Braddock readily accepted, sitting down and opening the wrapper for the sandwich. “I heard you got re-acquainted with some old friends last night.”
“How do you…”
“Don’t let the growth around here fool you. Manchester still behaves very much like the small town you grew up in. News travels fast, very fast.”
“I guess,” Tori replied. “Steak told you?”
“He might have sent a text, along with a photo or two.”
Tori changed topics as she opened a file folder containing original photos of Jessie’s car from twenty years ago. She further glanced around the office, the stacks of folders and papers from the case spread out. “You’ve been busy.”
Braddock nodded, finishing a sip of his coffee. “Just absorbing this file so I can attempt to converse on it at your level.”
Tori nodded, looking through another file that contained witness statements. There was her own statement and those of many of her friends, some of whom were at the bar last night. As Braddock crumpled up the wrapper for his sandwich and tossed it into the garbage can Tori asked, “What’s the plan?”
“Steak and Eggs are going to stay on the Lash angles,” he answered, wiping the edge of his mouth with a napkin. “They’re digging into her and her family’s background further and going over to Lash Construction to look through records there as well. If they get names of interest, they’ll investigate those and cross check them against the master list from your sister’s case.” Braddock held up a document stapled in the upper left-hand corner, “This is everyone’s name who came up twenty years ago. I imagine you recall every name on the list. We’ll see if they appear anywhere in the Lash investigation,” he answered.
“We probably need a database to cross reference this.”
Braddock nodded. “That’s in process,” he replied as he reached for his light gray and navy-blue patterned sport coat from behind his office door.
“And you and I?”
“We are going to re-investigate your sister’s case through the lens of Genevieve Lash. Let’s go.”
Braddock’s first stop was to take Tori to where Lash’s car was found abandoned along County Road 163. Braddock pulled to a stop and turned on his hazard lights.
The morning was coolly humid with a thick blanket of fog hovering over the wetlands to the north and south of the thin stretch of county road. The fog would burn away as soon as the sun got above the tree line. Tori took it all in and found the eerie quiet a little unnerving.
Braddock handed Tori a red folder that contained investigative notes and photos of Lash’s BMW convertible. “Her car was parked thirty feet ahead, on what there is of the right shoulder and was leaning to the right into the tall grass because of the blown tire.”
Tori nodded and opened the folder which contained photos, Braddock’s handwritten investigative notes and the forensic report on Lash’s car. She started walking away from the Tahoe, flipping through the photos.
Having been over the scene multiple times himself, Braddock leaned against the front grill of the Tahoe and sipped his coffee. He wanted to give Tori the chance to walk the scene and make her own impression.
Tori slowly strolled along the pavement, her eyes darting between the road, the shoulder and the photos. As she read through the notes, one item caught her attention. Lash’s car was found locked.
“How’d you open up the car?”
“Her parents had an extra key fob.”
Interior photos of the car revealed no phone, purse or any other personal belongings beyond an empty water bottle in the cupholder and a phone charging cord. The glove box contained the car’s manual and a flashlight.
Tori walked the area slowly, taking in the surroundings, gazing in every direction before scanning back through Braddock’s investigative notes and then flipping to the forensic report. She was particularly interested in the evaluation of and conclusions for the flat tire. There was a one-inch penetrating wound on the inside of the right front tire two inches from the rim. Based on the size of the puncture wound, the report made a certain number of assumptions followed by conclusions based on the assumed facts.
The first assumption was that considering the condition of the three other tires, their age and their proper level of inflation, the right front tire was properly inflated to begin with. Second, it was assumed that the tire would have been tampered with sometime on the night of the Fourth of July. Based on information provided by Tessie Joyner, Lash picked her up at seven p.m. and they drove into Manchester for the downtown Fourth of July carnival. They parked on a city side street. They remained in Manchester until nine-thirty p.m. when they then drove two miles to Mannion’s on the Lake. They remained at Mannion’s until approximately the one a.m. closing time.
Given the above parameters, the actual size of the puncture wound, the distance driven after having left Mannion’s, considering the likely speeds driven and general road conditions and calculating the rate that air would have escaped the tire prior to as well as while driven, it was the forensic conclusion that the tire was tampered with while parked at Mannion’s. It was further determined that given the puncture size and the distance driven, that the tire would have started to deflate rapidly once Genevieve Lash started driving and stressing the tire, leading to the blowout, particularly given the many sharp turns, some nearly ninety degrees, found on County Road 163.
“It was only a matter of time before it blew,” Tori muttered to herself. The report did note that the low tire warning light was illuminated on her dashboard.
Tori flipped to Braddock’s investigative notes on Tessie Joyner. He specifically asked about the operation of the vehicle and the tires. Joyner did not recall Lash having said anything about her tire going flat. Joyner didn’t notice if the warning light was on or that Genevieve was having difficulty with her car. “She didn’t say a word and I didn’t notice any issues with the car.”
Joyner indicated that Mannion’s parking lot was packed and that Genevieve was forced to park her BMW in the last slot at the far end of the parking lot that backed up to a thick grouping of trees.
“I remember the parking lot at Mannion’s where she parked the car,” Tori remarked. “That’s a long way out.”
“Yes, it is,” Braddock answered. “It’s a poorly lit area. On the passenger side there are trees and a manicured four-foot high hedge framing the end of the lot. Our guy would have had easy access to puncture that tire and with the trees and hedge, nobody would have seen a thing unless they were standing right on top of him.”
Tori closed the folder and made a slow three-hundred sixty-degree turn, taking in the entirety of the area. “Could he have possibly found a better place for her tire to blow out? We’ve been out here a half-hour and only one vehicle has driven by.”
Braddock agreed. “This is about as desolate as you can get around here.”
“What do you think happened with her car?”
“The report says its likely her tire would have deflated rapidly before it blew. The tire was losing pressure and the warning light came on. Now, when I see that warning light appear, that tells me I need to put air in my tire relatively soon. Most people would see that warning light and think the same thing. They certainly wouldn’t think a blowout is imminent. I’m guessing Lash was like most people. She didn’t have far to go. She figured she could make it home and deal with it later.”
“But she didn’t.”
“No. Her tire was severely compromised, but she didn’t know that. I think she got on this road, it’s winding with lots of turns, some of them tight with rapid, albeit short elevation changes, some humps and bumps. All that turning puts added strain on a tire that’s rapidly losing inflation.” Braddock shook his head in disgust. “She almost made it home. Her parents’ house is only another couple of miles down the road.”
Tori nodded, having reopened the folder. “The tire blows. She has to pull over to the side.”
“No choice at that point.”
“What jumps out at me is she didn’t call anyone.” Tori opened the file and flipped some pages. “And she had a cell phone, a new one.”
Braddock nodded. That was on his mind as well. “So why not call?”
“Because…someone is Johnny on the spot to offer a ride. After all, he punctured the tire. He was following her and had a good idea of how long it would last. When it blew, there he was to help a damsel in distress.”
“Like you said, she doesn’t call anyone, so he wasn’t but a minute behind.”
Tori nodded. “At most. I mean, she didn’t use the flashlight in the glove box. She didn’t make a phone call. There’s no evidence that she tried to access the spare tire,” She looked to Braddock. “But isn’t she wary? I mean, I would be. All women should be.”
“Yes, they should, but then there was the x-factor, the weather,” Braddock replied, pointing to the file folder. “You saw the weather report. I’m thinking she was in this spot around one-thirty a.m. That’s right when the storm was rolling in here and it was a bad one, big wind and heavy rain. It produced a small tornado that touched down just east of Crosslake.”
“She needed to get to shelter.”
“That’s right. She has a flat tire, severe weather bearing down on her, so someone comes along and offers her a ride.”
“And she takes it.”
“And now she’s gone,” Braddock replied.
Tori folded her arms over her chest. “Did our guy really calculate that her tire would blow here, or at least along this road? Is he that…precise?”
She just voiced something he’d been troubled by for the past day. “If that’s the case, we really have our hands full.”
“That takes…some,” she shook her head, “serious planning and calculation.”
“Or he really knows tires.”
“Our killer doesn’t strike me as the National Tire and Battery kind of a guy.”
“No, he doesn’t,” Braddock answered before giving a follow motion with his arm, “but it does suggest to me that she was far from a random selection. He studied her thoroughly, knew her patterns, anticipated what she’d be doing on the Fourth, where she might be driving and was ready.”
“He stalked her.”
“Not so much that anyone noticed, but yeah, I think he did,” Braddock answered and then waved his arm again. “Let’s go.”
“Where?”
“You know where.”
As Braddock cruised south on the H-Four Tori rode quietly, inhaling long breaths through her nose, steeling herself. At the junction for County Road 48, Braddock turned right and drove southwest. He eased around a gentle right curve and then slowed to a stop just short of the spot where Jessie’s car was found abandoned twenty years ago. It wasn’t hard to identify the location. There was a sturdy four-foot high bright white cross pounded into the ditch just to the right of the shoulder. The horizontal arm of the cross simply read Jessie Hunter - 7/5/99.
Braddock killed the engine and glanced to his right. Tori silently stared straight ahead.
“How long has it been?” he quietly asked.
“March 7, 2001, the day I buried my father,” Tori replied softly. “Who placed the cross here?”
“I imagine one of the friends you ran into last night,” Braddock answered. “Cal says it’s been there for a long time but given its crisp white condition, I’d say someone clearly tends to it.”
Tori reached for the door handle and stepped down out of the Tahoe. Braddock did the same and then opened the rear passenger door and took out another file folder, then walked around to the front and handed it to Tori. “This is what I was in working on this morning,” he said. “I knew we were going to do this, so I put it together.” It was a summary folder of Jessie’s disappearance, containing photos, investigative notes from that time, mostly from Cal Lund, and other pertinent information.
Tori opened the file, quickly flipping through the contents. All this information was seared indelibly in her memory. Yet it was one thing to look at it in the privacy of her home, or to lay down on her bed or couch with her eyes closed to think about it. It was quite another thing to be in the very spot once again.
“Do you need a minute?” Braddock asked.
Tori shook her head. “No, walk it with me,” she answered, handing the file back to Braddock, who opened it and scanned the first page.
Jessie Hunter’s white Pontiac Grand Am was found by sheriff’s deputy Ed Gregerson at 4:21 a.m. on July 5th, 1999. Deputy Gregerson recognized the car as belonging to the sheriff’s daughters. He radioed it in and then a call was routed to Sheriff Hunter’s house. Jessie was not home and there had been no phone calls from his daughter about trouble with the car. Late night calls were made to Jessie’s friends’ homes, but she was nowhere to be found.
As for the right front tire, a one-inch slice-like puncture was found along the outside of the tire close to the edge of the rim. The crime scene investigators’ conclusion was that the tire had been intentionally tampered with that night, that the hole and air pressure loss was steady, eventually causing the tire to blow under the stress of being driven. It was likely that Jessie Hunter would have heard a loud pop and then the lower right front of the vehicle would have immediately dropped, forcing her swiftly to the side of the road.
“Both tires were tampered with,” Braddock stated, getting the discussion started.
“Yes,” Tori replied with a nod. “Jessie’s was on the outside of the tire, Lash’s on the inside, but a similar method nonetheless—one-inch slice in the tire.”
Tori stepped down into the ditch and crouched in front of the cross, bowing her head and then murmuring, “Hey, sis.”
After a moment, she opened her eyes and cleared away some debris and then stepped down hard on the dirt around the base, firming up the ground and slightly straightening the cross.
She stepped back up onto the road and took a good long look around. “Both locations are awfully isolated,” Tori noted, glancing around their location. “I’m kind of surprised that highway bypass for H-Four didn’t cut right through this area instead of going out so wide to the east.”
“That was the original plan,” Braddock answered. “However, politics being politics, Kyle Mannion and other local leaders argued that the bypass had to run farther to the east. There were two homes on the state historic register that could potentially be harmed and some anthropology professors from the college argued there were Native American burial grounds out here somewhere.”
“Are there?”
Braddock snorted. “Who knows? The objectors were mostly the college professors and the members of the Manchester Historical Society. They had surprising clout, though, and hired Jeff Warner as their lawyer. With Warner and, I suspect Kyle Mannion’s financial help, they had the financial resources to lobby for a change because a year after the H-4 bypass route was originally announced, a re-route was approved by the State Department of Transportation. And then, lo and behold, three months later Kyle Mannion announces he’s building his corporate campus where? Along the east side of the H-4 bypass re-route where, as luck would have it, he owned a prime one-hundred-acre plot of land.”
“A billionaire’s kind of luck.”
“Exactly.”
Tori shook her head, bemused. “Kyle was behind the re-route.”
“Yeah, he downplayed that, said he had nothing to do with it and claimed he was just fortunate that it worked out that way, but everybody knows otherwise. But hey, it’s Kyle Mannion. He owns the biggest employer in what is now a company town.”
“It’s the way of the world.”
“Indeed, it is. The bypass has been fully open for three summers now. It’s been fine.”
Tori walked over to Braddock. “Open the file for me. I want to see the photos again.”
“Okay.”
The two of them examined photos of the car, the flattened tire and the area around the car. The area itself was largely unchanged, other than now th
ere was an asphalt shoulder whereas twenty years prior there was gravel on the shoulder.
“You’ve walked both scenes now. Thoughts?” Braddock asked.
“No sign of a struggle at either location, but particularly at Jessie’s where you might have seen some in the gravel of the shoulder since the flat tire was on the right side. The only definite foot impressions are from Jessie and her size fives.”
“Not only that, but both cars were found locked. Keys gone, purses gone, lights turned off, no hazard lights flashing,” Braddock added.
Tori nodded. “Because they both locked the cars and were leaving them for later when they came back and picked them up because there was…”
“No struggle,” Braddock finished the thought as he leaned against the front right fender of his Tahoe, the folder opened on his hood. “What’s that tell you?”
“They both got into another car easily. They got in because…” Tori’s eyes flashed, “they knew their abductor. They knew him.”
“Not only that, they trusted him. Especially Lash. She’s just three miles from home with a cell phone, yet despite all that, she got into the car with him.”
“Did he have a gun on her?” Tori asked.
Braddock contemplated that idea for a moment before shaking his head. “What would Jessie have done if someone pulled a gun on her?”
“She’d have run like hell for the woods, made the guy chase her, take a shot at her. That’s what my dad told us to do. Run, yell, scream, and whatever you do, don’t…”
“Get in the car,” Braddock finished. “I’ve told my son the same thing. I don’t see any evidence of that taking place here. I think our first thought is right. They knew him. They trusted him.”
Tori nodded. “Yeah, I think you’re right.” She shook her head at the thought. “So why now? Why now, after all these years? Is it just that it’s the twentieth anniversary? Is that the reason to kill again, to bring me home because of some number on a calendar?”
Braddock shrugged. “I’ve been asking a similar question in a different way, which is why Genevieve Lash? What made her so special? She was selected. What made her worthy of all of this preparation and calculation?” He sighed. “Please don’t take offense to what I’m about to say, but your sister’s case always had the whiff of randomness to it. Some deranged guy on the Fourth of July slipped notice, punctured several tires and just so happened to get lucky with Jessie.”
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