Silenced Girls

by Roger Stelljes

  So, who would fit a profile that the two women would trust?

  “That’s what we need to work on,” Tori panted out loud as she jogged over the pedestrian bridge stretching over the width of the H-4, the hotel in sight.

  Ten feet out from his dock Braddock floated in the warm waters of Steamboat Lake, eyes closed, his breathing light, the tranquility calming. Tall and lanky, he’d played basketball through high school and had opportunities to play regularly at the division two and three level of college. But dreams of division one basketball danced in his head. He’d walked-on at Long Island University in Brooklyn, twenty minutes from home, believing he could work his way to consistent playing time.

  Division one basketball was a massive time commitment, even for a walk-on. You were up at six a.m. for lifting and conditioning. There were long grueling practices. You ran all the laps and then were required to attend all film sessions and go to every study hall. All of which left little time for the actual fun of being in college. After two years he’d experienced many long bus rides and played a grand total of ninety-two minutes for a middle of the road team with little chance of the making the Big Dance and getting its one shining moment. He loved basketball, but on a cost benefit basis the time commitment just wasn’t worth it. After his sophomore year he hung up his high tops. He needed a new athletic release.

  Two non-basketball playing friends introduced him to the swimming pool. It was a great full-body workout that kept him lean and the beer belly at bay. Even after he became a cop, he managed to find the pool two to three times per week to supplement his other workouts. Now that he lived on a lake, for at least five to six months of the year he was able to get in a good swimming workout daily if he wanted.

  As he lay in the water looking up at the wispy clouds he thought about the case and an issue that was nagging at him. He was struck in interviewing Tori’s friends how they all said, down to a person, that the night Jessie disappeared was just a normal night. Lash’s friends said the same thing. The nights were normal, just like any other.

  That meant something.

  As that issue teased him, he heard his phone start to ring. He rolled over and swam to the dock, climbed the ladder and found his phone on the bench under his towel. It was Cal.

  “Katy Anderson’s mother just called. Katy has gone missing.”

  “What?” Braddock replied, gobsmacked. “Is she lost in the house?”

  “No. Katy’s gone and so is the car, a ten-year old aqua blue Toyota Camry. You better get over there.”

  Twenty minutes later, Braddock pulled up to the Anderson house. He’d not yet called Tori, wanting to get a feel for the situation first.

  Gail Anderson explained that usually in the morning when she woke up and made herself coffee and started making breakfast, Katy would get up and join. However, when Katy didn’t stir Gail went to her daughter’s room and found her bed empty. Then she looked out to the garage and saw that the Camry was gone.

  “I left yesterday with the impression that your daughter never left the house unless it was with you.”

  “That’s mostly true.”

  “Mostly?”

  “Yeah, it is, but every so often she would go for a drive in the middle of the night.”

  “I see.”

  “And then last night Tori came back out here.”

  “Tori was here?”

  “Yes, she came back out to talk to Katy. She stayed, it must have been for three hours. The two of them talked about going on a trip in six months. Tori was going to take her somewhere warm this winter. So, I don’t know if that motivated her to take one of those late-night trips or what, but she’s…gone. She’s never been gone this long.”

  “Does she have a cell phone?”

  “Yes.”

  “Did she take it with her?”

  “I think so.”

  “I assume you tried to call?”

  “Yes. I’ve tried again and again. No answer.”

  Braddock took down the details on the Camry, of Katy’s cell phone and told Ms. Anderson to stick by her phone. He called in to Lund to put out a bulletin for the car and Katy Anderson.

  Then he went to find Tori.

  Tori turned left from the main running path. She ran along the east side of the hotel, turned the corner, stopped and then walked toward the front entrance when she noticed Braddock parked under the canopy waiting for her. He was early.

  “I’ve been thinking about the case. I think we should be looking at this another way. Who is our guy?” Tori said as she approached him. “What characteristics does he have?”

  “Tori…”

  “What’s his profile?”

  “Tor…”

  “How is it Jessie and Genevieve would know or trust him?”

  “Tori, hang on,” Braddock replied, holding up his hand. “That all sounds good. But we have another more immediate problem.”

  “What’s that?”

  “Care to tell me what you did last night?” Braddock asked, a hint of accusation in his tone.

  “What does that mean?”

  “About going out to see Katy again.”

  “I went out to see an old friend.”

  “Why?”

  “Because I was trying to understand what happened to her, how she ended up a recluse. I was trying to help her maybe not be a recluse.”

  “Well, whatever you said must have worked,” Braddock replied. “Because she and the car are gone, and nobody knows where she is.”

  Tori’s shoulders slumped as she croaked out a guttural, “Oh God.”

  CHAPTER 12

  “BUT HOW DOES SHE GO FROM BEING HERE TO BEING GONE?”

  How do you search for someone who almost never left home?

  Braddock and Tori went back out to the Anderson house and put Gail Anderson through the paces. Why in the middle of the night did someone who almost never left the house sneak out with the car? How often did she go for these late-night drives? Did she ever leave for days at a time? Was there anyone she regularly talked to? Was there a secret life that Katy led that Gail didn’t know about? Was Katy the recluse just an act?

  Gail Anderson said no but…“But then again, I don’t know what she might have been doing online.”

  Braddock called for a crime scene investigator to go through Katy’s computer. The investigator found little.

  “Will, her computer is really old and she’s no latent computer genius. Her email is filled mostly with spam and I don’t think she’d ever downloaded virus protection. Emails from people of any recent vintage, which I’d define as the last three to four years, are limited to those for the remote data entry work she was completing for a couple of different companies.”

  “What about Internet history?” Tori asked.

  “Katy Anderson liked to shop online, although she didn’t buy much, which is reflective of her meager assets. Her reading interests appear to be entertainment, pop culture and baseball related. She read pretty much anything about the Twins. She binged watched a lot of television shows, working her way through the Netflix library and for what it’s worth, liked watching and re-watching ‘Breaking Bad’ and ‘The West Wing’. But contact with others?” The tech shook her head. “I see no evidence of that. She didn’t have a Facebook page. She wasn’t on Twitter or Snapchat. I see no entry into chat rooms, either on her computer or her cell phone, both of which are older models.”

  “In other words, her computer and cell history fit with that of someone who was a recluse,” Braddock remarked dejectedly.

  “Correct. She read about, and I think was interested in the outside world, but she had little actual engagement with it.”

  Braddock and Tori walked down the front steps and out to his Tahoe. He took one look at her, the anxious twitchy mannerisms, the demoralized eyes and he sensed Tori was teetering on the edge.

  He stepped away from her, created some space for himself and called in to Cal. There had been no sightings or even signs of Katy Anderson or th
e missing aqua blue Camry. Bulletins were issued throughout the state and all nearby jurisdictions were on alert and on the lookout.

  “Did she just run off?” Cal asked. “Was Tori being back and all that is going on, the memories, too much for Katy? Did she just run away from it all? It wouldn’t surprise anyone if she did.”

  “I don’t know,” Braddock replied quietly, feeling suddenly defeated in his own right. “Let’s test that theory. Check with the bus company, see if maybe she jumped on one to get out of town. I suppose airlines, too. Now,” he shook his head and sighed, “Cal, that just doesn’t compute with what Tori and Gail Anderson have told me about Katy’s mood last night but…who knows.”

  “I’ll see to it.”

  Braddock hung up and turned to find a pensive Tori eyeing him. He shook his head as he strolled back over to her.

  “Where do we even start?” Tori muttered, almost panicked. “Tell me, where do we even start looking for her?”

  Braddock simply shook his head. “I don’t know.”

  For the second time in a week he was staring at a woman’s disappearance and this time he had even less to go on. “What the hell is going on around here?”

  Sleep wouldn’t come. After a kill he always slept. The exhilaration, the expended energy of it, the sexual release always leading to a long, exhausted, restful sleep.

  Not this time.

  Every time he seemed to be drifting off, Katy Anderson popped back into his mind.

  He tried reading but couldn’t focus on the words in the book or on the stack of papers for work. Three stiff drinks failed to take the edge off. A long late-night walk did nothing to ease his whirring mind. The memory of Katy Anderson, the thought of her kept coming back over and over again.

  He had no choice. She came out of nowhere.

  Katy Anderson was not the type he pursued. Katy was benign, someone he would have hardly given a second thought to if he saw her on the street, heck, if she was ever seen on the street. She was the single last person he’d have ever expected to see anywhere, let alone fifty feet away in the middle of the night while digging a hole. Yet there she was on the edge of the ridge, staring right up at him as he was throwing a shovelful of dirt, Genevieve Lash’s plastic-wrapped body lying to the side.

  Letting Katy Anderson go was not an option.

  After he hit her in the head the third time with the shovel her body stopped moving, other than the light twitchy spasms as the last bit of life drained from her.

  He picked her body up, heaved her over his shoulder and hauled her back up the hill and dropped her next to the hole he’d been digging for Lash. Then he thought, how did she get there in the first place?

  He made his way back down to the edge of the crevice and tree line. He saw her car down on the county road. The lights were on, it was still running. He couldn’t leave it there.

  Taking the risk, he ran down to the road. The car was unlocked. He jumped inside, threw it into gear and drove the car away, circling back, not passing any other vehicles in the process, a bit of luck in a moment he’d felt far from fortunate. Back at the hole he put Lash’s wrapped body into it and refilled it, sweating profusely as he frantically shoveled the dirt. By the time the hole was refilled it was three-forty a.m.

  Given all that had happened recently, the search for Anderson and her car would be intense. He needed to dispose of the body and the car.

  He drove back to his house and retrieved his mountain bike and suitable riding clothes. Then he drove back to the gravesite. After he rolled the body up in plastic and stuffed it in the trunk of the Camry, he slid the mountain bike into the back seat. He drove an hour north to an isolated piece of property east of Leech Lake, driving it back in on a tight narrow road to the end of a narrow path back deep in the woods. At this time of year, the car wouldn’t be visible from the air. The car could only be found if someone drove all the way back in along the road and to the car, it was tucked back in so deep. It would be safe for now.

  He used his mountain bike to pedal the fifty-six-mile trek back down to Manchester, cycling into town in time just after the morning rush. He arrived at work an hour later than normal. Nobody was the wiser.

  Tori hadn’t been able to bring herself to take her morning run. Just showering and then dressing for the day was proving to be a chore as she lay on her bed, staring at the ceiling wrapped in her wet towel.

  Her cell phone buzzed. It was Braddock. “I’m on my way in now. Get over to the government center. We might have a break.”

  “Did we find Katy? Her car? What?”

  “It’s nothing that good, but it might be a start.”

  A local man and his girlfriend came forward. They saw Katy Anderson around 1:00 a.m., a few hours after Tori left her house. She was seen along the side of the road on County Road 48, just a few miles north of town.

  “That’s the general location of where Jessie Hunter’s car was found,” Braddock remarked.

  “That’s the place,” the man name Doug answered. “That’s where she was, right by the white cross.”

  “And what was she doing?”

  “I don’t know. She was walking back up from the ditch where the cross is, so I can only assume she was paying her respects.”

  “And you didn’t stop and see if she needed help or if she was okay?” Tori asked, dumbfounded. “A woman alone on the side of the road in the middle of the night and you just keep…driving along?”

  “Hey, hold on,” he replied defensively. “We slowed down. We wondered if she was in trouble. But her car was running. I saw the exhaust from the tailpipe, the lights were on, she gave us a little friendly wave, a thumbs up and yelled ’I’m okay’ as we slowed down. She was not in any distress.”

  “And she’s kind of crazy,” the other witness named Donna stated defensively.

  “So?” Tori replied angrily, “You don’t stop, roll down the window, and check on someone, a woman who is a vulnerable person?” She jumped out of her chair. “My God, what’s the matter with you?”

  Doug and Donna’s eyes went wide, startled, leaning back from Tori in shock.

  Braddock looked up and reached lightly for Tori’s left arm. He tilted his head for her to leave the interview room, which after a moment she let out a sigh and reluctantly did.

  “Geez, what’s her problem?” Donna griped.

  Braddock snapped his gaze back to the woman. “Agent Hunter’s problem is that twenty years ago her sister was abducted at that spot on that road.”

  “You mean she’s…” Doug started.

  “Yeah,” Braddock replied curtly. “Add to that a vulnerable woman who is also her good friend was left alone out on that road in the middle of the night and you didn’t even stop to speak to her—did you?” Braddock growled, his voice also rising before he caught himself, stopping for a moment to compose himself. “I think all Agent Hunter was asking of her fellow man was you could have made sure her friend got into her car and that she was able to pull away? Particularly given the history of that location. Especially given that Genevieve Lash disappeared from a dark country road just like that less than a week ago. Right now, people need to be looking out for each other and…you two could have done more here.”

  The two of them sat in their chairs, navel gazing, fully chastised. “You’re right, we should have,” Doug whispered quietly after a minute, “But, Detective, it was shocking to see her out. It took me a few seconds to recognize that it was her. You know, Crazy Katy.”

  “How do you even know her?”

  “I was three years behind her in school. Donna, too. So, we don’t know her, but we know of her, kind of like all the locals around here because…”

  “She’s Crazy Katy.”

  “Yeah. I thought it was weird she was out at that time of night. But, Detective, I know you’re looking at me, at us, like we’re these awful people, but I swear to you she seemed totally okay.”

  “And you didn’t see anyone else there?” Braddock asked.

/>   “No,” Doug and Donna replied in unison, shaking their heads. “She was alone.”

  Braddock excused Doug and Donna and as he watched them walk down the hall he looked to Steak and murmured, “Look into them.”

  “Will, they came forward voluntarily,” Steak replied.

  “I know, but a day later. Did they need twenty-four hours to get their story straight?” He shook his head, “We can’t afford to overlook anything. See if there is any reason to question their honesty.”

  Will walked back into his office to find Tori looking out the window with a vacant stare. “Sorry.”

  “I understand how you feel. I’m getting really tired of searching for missing women,” Braddock remarked with an exhale. “But if you can’t keep your shit together, you can’t work it.”

  Tori simply nodded.

  “Let’s go.”

  “Where?” Tori asked.

  “Back out to Country Road 48.”

  They met a forensic team at the cross, but after four hours of poking around the crime scene investigators found no evidence of anything having happened there.

  “It’s been at least thirty hours, Will,” the lead crime scene investigator stated. “And we had a lengthy thunderstorm roll through last night. Even if there was something here, that storm washed it away.”

  “She was seen here,” Braddock muttered, “but that’s it.”

  “She was visiting the cross,” Tori speculated. “But how does she go from being here to being gone?”

  Hunter and Braddock walked around the area of the cross and the shoulder of the road again. Interestingly, they weren’t examining the area of the road where he’d found Katy’s car, which was another two-hundred yards to the east. He dropped the binoculars from his eyes, hiding back in the trees twenty feet.

  How did they even know to search this area? He’d seen nobody when he drove the car away. Perhaps it related to why Katy Anderson had climbed the crevice in the first place.