by Rita Herron
“I’m sorry.” He laid the file he’d brought with him on the desk. “A few years ago, two girls went missing from Sunset Mesa. That same year, a bus carrying the local softball team crashed in Camden Crossing and took three girls’ lives. One survived, but two others—Peyton Boulder and my sister, Ruth—disappeared. We still don’t know what happened to them.”
“I read about the cases,” Sheriff Blair said. “I made it a point to familiarize myself with all the old files when I took office. Besides, I grew up around here and remembered the town’s devastation when the girls went missing.” She pulled a file from the drawer in the desk, opened it and placed it so he could read the contents.
“This is what I have so far on the missing girls from our area.”
“Avery Portland was fifteen, popular, a cheerleader. Parents dropped her off for a school dance. According to her boyfriend, she was acting funny all night, picked a fight and she went outside. He went after her, but she was gone.”
“Boyfriend’s story check out?”
Sheriff Blair shrugged. “He appeared to be devastated. His buddies all gave him an alibi, too.”
“How about girl two?”
“Melanie Hoit, sixteen. On the dance team at school. Disappeared from the mall in Amarillo where she was supposed to meet her girlfriends on a Saturday night. Security cameras turned up nothing. According to parents, everyone loved her.”
“Were either of the girls ever in trouble?”
She shook her head. “According to the families, no. Neither had any kind of arrest record. Both excelled in school. No problems with authority, although Avery’s father had abandoned the family eight months before, and her friends said she was angry and had been to see the counselor about the divorce.”
“Were she and Melanie friends?”
She nodded. “Since fifth grade.”
Like Ruth and Peyton, except they’d disappeared without a trace.
“No ransom calls. No phone calls from the girls.” Sheriff Blair rubbed her hand over her forehead. “No leads.”
Chaz spread the notes from the Camden case on the desk. “Sounds similar to our missing girls.”
“Except for the bus crash,” Sheriff Blair pointed out. “Avery and Melanie disappeared at different times.”
Chaz chewed the inside of his cheek. “True. One theory is that the kidnapper was obsessed with one of them. But when the crash occurred, he had to take both.”
Sheriff Blair narrowed her eyes. “But he left that other girl, Peyton’s sister.”
“Yes, Tawny-Lynn Boulder,” Chaz said, his chest clenching. “That’s true, but she had a broken leg and was unconscious.”
“So how did he make two girls go with him? Were there signs of a struggle?”
Chaz grimaced. “It was hard to sort out what happened.” He slid a photo of the crash site and tapped it. “There were skid marks from the bus and another vehicle, although the sheriff and crime team never tracked down the vehicle.”
“What about blood from a fight? If the girls struggled with the abductor, there might have been evidence.”
“The scene was a mess,” Chaz said. “Blood and glass were on the rocks, but the fire destroyed most evidence. And it rained that day so the rain washed away the rest.”
“I suppose if the kidnapper had a gun he could have forced the girls to go with him. But if Tawny-Lynn was injured, how did her sister and yours escape the bus unharmed?”
Chaz’s chest tightened. “They could have been hurt, which would have made it harder for them to fight back,” he said. “No one knows.”
“What about the girl who survived? It says in the file that she might have witnessed the abduction.”
Chaz nodded. “She sustained a head injury, had amnesia and can’t remember details of that day.”
Still, someone wanted her dead. Which confirmed in his mind that she had seen foul play.
Chaz removed three other photos and showed them to her. “These three young women have also gone missing during the past five years from various counties in Texas.”
“You think they’re connected?”
“I’m not sure, but maybe. The M.O. is the same. The victims are around the same age. All went missing in the spring, and vanished without a trace.”
“Spring?” Sheriff Blair scowled. “The time of year might be significant.”
Chaz nodded. What worried him most was that they had no leads. “If the same perpetrator kidnapped all these girls, that means another girl might go missing any day now.”
* * *
TAWNY-LYNN FROZE, her nerves sizzling with tension.
Barry Dothan had seemed harmless when she’d known him years ago. He was almost childlike in his speech patterns, and walked and behaved like an oversize kid. He’d gained weight and had a pudgy look about him now, his jowls were sagging, his dirty blond hair wiry and choppy as if he’d cut it himself.
But he was hiding and taking pictures of her. And the police had found pictures of Peyton and Ruth as well as other teenagers on the bulletin board in his room.
She shivered.
Was he going to add hers to that wall?
She slowly moved toward the woods, determined to talk to him. But panic flashed in his eyes when he saw her, and he started to run.
“Wait,” Tawny-Lynn called.
He planted one hand on a tree, his eyes darting in all directions. She glanced around for a car, then noticed a bicycle tucked against a copse of trees.
“Barry?”
“I...didn’t do anything wrong.”
Tawny-Lynn forced her expression to remain calm. “I just want to talk to you.”
“I didn’t do anything,” he mumbled again. “I just like to take pictures.”
“It’s all right,” she said. “But why are you here?”
He shook his head from side to side, back and forth in a frantic motion, his eyes widening in a crazed expression. “I didn’t do anything!”
Then he jumped on his bike and raced back through the woods, weaving and swaying as if she’d frightened him.
Her heart raced as she jumped in the truck and fired up the engine. Barry might have been obsessed with her sister or Ruth, but would he have hurt them?
Maybe he’d tried to help them that day, but one of them had fought him and things had gone ugly....
But Chaz was right. He didn’t have the intellect or enough emotional control to have hidden a body or kept quiet all these years.
Still, the way he protested so vehemently made her wonder if he knew something that he hadn’t told. Maybe he’d been here that day and seen something?
The truck chugged around the winding road, her mind trying to picture the blank face in her memory. Could it have been Barry who’d pulled her from the fire?
She turned down the drive to White Forks, angry that her mind refused to give her the answers she needed.
The answer everyone in town needed, especially the Camdens and the parents of the deceased girls.
She threw the truck into Park, retrieved two of the grocery bags and started toward the porch steps. But she froze at the bottom, her breath catching.
A dead animal, maybe a deer, had been slaughtered and left on the porch. A bloody trail was smeared on the steps.
And another message had been written in blood on the door.
Leave, or this will be you next.
Chapter Eight
Chaz had just left Sunset Mesa when his phone rang. His stomach knotted when he saw Tawny-Lynn’s number on the screen.
“Hello.”
“Chaz, I hate to bother you—”
“What’s wrong?”
“Someone left a slaughtered deer on my front porch with another message.”
Cha
z silently released a string of expletives. “Don’t touch anything and don’t go inside.”
“I haven’t. I’m sitting in the truck.”
“Good. I’ll be there as soon as I can.” He jogged outside, jumped in his squad car, flipped on the siren and sped away from Sunset Mesa, his phone glued to his ear. “Did you see anyone when you pulled up?”
“No,” Tawny-Lynn said.
“Has Jimmy been there to redo the locks?”
“Not yet. I’m expecting him any minute.”
“Okay, just keep your eyes peeled. If you see anyone, get out of there. Don’t try to confront them on your own.”
“Don’t worry. I don’t have a death wish,” she said.
But someone else had one for her. He turned onto the main highway leading back to Camden Crossing. “I just came from talking to the sheriff in Sunset Mesa about the two girls that went missing from there the year before Ruth and Peyton did.”
“Didn’t Sheriff Simmons already cover that?”
“Yeah, but it turns out the sheriff in Sunset Mesa was suffering from dementia. I thought fresh eyes might see something they missed back then.”
“Any luck?”
“No. But I’m not giving up.” A thick silence fell between them. “Tawny-Lynn, are you okay?”
“Yes,” she said, although she didn’t sound okay.
How could she be with threats being made against her? “Did something else happen?”
A weary sigh echoed back. “I stopped by the site of the bus crash.”
A heartbeat passed. He didn’t know what to say. Everyone had pushed her to remember, yet that day had been traumatic and painful for her. “And?”
“I remember someone slamming into the bus and us careening over the side of the ridge,” she said. “But I didn’t see who hit us. And...then I remember being unconscious and waking up and someone was pulling me from the wreckage. Smoke was billowing around me, and the heat...it was so hot and I was scared.”
Chaz’s heart was pounding, but he didn’t push. He simply waited to see if she would elaborate.
“But that’s it,” she whispered. “The face is...blank.”
He slowed as he rounded a curve, then passed the high school.
“Maybe you didn’t actually see the face,” he suggested.
“I...don’t know.” Her voice cracked. “I feel like I did, but there’s something in my way, blocking out the image.”
“You were injured,” Chaz said softly. It was about time someone cut her some slack.
Another tense minute passed, while he veered down the driveway to the ranch.
She cleared her throat. “There’s something else.”
He scrubbed a hand through his hair as the farmhouse slipped into view. “What?”
“Today when I was at the site. I felt like someone was watching me, and when I looked over my shoulder, Barry Dothan was there, hiding in the woods, taking pictures of me.”
Fear slammed into Chaz. “Did he hurt you?”
“No,” Tawny-Lynn said. “But it was spooky. I tried to talk to him, but he kept shouting that he hadn’t done anything wrong.”
“Did he say what he meant by that?”
“No. But why would he go back there if he wasn’t there when the accident happened?”
“Good question. I’ll have a talk with him and his mother. Maybe he did something to the girls accidentally. If not, maybe he knows something.”
Chaz raced up beside the truck and parked, then jumped out, his gun drawn. Tawny-Lynn opened the truck door and climbed down, her face pale.
He took one look at the bloody deer carcass and message on her porch and fury railed inside him.
“I have to do something to stop this,” she whispered.
“It’s not your fault,” Chaz said between gritted teeth.
Then he did what he’d wanted to do when he saw the very first message. He pulled her up against him and wrapped his arms around her.
* * *
TAWNY-LYNN LEANED into Chaz, her body trembling. Ever since that awful accident, she’d felt alone.
Persecuted, confused, terrified and guilt-ridden.
She’d learned to deal with it and to stand on her own, but for just a moment, she allowed herself the comfort of Chaz’s arms.
He stroked her back, rubbing slow circles between her shoulder blades. “You don’t deserve this, Tawny-Lynn, and I’m going to make sure whoever did this doesn’t hurt you.”
Tension slowly seeped from her tightly wound muscles. She felt the warmth of his arms encircling her, the soft rise and fall of his chest against her cheek, the whisper of his breath against her ear.
Finally she raised her gaze to his. “I’m sorry, Chaz. I guess that dead animal shook me up more than I thought.”
His eyes darkened with concern and other emotions that made her want to reach up and touch his cheek.
Kiss his lips.
Foolish.
A muscle ticked in his jaw. “I promise you I’ll put a stop to this cruelty.”
She pulled away and struggled for bravado. “Whoever did it probably just wants to scare me off.”
“Maybe so. But I won’t tolerate this kind of crap while I’m in office. When I find the bastard who did it, he’ll pay.”
She folded her arms, missing his contact already. The sound of an engine rumbled, and a black pickup rolled up.
“There’s Jimmy now.” Chaz flicked a hand up to greet the locksmith as he emerged from his truck. “We have a problem here,” he said, indicating the carcass on the front porch. “Let me check the house out first, then you can get to work.”
Chaz gestured to Tawny-Lynn. “Stay here with her until I return.” Then he raced up the steps to the house.
Tawny-Lynn hissed a breath, praying the person who’d threatened her wasn’t inside.
Jimmy shuffled back and forth. “Sorry you’re having trouble, ma’am.”
Tawny-Lynn forced a polite smile. Jimmy was probably in his thirties and wore jeans and a khaki shirt with the name James’s Locks embroidered on the pocket. His smile was flirty like it had been at the diner although a devilish gleam lit his eyes.
But Chaz must trust him or he wouldn’t have called him.
“You didn’t grow up in Camden Crossing, did you?” she asked.
“No, ma’am,” Jimmy said. “I came from Sunset Mesa. But I moved here a couple years ago.”
Chaz returned to the doorway and waved that the house was safe. “I’ll clean up this mess, Jimmy, and you can start with the locks.”
Jimmy nodded, grabbed a kit from his car and headed up to the porch. “You want a security system?”
Tawny-Lynn frowned and shook her head. “I don’t think installing a security system is worth the investment.”
Chaz didn’t look convinced. “Put dead bolts on all the doors and check the window locks. Then install a hidden camera and aim it at this porch. If this guy shows up again, we’ll nail him.”
Tawny-Lynn waited until Chaz hauled the bloody deer carcass off the porch. He carried it into the woods, and she retrieved the groceries, sidestepping the blood on the porch floor as she carried them inside.
She quickly sorted and stored the items, glad she’d cleaned the pantry of the outdated canned and boxed goods. Chaz came in for more bleach and a bucket of water and sponge.
Jimmy started in the kitchen with the back door, giving Chaz time to clean the front porch. She brewed a pot of coffee and left it for the men, then started to clean the den.
But the memory of Barry Dothan at the crash site made her rethink her plan. Instead of starting downstairs, she’d start in Peyton’s room.
She and Ruth had been whispering about boys those last few weeks, sharing secrets and gig
gling and talking in hushed voices. Every time she’d tried to join the conversation, her sister had shut her out.
What if her boyfriend knew something?
Maybe there was some clue in Peyton’s room as to the secret they’d been sharing.
* * *
CHAZ HAD PHOTOGRAPHED the deer and bloody message before he hauled the carcass into the woods. Then he searched for fingerprints on the door, but other than the blood, the door had been wiped clean. There were also no footprints in the blood so the perpetrator had sidestepped the bloody trail he’d left on the steps.
Someone knew what he was doing and was covering his tracks.
But who?
There were a dozen or so people who didn’t want Tawny-Lynn here.
Because they didn’t want her to remember what happened that day? To remember the face she said was blank?
Because he or she had done something to Ruth and Peyton?
That thought made his gut churn, and he punched the number for the crime lab and asked to speak to Lieutenant Willis Ludlow, the CSI chief he’d met at a police seminar.
“What can I do for you?” Lieutenant Ludlow asked.
Chaz quickly explained the circumstances. “My deputy couriered over some blood samples I took at the crime scene.”
“Yeah, hang on a minute, and I’ll pull the results.”
Paper rustled, then a tapping sound followed, and he realized Ludlow was on his computer. Seconds later, he returned. “Okay, the blood sample on the mirror came from an animal. It was dried and had been there a couple of days.”
Two days—the same day Tawny-Lynn’s father had died. “Deer blood?”
“No, a rabbit.”
“And the blood on the wall?”
“That one was from a deer. Maybe your guy is a hunter.”
“Possibly.” Or anyone with enough imagination to kill a deer and use its blood to frighten Tawny-Lynn.
His mind ticked away possibilities. It had to be someone fairly strong to have dragged the deer up onto the porch. Someone who didn’t have a weak stomach.