting about with “some boy.” The write-up made the woman sound more irritated than worried.

  Risa frowned and wondered if maybe Ester Holtzclaw hadn’t disappeared willingly because her parents were such dickheads. Then again, Risa told herself, the newspaper was decidedly different in that era. Parents had been different. Maybe kids had been different, too.

  What she did know was that three weeks later, when Ester Holtzclaw’s body had been found, the town had turned upside down. So they might not have worried when she went missing, but they did at least care that she’d been killed. And they worried that they had a killer in their midst.

  Risa didn’t want to believe this case was connected to Kaylee Schulte’s. The Ester Holtzclaw murder was almost three-quarters of a century old. Janet Deevers’ case was fifty years ago, and that had already concerned the shit out of her. It was beyond scary to think there might have been a serial killer operating for that long. Risa didn’t want to believe that Ester Holtzclaw fell into the same category, because if she did, then this man would have been working for a much, much longer time.

  Consoling herself that she didn’t have enough information yet, Risa kept staring at the screen. She told herself the cases didn’t match, but there were some disturbing coincidences she couldn’t get past.

  Ester Holtzclaw’s body had been found on the other side of the national forest. In fact, if Risa had followed a line from the entrance to the trail she’d run the day she found Kaylee, directly through the point where she’d stumbled over the body and straight out the other side, she would have hit the spot where Ester Holtzclaw was found.

  The designated forest land was relatively narrow there. So, while Ester had not been found in the park, she was very close. She was also found in a wooded area and wearing the dress she disappeared in. As Risa read through the case, this led police officers at the time to come to the brilliant conclusion that she had been murdered the day she left.

  Risa didn’t believe that now. Another check mark, Risa thought, about the way things had changed. There was no information about whether she had been assaulted or about collection of evidence. Though it was entirely possible they had checked and it was just that no one put “that kind of information” into the newspaper. The good people of Dark Falls were worried enough with the murder. They wouldn’t need to know if it was actually worse than what they believed.

  Of course, there was no collection of fingerprints or DNA. Fingerprints—and the idea of identifying a person by them—had been around a long time, Risa knew. But no one could collect them off a body or clothing at that time. And DNA? Not part of law enforcement then. No, it seemed most of the officers at that time had gone boldly forward with Sherlock-Holmes-style evidence. “I see she’s wearing the same clothing, therefore she must have been murdered the same day.”

  Never mind that if she’d been kidnapped, she probably wouldn’t have had anything else to change into. The real Sherlock would have caught that anomaly, Risa thought.

  Still, she read through the story. What bothered her was a hand-drawn picture that looked almost like Greek tally marks. They weren’t quite counting in fives. They didn’t quite look like letters, either, but they didn’t look random and they didn’t look like nothing either. In fact, the news
paper had printed a plea from the police department for help deciphering the marks. They also said the marks had been found on this young woman’s legs. There was a knife—an old hunting knife—found near the body.

  The paper didn’t say if this was the knife they thought had been used to carve the marks or even that the marks were carved into her. As Risa re-read the article, she realized that was her own bias creeping in. She’d seen Kaylee Schulte, and she was looking for similarities. Given the wording in the paper, anything was possible— paint, marker, pen, carving? But it didn’t say.

  Risa sighed and reminded herself that old “journalism” was more concerned with the sensibilities of good upstanding citizens than current papers were. This article didn’t seem all that concerned with actually solving the case, but that just might be hindsight. It might be the bias of trying to tie her case to another, mixed in with all the tech an average citizen of today knew about compared to a police officer seventy-five years ago…and Risa was frustrated.

  She wanted more, but this article was all she had.

  She searched in the days and months after the killing for others like it. She found a memorial for Ester on the one-year mark of her disappearance. Still, even that piece didn’t mention that she’d been murdered. Only that her “death” had not been solved and no new clues had turned up.

  Risa searched through the following years looking for things the police tied to Ester. But there was nothing.

  There was absolutely no photographic evidence of Ester Holtzclaw, and walking into the police station and pulling old evidence files was not anything Risa was capable of. She’d have to hand all this information off to Ethan.

  She’d been there two hours by the time she stood up and stretched, her worry gnawing at her. She printed out the documents and paid her three dollars and seventy-two cents of print fees at the front desk, even though Alan and Cara told her it was unnecessary.