by Zoe Carter
Trevor Gallagher stood very straight, like the soldier he was. “So the Thornwood Heights PD has said over and over.” He let out a frustrated breath. “I’m fresh back—just this morning—from Afghanistan after a four-year tour. My kid sister left home three weeks ago and hasn’t been seen or heard from since. I saw an article in the Townsend Report about missing girls. One of the photos looked like Tammy but it wasn’t her. So where the hell is she?”
“Listen, Gallagher,” Lewton said, his usual ugly grimace taking over his smug face. “Like I said, more than once—”
Trevor held his phone up to Lewton’s face. “Just look at another photo of Tammy. Her hair is brown in this shot, but my mother told me that she dyed it blond around the time she disappeared. She’s also wearing makeup in the photo since it was right before a school dance. Tammy rarely wears makeup, but my mother also said she’s had a face full of gunk lately.”
Tommy Riley got that expression on his face that Lauren recognized as shock combined with worry. Something had registered.
“She ran off a few weeks ago?” her father repeated. “I misunderstood when I overhead you speaking with the receptionist in the station—I thought she’d just taken off today.”
A muscle worked in Trevor’s neck. The guy was pissed. No one was listening to him. No one had been listening to him. “No, it’s been a few weeks,” Trevor snapped. “I’ve told the police this over and over. Jesus.”
“Calm down, Gallagher,” Lewton warned.
Asshole. His sister is missing!
Trevor ignored Lewton and turned to Tommy Riley. “Tammy lived with my mother in the trailer park. The double-wide was foreclosed on, so they had to move. Apparently, my mother ‘met’ some loser on an online dating site and he told her to come out to California and bring Tammy too. Because my sister isn’t a moron, she refused. My mother took off anyway. Tammy hasn’t been seen or heard from since.”
“Let me see that photo again,” the chief said.
Trevor handed him the phone. Tommy Riley studied it for a moment, then cleared his throat. “Mr. Gallagher, the body of an unidentified young woman with long blond hair was found a few weeks ago, buried in the woods. Group of hunters with beagles came across her remains. There was some discrepancy about whose jurisdiction the exact location fell under, and unfortunately, since she was unrecognizable and didn’t match any missing person’s reports...well, solving the mystery of her death fell in priority. She’d been deemed a Jane Doe runaway. There was some drug paraphernalia found beside the body—the only evidence, unfortunately, so...”
Lauren watched Trevor’s legs buckle, her own stomach twisting.
A body had been found? Why hadn’t it been front-page news? Because where she’d been found had straddled town lines and both municipalities had dropped the ball? Because she was a “nobody?” A runaway who no one was looking for—who’d been mixed up in drugs. And because Victor Townsend’s murder and Lauren’s arrest had been the big news three weeks ago. The story of a dead runaway had probably been buried in the back pages of the Thornwood Heights Gazette.
A hot rush of anger coursed through her. First, missing girls from twenty years ago whom no one seemed to care about. Now, a dead teen forgotten in a morgue.
“I’ll take you to the medical examiner’s office to see if you can identify her—I hope not,” Chief Riley added. “There might be identifying marks or jewelry.”
Trevor stood very still and turned his head away from the cops. Lauren could see the pain and worry etched into his profile, the hard line of his jaw, the eyes shut for a moment.
“Again, it very well might not be your sister,” the chief said. “She’s eighteen and could have left town to start a new life as an adult. You said you just returned from overseas today—and thank you for your service, by the way. I’m sure she’ll get in touch when she hears you’re back, Mr. Gallagher.”
“There’s no one to hear it from. She’s on the outs with our mother. Tammy would have gotten in touch with me...if she were able. But the thing about the drugs found by the body—” He shook his head. “No way. Tammy would never do drugs.”
Lauren’s heart went out to the guy. Please don’t be his sister, she thought. She wanted to follow her father and Trevor Gallagher to the morgue, be of help somehow. But what could she do?
As Lewton nodded at Trevor with faux compassion and headed back to the police station and her father led Trevor down Main Street toward the morgue, she trailed at a distance, sitting down on the library steps across the street. He’d come out eventually. And from his expression, she’d know whether the dead girl was his sister. For his sake, she sure as hell hoped she wasn’t.
* * *
As the police chief held open the door to the morgue, Trevor Gallagher stiffened, unable to walk in. An infantryman in four years of active duty, he’d faced IEDs, enemy soldiers springing out of nowhere, checking for signs of life in a fellow soldier, a buddy cut down in combat. But this—walking into a morgue to possibly identify his kid sister?
This couldn’t be happening. Tammy. He couldn’t stop thinking of her as a little kid, freckles across her nose and cheeks, her big pale brown eyes, like a doe’s.
Even though I don’t have a dad, she’d said sometimes, I’ll always have you. And you’re the best, Trevor.
He felt the chief’s eyes on him. “Take all the time you need, Trevor,” Chief Riley said, moving a few feet away out of respect. The other cop had seemed like a real asshole, but the chief seemed decent.
He sucked in a breath and let it out. She can’t be in there, lying in a cold morgue. My sister hasn’t been dead for weeks, unidentified, labeled a runaway junkie. It can’t be her. It’s not her, he told himself. It’s not Tammy.
He started to move forward, but his legs went all rubbery and he felt like he was trying to breathe through Jell-O.
“It’s likely not your sister, Mr. Gallagher,” Chief Riley said, compassion in his voice. “Surely your mother would have reported your sister missing after weeks of silence, no matter their issues.”
Anger replaced the dread. He glanced at the tall, balding police chief who held his hat in his hands, against his chest. “My mother is more concerned with her new boyfriend and her new life on the West Coast.”
He shook his head. Dammit. When he hadn’t heard from Tammy in a week—and she always emailed him every other day or so—he called his mom, who’d told him she’d taken off for the coast and had no idea where Tammy was. So he’d called the restaurant where Tammy had worked and learned she hadn’t shown up in almost a week. He’d known in his gut that something was wrong, but when he’d talked to his unit buddies about it, they’d assured him he was overreacting. That Tammy was staying with a friend. His tour was ending and he’d go home and buy that ranch he’d been yammering about for four years and put his sister through college, they’d reminded him. When another week had passed without word from Tammy, he’d called the Thornwood Heights police department and gotten the runaround because Tammy was eighteen—a legal adult. Desperate for any word about her, he’d checked the online edition of the Thornwood Heights Gazette and the Townsend Report and had come across a post by a reporter named Lauren Riley about girls going missing from town. He’d emailed the reporter, set up a meeting, which he was very late for, and had spent his final week in Afghanistan worried out of his mind in ways he’d never been over his own fate in a battle zone.
He’d thought he’d been doing the right thing by Tammy by enlisting in the army so he could make something of his life; be there for her in the way his mother never could. Four years ago, Trevor had been a twenty-four-year-old headed nowhere but down the wrong roads, but the army had changed him, set him straight, made him into a man. Now, at twenty-eight, he was ready to set down roots in the farmlands just outside Thornwood Heights, buy that ranch, raise cattle and the alpacas that Tammy loved
so much and put his kid sister through school so she could become a veterinarian like she’d always dreamed.
She wasn’t in that damned morgue. She wasn’t.
“Okay. Let’s go,” Trevor said.
The chief gave him a commiserating nod, then led the way into the building. He stopped at an open doorway. Hayden Blake, Medical Examiner, MD was on a plaque. “Hayden,” Chief Riley said to a man sitting at a desk, head down in paperwork. “I have a possible relative of the Jane Doe found three weeks ago in the woods.”
The medical examiner, a tall blond man in his late thirties, glanced up at Trevor and nodded, then stood and came around his desk. “Hayden Blake,” he said, extending his hand. “This must be very difficult for you. I determined the young woman to be between sixteen and twenty years of age. Is your sister in that range?”
Shit. “She’s eighteen,” Trevor said.
Dr. Blake nodded. “Right this way.”
Trevor followed Blake and Riley into a room full of stainless steel and cold chambers. For a moment, Trevor’s legs went rubbery, and he had to grip on to the side of the steel table for support.
“Are you ready?” Dr. Blake asked. “I know it’s impossible to be ready.”
Trevor nodded. “Let’s get it over with.”
Dr. Blake slid out one of the chambers, and Trevor turned away until Dr. Blake gently said, “Could this be your sister?”
Trevor squeezed his eyes shut and slowly turned toward the table. He opened his eyes, his stomach twisting at the sight of the badly decomposed body. The hair was dyed a bleached blond but the style—long and wavy, looked like Tammy’s from the last time they’d Skyped.
“She had a ring,” Trevor said, “that she never took off. Was she found wearing a ring?”
Dr. Blake pulled out an evidence bag. “Yes. Can you describe it?”
Oh hell. For a second he couldn’t speak, couldn’t find his voice or even a goddamned breath. “A thin gold band with three tiny, vertical ruby stones.” Ruby was her birthstone. He and Tammy had walked around town before he deployed. She’d stopped in front of a shop window, staring at the ring, her expression all wistful. She didn’t say a thing about wanting it, but he knew she loved it. He bought it as a promise he’d always be there for her, even when he was thousands of miles away in hell.
The medical examiner’s expression said it all; Trevor had to again lean on the steel gurney for support. Dr. Blake took out the ring from the evidence bag and held it up.
“That’s Tammy’s ring,” Trevor said, acid burning his gut.
Dr. Blake rushed over a chair, and Trevor sank into it. He buried his face in his hands. “Was it an accident? The chief said there were drugs involved, but that can’t be right.” Yeah, Trevor hadn’t been home in four years, but he’d Skyped with Tammy a couple times a month and she’d looked and sounded great. She wasn’t doing drugs. No way.
He caught the look that passed between the cop and the medical examiner. What the hell was this?
“She was strangled, Mr. Gallagher.”
Trevor bolted up. “Someone killed Tammy?” Strangled? Who would want to hurt Tammy?
“I believe she was killed and her body moved to the burial site where she was found,” Dr. Blake said. “I’m very sorry, Mr. Gallagher. Now that she’s been preliminarily identified, I can seek out dental records to confirm.”
Trevor glanced at the body lying in the cold steel drawer. He could see the height was right, and the body type.
I should have been here for you, he wanted to scream. I should never have left you alone with our bitch of a mother.
“We’ll launch a full investigation,” Chief Riley said, resting a hand on Trevor’s shoulder. “I assure you of that.”
Trevor shut his eyes. He had to get the hell of here. He turned and ran out, stopping outside, suddenly unable to move another step, his legs like lead, bile rising in his gut. He lifted his face to the sky, his head dropping back.
He sucked in a breath, his gaze on the playground on the town square in the distance, where he used to take Tammy to get out of the mobile home. Just past the playground entrance was the smoothie shop where they’d always go afterward, where they’d try a different juice blend every week. And across the street was the library, where he’d take her to borrow books when she was in elementary school, Tammy with the one book she managed to find about alpacas, and Trevor’s stack on ranching.
A woman stood on the steps to the library, backlit against the sun, her long wavy russet-brown hair loose past her shoulder. He couldn’t see her face, but for a moment, he let himself imagine that she was Tammy, waiting for him.
But Tammy wasn’t waiting for him.
His sister was dead. Murdered.
He hadn’t been there for her.
I’m sorry I failed you, Tammy, he thought. But I’ll make sure your killer is brought to justice. I promise you that.
Chapter Two
Lauren stood up as Trevor lurched out of the morgue. His expression—utter pain, grief, anguish—told her that he’d identified his sister.
Eighteen. And gone.
He stared at her, but then turned away. In the moment that she vacillated between going over to him to introduce herself as the reporter he was supposed to meet and staying where she was to give him privacy, he took off running down the street, got into a black pickup and peeled off.
She dropped back down on the top step, the wind practically knocked out of her. An eighteen-year-old found dead in the woods weeks ago—thought to be a runaway drug user. A murder no one seemed in a hurry to solve.
Just like twenty years ago. Two girls had gone missing around the same time. No one had given two shits about one of them—wrong side of the tracks, runaway, no one looked for answers, including the police. But the other? Her name said it all: Blake. Abby Blake. Abby’s disappearance had set off a firestorm of police activity because of who her father was—the rich, powerful Connor Blake, who owned three quarters of Thornwood Heights. And because the chief of police was the father of Abby’s best friend, Jennifer Riley. Months of investigating had led nowhere and the case had gone cold.
But last week, a skeleton had been found at the boathouse and was being investigated. Lauren knew her sister Jennifer had been freaked out, scared, nervous, worried the skeleton would turn out to be the remains of Abby Blake. But the medical examiner, who happened to be Abby’s twin brother, Hayden, had quickly determined that it was not.
What did Lauren’s big-deal NYPD detective sister have to say about all this? Zippo. Instead of giving Lauren any more information, working with her as cop to journalist, Jennifer Riley had told Lauren at least five times that she had “no comment,” that this was dangerous business and if Lauren wanted to stick with reporting the news, she should do so without trying to manipulate a sister relationship. A sister relationship that was very new. Jennifer had been gone for almost as long as Abby was missing.
Even after all these years, Lauren still hated thinking about Abby Blake. Abby had been the girl with everything. Beautiful. Wealthy. Kind. Lauren had been young when Abby had disappeared—just five years old, but she remembered thinking that Abby looked like a fairy-tale princess. Abby was always so nice to her BFF’s kid sister, stopping to play dolls with Lauren in her room for a few minutes, admiring her kindergarten art projects, watching her do cartwheels in the front yard.
But then Abby had vanished. And Lauren’s family had been destroyed in the process. Suspicion. Accusations. Interrogations. Back then, it had been Jennifer who’d been under the narrowed gazes of the townspeople. The last to see Abby Blake alive. Not telling everything she knew. Jealous of her wealthy golden-girl best friend. Hiding something. On and on and on. Now Jennifer was back in town, but the cloud of suspicion still hung over her, despite her badge, despite her push for the truth and answe
rs. This town was hiding something.
And Victor Townsend had been on to something. He’d clearly recognized that with two missing teenage girls—cold cases from twenty years ago—there might have been others. Lauren wasn’t sure what had inspired him to make the leap, but something had. In the weeks before he was killed, Victor had posted for information about any other girls and young women who’d gone missing from town or in the county. The photographs Lauren had seen when she’d snooped in his computer were apparently of those girls and the one name they knew: Abby’s.
But the cops were being cagey—including her own sister. A skeleton had been found. And now a teenage girl had been murdered.
What the hell was going on in this town?
Lauren went into the library to use one of the communal computers. Typing Thornwood Heights Gazette into a browser, she searched for Jane Doe, found dead, woods, and hit Enter. There it was. A three-line buried article under an ad for the Appliance SuperStore.
“The body of an unidentified female, determined to be between sixteen and twenty, was found buried on the edge of the Thornwood Heights woods this afternoon, possibly related to drugs. Anyone with information should contract the Thornwood Heights Police Department at 555-1616.”
Tammy Gallagher had been Jane Doe for too long; she was a young woman with a name and past. Yeah, Lauren wanted to know what happened to her, but she also wanted to pay tribute to who she’d been, make her a real person who was mourned. That was the kind of journalism Victor had believed in: people mattered, lives mattered. Lauren was going to make Tammy Gallagher’s death front-page news the way it deserved to be. In order to know who Tammy Gallagher had been, Lauren would need to talk to those who knew her.
Which meant finding Trevor Gallagher. Time to use her investigative skills.