Ally. Mac. Jake.
Best friend. Boyfriend. Third wheel.
They’d claimed to be asleep, passed out. There was no way to corroborate their accounts … but I could check their whereabouts the night of the gala, on the possibility that not only were the Chesney and Starbuck homicides related but that their killers were one and the same. Mac had claimed to have to work that night. What had Jake and Ally been up to?
Though what if they hadn’t been alone at the lake that night? What if someone was there, someone who watched them, maybe someone who was fatally obsessed with Chesney … or someone with a reason to kill off museum employees.
Kent Starbuck.
Larry Bornstein.
Damn. I’d planned on digging into Larry Bornstein’s background today. It was one more thing that had been pushed to the back burner. In light of today’s discovery, it was something that needed to happen sooner rather than later.
I had wondered earlier if he could have killed Starbuck to gain her job. At the time, it seemed outrageous, and yet once again, I reminded myself that I’d been involved in cases where the motive was far weaker.
Now both of his co-workers were dead. Was he a potential suspect? Or the next victim?
I tried to hold on to that thought, to think through how it could have happened, but the wine was already doing what I needed it to do and a slow-building warmth dimmed the horrors of the day. A creak on the staircase, then Brody was at my side. He sat next to me and rubbed the back of my neck. He smelled of soap and mint toothpaste, and I leaned into his side, closing my eyes against the soft flannel of his pajamas.
“It’s late.” His hand dropped from my neck to my shoulder, massaging deeper into my tense muscles. “I saw the news. They said the body of a woman was found at Lost Lake. They’re saying it was murder. Are you on the case?”
I nodded. “Yes. She was originally a missing person. Now she might be a murder victim. I’m afraid I missed something, Brody. I was there, at the lake, hours after she disappeared. I looked her boyfriend, her friends, straight in the eyes and swore she would turn up. And she did, only she’s dead. She’s dead.”
“Honey, you work harder than anyone I’ve ever met. But you’re only human. You need to rest.” Brody gently took the nearly empty glass of wine from my hand and set it on the coffee table. “Come to bed.”
“No. I can’t sleep just yet. I need to … think.”
“The dead will wait, Gemma,” Brody said. In the dark, it was hard to see his features, but his voice was troubled. “I’m worried. This isn’t like you.”
“What, the drinking or the sadness? Neither is serious. Just a … phase that will pass.” Standing up, I took the glass and finished the last swallow. “I’m going to take a bath.”
Brody grabbed my hand. I tried to pull away, but he held on tight. “Sweetheart, what if this is more than a phase?”
I was too tired to argue so I simply said the truth, and saying it out loud, for the first time, released the last bit of tension in my body. The words were all that I had left to give, and when I was done speaking, I turned away and moved to the stairs, my eyes full of tears, my heart full of sorrow.
“Sometimes it just gets to be too much, Brody. You said the dead will wait … but the dead … they’re in my mind, constantly. Every case I’ve worked, every victim … It doesn’t go away. It never goes away.”
He dropped my hand and, in the dark, I heard his breath catch. “I wish I could share this burden with you, Gemma. I wish it more than anything in the world.”
In the bathroom, I kept the lights off, afraid to look at myself in the mirror. As the tub filled, I sat on the edge and cried. I was so tired by that point that I didn’t know who I was weeping for, the dead or myself.
Finally, I eased in to the bath. The water was just shy of scalding, and I let the heat wash over me as the wine had, loosening muscles, easing joints, dimming the edges of the long, sad day until my mind was an empty well, devoid of thought and feeling.
Chapter Twenty-four
Valley Mountain Search and Rescue operated out of a pair of hangars at the municipal airport on the south side of town. On my way there, I called the hospital and spoke with a supervisor in the nursing department. She confirmed that Mac Stephens had worked an overnight shift the evening of the gala. Then I called Jake Stephens. He picked up on the tenth ring, sounding both angry at the early morning call and extremely hungover.
When I asked him my question, though, he calmed down and grew quiet. After a moment of thought, he said, “I was home Saturday night. I’m living with another cousin, Nicole, until I can afford my own apartment. We went to a party at her friend’s house and then came back here. We played some pool and watched a movie. You want her phone number? She’s already left for the day.”
“Sure, thank you.” I jotted down the number and ended the call with Jake. Then I called Nicole, who didn’t answer, and left a message.
Though I was nearly to the VMSR hangars, I parked outside a bagel shop and went in. I ordered a box of coffee and a bag of bagels with an extra couple containers of cream cheese. While I waited for my order, I stepped to the side and called Ally Chang.
Unlike Jake, she sounded alert, wired. “I stayed at my parents’ house last night. I didn’t want to be alone. But they don’t want to talk about all this. My mom said it’s too sad. She said I should see a grief counselor.”
“That’s probably a good idea. Hang on a second.” I took the bag of bagels and the coffee from the store clerk and set them down on a table in the back of the shop, away from the other customers, where I could continue my conversation. “Ally, I’m collecting as much information as I can in this case. Obviously, we believe there’s a connection to Betty Starbuck’s murder. What did you do Saturday, after you left the police station? Did you go home? Were you with anyone that night?”
Ally was sharp. “Oh my god, you think I killed Sari and her boss?” She started breathing hard and fast. “I’m going to be sick.”
“Ally, please, take a deep breath for me. I need you to calm down.” I waited while, on the other end of the line, Ally breathed in and out. After a few minutes, she came back to the phone and sounded, if not calm, at least not panicked.
“I went to the grocery store and then I went home. Alone. I spent that whole night looking through old scrapbooks, pulling photographs of Sari, putting together a missing person poster on my laptop. I wanted to be ready in case you asked for something like that, in case she didn’t come home and you needed more to find her.”
“Did you talk to anyone, see anyone? A neighbor, a boyfriend?”
Ally started crying softly. “No. The apartment next to me has been empty for months. I don’t have a boyfriend. And now I don’t have a best friend.”
“I’m so sorry for your loss. I truly am. I’m going to find Sari’s killer, Ally. I swear it.”
We ended the call and as I hauled the bagels and coffee out to my car, I couldn’t help but wonder if I’d just made yet another empty promise.
* * *
Inside the hangar, I found Finn pacing in a small kitchenette.
“You look like hell,” he said. His dark hair was tucked under a Red Sox ball cap and his eyes were bloodshot. It seemed I wasn’t the only one who’d spent some time the previous night with a drink or two.
“Yeah? Screw you. You want plain or sesame seed?” I dumped the bagels on a paper plate. A couple of VMSR staffers joined us and helped themselves to the spread. They were subdued, with a few questions about the death but not many.
They understood all too well what it meant to recover a body.
“Seriously, you don’t look good. Are you getting sick? I’ve got a weekend fishing trip out to Florida in two weeks.” Finn said. “I don’t watch to catch whatever you’ve got.”
“No, I’m not sick. What’s the story? Are we going to stand around all day kvetching?”
“We’re waiting on a few more of our guys.” He poured a cup of
coffee from the box and tore open a few packs of sugar, adding them and then stirring.
He stirred for a long time, and the sound of the red plastic straw scraping the edges of the cup made me want to scream.
Deep breaths.
“I spent some time this morning checking alibis for Saturday night for Mac Stephens, Jake Stephens, and Ally Chang. Mac worked a shift at the hospital. Jake was with his cousin, Nicole. I’m waiting on a call back from her to confirm this. And Ally was home alone.”
Finn raised an eyebrow. “Can anyone verify that?
“No. Ally was upset, panicked that I even asked. Finn, she’s petite but she looks strong, fit. If she incapacitated Betty Starbuck with a blow to the head, she’d have easily been able to then choke her to death.”
“What’s her motive for the killings?”
It was the same question that was bothering me. “I have no idea.”
Twenty minutes later, we were in the air and I looked out over the scenery. The flight would be short, and it wasn’t my first time in a chopper, but the experience never gets old. From this altitude, Cedar Valley looked like a dream. In the east, vast tracts of farmland stretched in neat squares, a green-and-brown checkerboard. To the north, the Rockies stretched for miles under towering cumulous clouds.
Finn leaned over and gestured to the clouds. “Thunderstorms,” he mouthed. I nodded in reply and turned back to the window. Thousands of feet below me, the Arkansas River sparkled as shimmery and shiny as a dancer’s satin ribbon. The water—brilliantly, impossibly blue—ran down from the mountains and then moved south and southeast, headed toward Kansas.
For the briefest of moments, the entire valley was laid out, one long, winding clear swatch in the middle of an otherwise immense and dense forest. As we started our descent, I wondered what it would be like to lose myself in those woods, just for a day or two.
I’d told Brody the previous night that the dead were in my mind constantly, that they never went away. Though a part of me longed to lose them, a larger part knew I needed them. It was their faces, their stories, that kept me moving forward in search of justice.
We landed in the meadow near the campsite and climbed out of the chopper. Charlie Darcy, the fire lieutenant and VMSR volunteer, met us. He said it had been a quiet night at the lake. In the morning light, I couldn’t help noticing how fresh and energized he looked. He was a tall, lean man with a charming smile and a wicked scar that traveled in a straight line down his cheek.
He offered us coffee from a pot he’d set up over a low fire in the campground grill, and both Finn and I declined. The other guys in our group accepted, and we spent another few minutes standing around the campsite, murmuring to one another. Darcy and I discovered that we’d graduated from the same local high school, only three years apart, and we fell into an easy conversation.
After a few minutes, Finn interrupted. “Sorry to break up the party, but we should get a move on.”
“Absolutely. My chief talked to your chief, and they gave me the green light to stay and help you canvas the area,” Darcy said. He pulled off the navy blue wool sweater he wore and replaced it with a lightweight red sweatshirt. “I’m all yours, so just tell me what to do.”
I started to speak, but Finn cut me off. “You ever work a crime scene before?”
Darcy shrugged. “Sure. EMS is often first on the scene. Have I collected evidence? No, but I know not to step in anything that has the faintest whiff of importance. That good enough for you?”
“Yes, and we’re grateful for the help,” I said before Finn could respond. The last thing I wanted to deal with was a pissing contest between my partner and a fire lieutenant. “Charlie, why don’t you pair up with the techs. The three of you should go over the campsite. Finn and I will walk the perimeter of the lake. I want to see what’s on the other side of the water.”
Once again, Finn and I pulled on day packs heavy with water bottles, emergency supplies, and evidence kits. We headed north, moving slowly, not sure what—if anything—we were looking for. Finn traveled to the side, through the woods, while I stayed on the trail. As far as I could tell, no one had yet taken this particular trail past the campsite this season. The ground was slushy with melting snow and mud, and though I could hear Finn, somewhere up ahead, breaking through bush, I couldn’t see him.
I saw evidence of bear activity—scat, prints—as well as the distinctive track of a mountain lion. This remote terrain was their territory, and I kept that in mind as I walked, one ear tuned to Finn’s movements, the other to the sounds around me. I’d seen a mountain lion just once before, driving home late one night. It was in the canyon, half a mile from my house, and my bright headlights spooked it. The cat had frozen in the middle of the road, then slowly turned away and sauntered down to the creek. It took me ten minutes to exit my car when I reached my driveway; once out, I’d never moved so fast to the front door.
Forty minutes later, we reached the far side of the lake. I stood a moment, under the sentinels of blue spruce trees, breathing heavily, and looked back across the water. I squinted in the general direction of where I thought the campsite was, but all I could see was a seemingly endless horizon of trees.
I dumped my pack and wiped at the sweat on the back of my neck.
Finn, cool as a cucumber with barely a sheen to his forehead, crouched near the base of a spruce that was easily forty feet tall. He brushed dirt and twigs away from an area on the ground.
“Someone’s been here. Recently.”
I knelt beside him. “How can you tell?”
He pointed out a vaguely rectangular indentation on the ground. “This area, it’s from a sleeping pad. It rained last week. This would have been washed away.”
I searched the area and found more evidence of what seemed to be a permanent campsite. A thick silver cable was strung between two trees, with carabiners and a pulley system in place. It was rigged for easy hanging of food bags and trash. Near the sleeping area, a pile of rocks with a metal grate on top of it showed grilling activity.
“Someone’s staying here on a regular basis,” Finn said.
I told him I thought I’d seen someone … or something … the first day I was called to Lost Lake. “It was the strangest thing. It was like a flash or glint of light, but that’s impossible at this distance. Maybe it was the sun reflecting off the surface of the water.”
Finn walked the perimeter of the makeshift campground. “Or maybe someone was here. Give me your binoculars, would you?”
I pulled them from my pack and handed them to him. He stared through them, across the lake, for a solid minute, then wordlessly handed them to me.
“Take a look.”
I lifted them, looked in the same direction he did, and gasped. “That’s incredible. The view from this spot is dead straight across to the campground. If someone was here, watching Chesney and her friends that night, he’d have seen everything.”
“The worst part is they’d have had no idea they were under observation.”
I shivered.
Finn picked up my backpack and handed it to me. “Let’s get back to the others. I think when we return to the station we should draft a press release. We can keep it deliberately vague. We’ll ask for the public’s help, request that anyone who may have seen anything at Lost Lake in the last few weeks come forward.”
I nodded and headed back down the trail. This time, Finn walked with me, and I pointed out the mountain lion and bear tracks to him. In light of what we’d found, in light of the fact that someone might have been watching Chesney and her friends, the animal prints were suddenly a lot less frightening.
We talked as we walked. I reminded him that we needed to delve deeper into Larry Bornstein’s background and learn as much as we could about the Rayburn Diary. If it, and not the museum, was the link between the murders, then we needed to understand everything about it. Finn liked Bornstein for a suspect, but agreed that the motive of killing someone to obtain her job was a stretch. Sti
ll, he, too, had seen people murdered for far less, and we both adhered to Chief Chavez’s fourth truth of being a cop: If you can imagine it, someone’s already done it.
Back at the campsite, we joined up with Charlie Darcy and our guys. They’d been unable to find anything of importance but had dutifully collected samples of soil, lake water, ashes from the campsite, even pinecones and fallen leaves. They’d photographed everything and anything that seemed relevant.
Cold, sweaty, and glum, we piled in the VMSR helicopter and flew back to town, the whir of the bird’s blades and the occasional radio chatter between the pilot and air traffic control the only noises.
Chapter Twenty-five
Once we were back on the ground, I phoned the museum and asked Larry Bornstein to join me at the station for a conversation. He was nervous on the phone, in shock about Sari Chesney’s death. But he agreed to come by in an hour. I took that time to shower and change into fresh clothes in the locker room.
Bornstein arrived, and Finn and I escorted him to an interview room. Bornstein wore another sweater vest, navy blue this time, over a white long-sleeved button-down shirt and a pair of dark slacks. A maroon bow tie hung askew at his neck.
In his hand was the ubiquitous small bottle of hand sanitizer.
“Thank you for coming in, Dr. Bornstein,” I began. “The death of Sari Chesney, coming so soon on the heels of Betty Starbuck’s murder, is beyond shocking.”
Bornstein nodded. “I just can’t believe it. I worked with them for years. To think that they both are dead—not just dead, but possibly murdered—is unfathomable. I don’t understand why anyone would kill them.”
“That’s exactly what we’re trying to ascertain. Obviously, since both Sari and Betty worked at the museum, our first assumption is that their deaths are related,” Finn said. He turned to a fresh page in his yellow legal tablet and clicked open a pen. “Do you have any thoughts about that?”
Bornstein paled as he realized the implications of Finn’s question. “My god … Am I in danger?”
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