Forsaken Trust

by Meredith Doench

  “I’m sorry,” I said. “This is a small town, Sadie, and the BOLO will ensure that all law enforcement will be looking for her in the state of Ohio. We’ll do all we can to find your mom, but we have to follow the law.”

  Harvey and I escorted the scared young woman and her grandmother, who was used to dealing with the problems of her drug-addicted daughter, out of the station. Harvey stood beside me at the window, and we watched as the two made their way into the parking lot.

  “Sadie knows more than she’s saying,” I said.

  Harvey agreed.

  “I have a feeling her buddy Ava plays a part in this, too.”

  “How are we going to get them to talk?”

  “I don’t think we can make them,” I said. “But there might be another way to get the information.”

  Chapter Nine

  Day Three: 2:40 a.m.

  I’d been sitting in my truck for over an hour parked two homes down from that of Sadie and her grandmother. So far, there hadn’t been any movement inside or outside the home. My theory was that Sadie wouldn’t stay put; she’d been upset when she left our meeting, and I figured she’d soon be out looking for her mother. I was curious to see how Ava would fit in to all of this and to see where Sadie would choose to look for her mother. Rumors were already circulating that the serial killer had taken another woman. I wanted to believe that Wilma Henderson was simply out of town, but I knew there was a very real possibility that she had already been killed.

  Sadie’s grandmother’s small ranch sat in a working class neighborhood that was quiet and well cared for. With the summer season over, the town was eerily dead. Vacant houses spotted neighborhoods as many were only used as summer cottages.

  I’d splurged on some coffee from a real vendor rather than the terrible sludge at the station house, and I sipped it while scrolling through my emails. I hadn’t checked my personal email account in days. While most of it was dog care coupons and other junk, there were two emails that stopped me cold. From Rowan. Call me, the subject line read. I want to talk to you.

  Delete.

  I needed to contact Rowan, but it would have to wait until after we solved this case. After all, she’d waited almost eight months before contacting me. It was possible I was jumping to conclusions; I didn’t know what Rowan wanted, and her insisting to speak with me could have had nothing to do with getting back together. I’d been in enough relationships, though, to know that we lesbians have what I liked to call the boomerang effect. We might argue until we lose our voice. We might also break up and swear we never want to see each other again. Give it a year or so, and after another bad relationship, we generally boomerang our way back into the arms of our exes.

  I wasn’t ready to boomerang back to Rowan again. I thought of Bennett; I enjoyed her company, and our kayaking down the river. And there had been that touch between us. Innocent enough. Still, I couldn’t stop thinking about the way her touch made me feel.

  A text came through from Harvey: No action here. You?

  Me: Quiet.

  Harvey: ?

  Me: Patience.

  Harvey was stationed outside Ava Washington’s trailer. Since the two girls weren’t willing to talk to us, I knew their behavior would. Ava was fifteen, and Sadie was eighteen—I’d been both of those ages and remembered well my allegiance was first and foremost to my friends. My guess was that both girls had secrets—don’t all teenage girls?—but that Ava would have done just about anything to please Sadie. It was in the way she looked at Sadie as she stood by Coach Allard’s SUV. It was in the way Ava recoiled from Sadie after saying aloud Heart to Heart. Sadie held all the power in the friendship; Ava was the admirer of Sadie, something of a devoted younger fan.

  What did all of this have to do with the dead women in the river? And why hadn’t Bennett and Richardson been able to identify the fourth victim, the one submerged in the water, Ophelia? Her body had taken the brunt of decomposition, and logically, not everyone was lucky enough to have someone who missed them when they didn’t return home or missed too many phone calls. I feared that no one was looking for Ophelia, and that would make it more difficult for us to find her identity. My heart ached for people like her—everyone in this world deserved someone who missed her absence.

  Headlights spilled across my windshield, and I ducked just as the lights winked out and drove past. The car slowed until it stopped on the other side of Sadie’s mailbox.

  I crawled over to the passenger window and peered over the lip of the car door. I saw the signal—the flicker of the light outside the garage. I scribbled down the license plate of a dark-colored sedan, silently blessing the governor who insisted that Ohio cars have plates on both the front and back ends. Then there was Sadie, her figure darkened in jeans and a black hoodie. She came around from behind the house and ran across the yard with a backpack bouncing against her back. She slipped into the passenger seat, and the car rolled forward before Sadie could latch the door closed. I lay as flat as I could across the front seats as the sedan rolled away from me, lightless and soundless into the night.

  Once I counted to ten, I looked out my rear window to catch the red taillights turning left at the stop sign at the end of the neighborhood street.

  “When Grandma’s asleep, the kid will play,” I said, keying my truck awake. I turned around in a driveway next to Sadie’s and ran the stop sign.

  I kept my distance, but followed close enough to see that the driver was shorter than Sadie, a figure who followed all of the traffic rules while driving five miles under the speed limit. These were clear signals to me that this driver was working very hard not to catch the attention of anyone, let alone law enforcement.

  I followed the vehicle through what was considered downtown Wallace Lake, a whopping three lights with a construction zone outside of the Tastee Freeze. The town was silent save for a few cars on the road. We made our way to the other side of Wallace Lake where the vacation homes loomed large over the water and docks held speedboats and pontoons. When the car turned onto a street with no outlet, I parked my truck outside its entrance so I could see every vehicle that came in or out.

  Slipping out of the truck, I moved closer to the house where the sedan had pulled into the drive—number 1215. These homes were newer, no more than a decade old. I hid behind a row of landscaped pine trees just as the garage door went down and hid the car. The lights flickered on inside the home, and I snapped a few photos with my iPhone.

  When there was no movement around the house for a good fifteen minutes, I made my way back to the truck. I texted Richardson, Who owns 1215 Acorn Ridge Dr?

  My coffee was gone, but I found a bottle of water under the driver’s seat.

  Richardson: Seriously? It’s almost 4 a.m.

  Me: Seriously. I’m watching the house now.

  I waited for Richardson to crawl his ass out of bed and get to his computer before I sent the license plate number. Sadie clearly hadn’t come to this address to party. So why had she gone so far as to sneak outside after her grandmother had gone to bed? There was no indication that Ava was in this house, and Harvey hadn’t reported any movement from her trailer. The other houses on the dead end were totally dark and looked empty—no trash cans at the curb or planters out front, nothing to suggest someone lived there full-time. I guessed them to be second homes of boaters and water skiers, weekend hideaways from the city. House number 1215 basically had the street to itself.

  Finally, Richardson texted back, Two names on the house. Henry and Joan Marco. Two vehicles under Joan Marco’s name, a 1999 Buick sedan and a 2007 Land Rover. He included the plate numbers and VINs.

  A Land Rover. I searched the truck for my notepad and flipped it open. The plate numbers matched from earlier today. Whoever Joan Marco was, a man named Cody Allard was driving her vehicle earlier today with Ava and Sadie near the woods surrounding the Powell River.

  What the hell was going on? The more I learned about this case, the more tangled the details and its
players became.

  My phone beeped with a text from Harvey: Ava’s on foot.

  Me: Tail her.

  It would be a long walk, but it was possible for Ava to be headed to this location. If that were the case, why didn’t the driver pick up both girls and not just Sadie? Where would Ava go in the middle of the night alone and on foot? She obviously wasn’t the least bit afraid of the serial killer prowling the area.

  Harvey: Ava @ Cody Allard’s apartment. Inside.

  Me: Stay put. Get photos when she leaves.

  I hadn’t expected this development. Ava and the new high school teacher? Ms. Washington’s fears about her daughter hanging out with a crowd that could get her into trouble were well founded. However, at least so far, she’d been focused on the wrong person: Sadie and not the coach.

  The background check on Cody Allard came back clean. He was a new teacher and a new resident in Wallace Lake in the past year. There was nothing to alert my suspicions of him except for the fact that a fifteen-year-old girl on his team had snuck out and was now inside his home. And then there was the SUV, the dark green Land Rover that he seemed to be sharing with a married woman.

  I texted Richardson, What do you have on Henry and Joan Marco?

  Richardson: On it. Nothing yet but retirees.

  Me: Last place of employment?

  Richardson: For Joan, Wallace Lake High School. Guidance counselor until 2004. Henry has been on disability since 1999.

  I texted Richardson back, Is Sadie Reid a current student at the high school?

  Richardson: Graduated last year.

  There was no way Sadie could be a part of the weight-lifting team other than as a mentor or an assistant to the coach. It didn’t seem likely the high school would have formally hired her to assist a new teacher, particularly when Ava made it clear there had never been a weight-lifting team at the high school before this teacher arrived.

  “Dammit!” I tossed the cell phone onto the passenger seat and took a swig of the warm water. The water almost came flying out of my mouth. There on the seat beside me was my dad’s figure decked out in his finest police regalia.

  I choked the water down. “Dad”—I coughed—“where have you been?”

  “Hiya, Lucy-girl. Looks like you’ve caught yourself another mess of a case.” He looked out the passenger window. “I always hated these overnight stakeouts.”

  “Where have you been?” I asked again.

  He gave me one of his grins. “You haven’t needed me. You never have.”

  I shook my head. “I’ll always need you.”

  “You’re one hundred times better at this work than I ever was,” he said. “That gut of yours is dead on except when you get too many crossed signals.”

  “Like in this case.” I added, “I hate feeling like I’m going at it alone.”

  “Could be your own fault.”

  I knew what he was referring to, and it wasn’t Harvey or Richardson. “I’ll get with Sanders tomorrow.”

  “Allies don’t always make the best decisions, Luce.” He gave me a hard look. “Nor do detectives.”

  “I keep thinking about Ainsley.”

  “I know you do,” my dad said. “His death was a tragedy, but it wasn’t your fault. Here’s the thing, Luce. Refusing to trust other law enforcement officers isn’t going to keep you safe from losses like Ainsley—it will only make you vulnerable. There is a strength in needing others.”

  I waited a few moments before I responded. “I tried to make the murder board,” I said, ignoring his comments, “but there hasn’t been much so far to fill in.”

  “The board doesn’t always work the way you want it to,” he said. “Sometimes it works better in the mind.”

  “Meaning?”

  “Exactly what you’re doing now, mentally pulling all the puzzle pieces together in front of you. It’s not always so neat and tidy as a murder board.”

  “So what should I do?” Exhaustion was setting in. I realized for the first time that I hadn’t slept more than a few hours since Sanders burst into my apartment and found me asleep on the couch.

  “It’s not so much what you should do but more what you should consider,” my dad said. “Maybe the shape of this case isn’t a rectangle.”

  I yawned and took another drink of water and wished like hell for some caffeine.

  “Come on, Luce. Think about what I taught you.” He crossed one leg over the other and rubbed his neatly trimmed mustache. “Don’t forget that one of your greatest resources as a cop is your own past. Pull from your background. You grew up in a town only a little bigger than Wallace Lake. You know how these places work.”

  The light went out in the Marco home and I relaxed back into my seat. It looked like Sadie would stay the night, and I needed to wait her out to see what her next move would be. “What do you mean?”

  He finally said, “Small towns are all about loyalty.”

  “Secrets.”

  “Yes. Cities have them, too, but not so deeply embedded into the culture. Cities build their own small towns with separate communities. It’s almost like we’re hardwired to stay loyal within a certain space and to the people that inhabit it.”

  “What are you saying, Dad? That everyone in Wallace Lake is in on the murders?”

  He shook his head. “Not at all. What I’m saying is that there are two communities working here: the locals and the outsiders. You need to go at this with an us-versus-them mentality. What do the outsiders do in this town?”

  I shrugged. “They keep the economy going. They buy summer cottages and recreate on the lake and river.”

  My dad nodded. “And then?”

  “They abandon the place until the next season.”

  My father was right, of course. I hadn’t fully considered that the strong code of silence we faced in this case was coming from the collective community, not just individuals. When in doubt, these neighbors sided with those they knew, whether they liked them or not. There was a tendency to turn away from the crimes of a neighbor or schoolmate rather than report it. Loyalty ran deep, and secrets had a way of trickling down through generations. I thought about the way my dad and his partner, Roy Tyson, both of whom grew up in my hometown, were able to pull on familial ties and crimes during their law enforcement work. I’d been present as a child around the dinner table for many of those discussions about what someone’s uncle might have done and his grandfather before that. The one thing I’d learned about small towns was that they were rarely how they appeared to a visitor. All that quaint charm and friendliness fell away once an outsider tried to grow deeper roots.

  “Don’t you remember what happened when we suspected Billy Anderson of dealing marijuana? Why, he had himself quite a business, and we had to…”

  I listened to my dad talk about his case from long ago. He explained the snare he and Roy Tyson had to climb through in order to dig and push their way into the truth. Even then, bloody and torn from the journey, the truth, my father said, was subjective and in constant shift.

  The familiar sound of my father’s voice was soothing, and he lulled on and on until I eventually drifted into sleep.

  Chapter Ten

  Day Three: 7:30 a.m.

  I woke to the incessant ding of my cell phone. Squinting against the sun’s morning light, I tried to stretch out my legs and arms inside the truck. I’d fallen asleep slumped against the door, a dangerous move on a stakeout. Thankfully, the neighborhood was barren, and the home I’d been watching was quiet.

  All the muscles of my neck and back screamed with every movement. I scrambled for my cell. I’d missed a text from Bennett at 5:57 a.m. Fourth victim identified. Old arrest record.

  Bennett, I knew, had been searching for a positive ID using DNA analysis.

  A recent text from Harvey read, Both subjects on foot. Allard left five minutes before Washington. Headed toward high school.

  Me: Photos?

  Harvey: Got ’em.

  Me: The two of them toget
her?

  Harvey: Hit the lotto, boss. A kiss at the door.

  A kiss. I was struck by the boldness of their physical embrace outside of the home. The two had grown comfortable with each other and their surroundings—they felt safe with their secret. Allard was twenty-six years of age. Ava Washington was only fifteen years old, and although she appeared to be complicit in the relationship, she was under the legal age for consent. We now had evidence of statutory rape.

  My next question was whether or not Sadie was involved with Allard. My observations when I found them in the wooded area told me the connection between Sadie and Allard was much stronger than Ava and Allard’s. But that didn’t necessarily mean that Sadie was sleeping with him. Somehow I couldn’t picture Sadie falling for Allard’s jock charm. She struck me as a young woman who was too smart for that.

  My phone rang.

  Richardson: Bennett got the DNA results back on the fourth victim. Leslie Rex, age 62.

  Me: Wallace Lake resident?

  Richardson: Not sure. Last known address was in Jacksonville, Ohio.

  Me: Jacksonville? That’s quite a ways from here.

  Richardson: Sure is. Something else? That house you watched last night. Joan Marco? She bailed Rex out the last two times she was arrested.

  Me: Hmmm. Where was that?

  Richardson: First time in Akron. Second in Columbus.

  Me: No record of employment or arrest in Wallace Lake?

  Richardson: None.

  Me: Good work. Did Ava Washington’s mother or Sadie Reid’s grandmother report the girls missing from the home this morning?

  Richardson: No.

  Me: Let me know if they do. Harvey and I need to talk to Joan Marco. Email me her driver’s license, would you? Arrests?

  Richardson: Nothing. Upstanding Wallace Lake citizen.

  Me: I bet. Keep digging.

  We’d uncovered some sort of a ring, something I didn’t yet understand. Unless I’d missed it, Sadie was still inside the Marco home, which looked very much asleep. We’d determined the relationship between Ava and Allard, but what about the relationship between Sadie and Joan Marco? Or Marco and Allard? For a town synonymous with the opioid epidemic, the only evidence we’d found of its abuse was in the victims. It was true that many dealers abstained from use, but we were looking at a number of people, and it would have been difficult to regulate all of them if we’d uncovered some sort of drug dealing operation. Besides, I couldn’t picture these retirees or Cody Allard dealing heroin. Allard was a creep, definitely, but a drug kingpin? Hardly.