“Yeah. I wanna go home.”
Zane nodded at Stevie, and she removed Jake’s cuffs. Angie grabbed an arm and steered him into the back of the bar. The tension level in the bar dropped twenty degrees.
“Go home, Tony,” Zane ordered. The man glared at everyone but turned and left.
Stevie took her first deep breath as Zane looked around the room. “I don’t want to come back tonight,” he said to the crowd. Murmurs of agreement went through the group.
Zane gestured to the door. “Let’s go.”
Stevie was ready to leave. Her man was in one piece, and she couldn’t wait to tell Carly she’d finally gotten some satisfaction with a boot to Jake Powers’s crotch.
CHAPTER SEVEN
The next morning Zane held the diner door open for Stevie. The scent of eggs, bacon, and coffee greeted them.
“I’m starving,” Stevie muttered. She held up a hand to Hank, who was sitting at a lonely table near the back, waiting for them.
Good choice. Zane didn’t want half the town listening while Hank updated them on Bob Fletcher’s autopsy results. He hadn’t liked the meeting location, but Hank said his schedule was tight, he needed to eat, and Zane would have to wait until his official report unless he wanted a briefing now.
Murder and maple syrup.
They greeted the medical examiner, and Zane held up two fingers to the waitress, signaling for coffee for Stevie and him. They needed it. They’d had a hard time falling asleep after the brawl at Fletcher’s last night. Nothing like an adrenaline dump in one’s stomach to make sleep stay away. Stevie had gone home with him and clung tight to him all night. They’d needed the one-on-one time.
He knew she was close to agreeing to move in with him. One of the hardest things he’d ever done was sit back and let her come to the decision in her own time, but Patsy had assured him it was the right path to take. Clearly the universe was trying to teach him patience.
Moments later they both had gotten coffee and ordered omelets, and now they watched as Hank wiped his mouth with his napkin, a time-for-business look on his face.
“Bob Fletcher had the remains of a Suboxone tablet under his tongue,” Hank announced quietly, glancing behind Zane and Stevie to make certain no public ears were listening.
Zane set down his coffee cup. “I have no idea what you’re talking about. What’s Suboxone?”
“A treatment for opioid addiction. It dissolves under the tongue and helps relieve the addict’s withdrawal symptoms.”
“I’ve never heard of it,” said Stevie.
“It’s been around a few years,” said Hank. “It can become addicting itself, so it’s controlled. Bob had classic symptoms of a narcotic addiction.”
“Damn it!” Zane wanted to hit something. “I’m tired of finding out about people’s drug habits in this town. It’s like discovering dangerous mold inside your home’s walls. It can contaminate everything.”
“Did one of you give it to him?” Hank asked. “Or did you check to see if he had it on him?”
Zane looked at Stevie, and she frowned in confusion. “We didn’t give him any medication. And I know he was thoroughly searched before he was put in the cell. He wouldn’t have had access to anything like that in there.”
“Well, he got it somehow. I imagine during the time in your cell he was craving his narcotic fix pretty bad. Shakes. Sweats. Nausea. Someone gave him something to take the edge off.”
“Kenny wouldn’t do that,” said Zane. Stevie nodded vehemently in agreement.
“So that leaves your killer,” stated Hank. “He gave him something to make him feel better and then murdered him. Don’t know what I think of that.”
“That makes no sense,” said Stevie.
“Unless the murderer did it to get close to Bob,” suggested Zane. “Show him he had something to take the edge off and then killed him when his guard was down. Bob was a beefy guy, used to handling the drunks in his bar. To kill him by slashing his neck, you’d have to be up close and personal.”
“About that,” said Hank as he bit into his toast. “The angle and depth of the cuts tells me your killer is right-handed. I know that’s not a big help because most of the population is right-handed.”
“Then Tony Cooper definitely isn’t our man,” said Stevie. “I had the pleasure of watching him eat scrambled eggs yesterday. He used the arm closest to the window in his home, his left.”
Zane nodded. “The left was his dominant arm during the fight last night. I’ve already talked to a few people who said he was in church all morning on Christmas, so his alibi holds up anyway.”
“Where’s that leave us?” Stevie whispered. “Another killer walking around Solitude?”
“Was there anything in your findings to tie Bob Fletcher to Vanessa Phillips’s death?” Zane asked Hank. His brain was working overtime. Did they have one or two killers still in town?
Hank shook his head. “Not in either autopsy. You’re going to have to do some more old-fashioned police work to verify your killer.”
Zane nodded, meeting Stevie’s gaze.
“We’ve hit a dead end on fingerprints and witnesses,” said Stevie. “I sent a few pieces of trace evidence to the state lab, but that can take weeks. People are starting to lock their doors at night. Especially the young women.”
“They should be doing that anyway,” asserted Hank. “The city of Medford has had two women in their early twenties go missing in the last six months. Haven’t found a sign of them. One possibly took off with a boyfriend, but the mother of the other one swears she wouldn’t leave town.”
The hair on Zane’s neck stood up. “You know about Samantha Lyle, right?”
Stevie leaned forward, nodding as Hank shook his head. “I don’t think so,” he said.
“She vanished from Solitude two months ago. She’d been talking about going to Nashville, so a lot of people think she took off without telling anyone. But if she did, she left all her clothing behind and it was after having a fight with her boyfriend at Fletcher’s.”
“Fletcher’s again, eh?” asked Hank. “I’ve always known it was a cesspool, but it seems to be the eye of the storm, sucking in more victims.”
“That makes five women killed or missing, if we include the Medford women,” said Stevie. “Was Bob involved in all of them? He implied to Tyler that Amber Lynn was a spur-of-the-moment-type thing.”
“Even though we think his motivation for killing Amber Lynn was to get that flash drive back, the footage of him putting a different young woman in his vehicle suggests that he might have been involved in the disappearance of at least one other. Who we still can’t verify was Vanessa Phillips.” Zane rubbed a hand over his forehead. “It looks like we have a predator with a taste for young women, and Bob was involved in some way. I’ll reach out to Medford PD today and talk to the investigators, see where they’re at in their cases. I hadn’t heard about the missing women from out there.”
“I remember seeing a notice about one of them,” said Stevie. “I forgot until now. But if they’re all related, could Bob Fletcher be the suspect?”
“We’ve got him on video with a young woman.” Zane ticked off points on his fingers. “We know he choked Amber Lynn, Samantha Lyle was last seen leaving Fletcher’s after fighting with her boyfriend, and now two more women of the same age are missing. Holy crap . . . have we been blind?” Dread filled him. Had a serial killer been operating in southwest Oregon?
“But who killed Bob?” asked Stevie. “Was it vigilante justice by someone who knew what he was doing to young women?”
“Or someone who simply had a bone to pick with Bob,” Hank suggested. “He wasn’t the type to make friends.”
Zane met Stevie’s gaze. “We need to search his home. Today.”
Stevie stepped inside Bob’s small house and wrinkled her nose. Ugh. “Smells like a single
guy lives here.”
Zane winced. “My place smells like this?”
“Hell no. You’re clean. I should have said it smells like a sloppy single guy lives here. And that there’s a reason he’s still single.”
Bob’s small ranch home sat far out of town, way back from the main highway. Snow covered the long winding dirt road to the house, and Zane had cursed three times as his wheels hit deep ruts. He’d taken the house key from Bob’s personal effects at the station, and they’d both bootied and gloved up before entering the home, their evidence kits in hand.
Stevie began by photographing every room. The house felt claustrophobic. The ceilings were too low for Stevie’s taste and the windows too small. She could hear the Rogue River as it rushed by about a hundred feet from the back of the house. Tall fir trees blocked any view of the water or of his neighbors.
“Definitely a private home,” observed Zane. “No one would have noticed his comings and goings. Or heard anything either. There’s got to be at least a half mile between him and his closest neighbor.”
Private enough to bring home unwilling young women?
“I don’t see any outbuildings,” said Stevie, looking out a back window. “Let’s start in his bedroom.”
After photographing every inch of the room, she and Zane pulled it apart. Mattress, box spring, under the bed, behind wall hangings, every inch of his closet and dresser. She made no comment about the huge stack of porn magazines and DVDs in a cardboard box next to his bed. They moved into the bathroom, which rivaled those at the Wayward Motel. He had a mold problem on the bathroom ceiling.
“Don’t men see that sort of thing?” Stevie asked, pointing upward.
“I’m sure he saw it,” said Zane. “I think he just didn’t care enough to do something about it.”
Men.
“You would have cleaned it, right?” she asked.
“Absolutely.” He busied himself in a bathroom cupboard.
Stevie suspected her brothers would have too. Well, maybe not Bruce. Unless he worried about a woman seeing it. She took a long look at the grimy tub that hadn’t seen a scrubber or Clorox in a long time. If she had wanted to kill someone, the tub would have been a natural place to contain the mess. But clearly Bob hadn’t cleaned it to erase evidence.
“Well, hello there.” Zane turned around, an orange prescription bottle in his hand. “If I hadn’t talked with Hank this morning, this bottle wouldn’t mean a thing to me.” He held it out for Stevie to see. Suboxone.
“Was he taking it regularly?” Stevie asked. She took the lid off the bottle. Half the number of prescribed pills were gone. “I wonder if he was trying to get clean from the oxy. Look at the label. He went out of town to fill it. He didn’t want anyone around here knowing he was taking the medication.”
“Are you saying our pharmacy might harbor gossips? Impossible,” stated Zane with a straight face.
Stevie smirked. “I suspect Donald knows everyone’s dirty little secrets. But I think he’s pretty good about keeping his mouth shut. Most of the time, anyway.”
They hit pay dirt again in the second bedroom. Cash. Lots of it. Stevie did a quick count of the bills that’d been tucked inside a paper bag and stashed in a short filing cabinet. “He’s got seven thousand dollars here. Could that be profits from Fletcher’s?”
Zane fanned out the cash on the floor. “I don’t think so. Look how nice and neat the bills are. And they’re big bills. Fifties and hundreds. Whenever I’ve been in Fletcher’s the crowd pays with cards or crinkled-up small bills. These look fresh from the bank.”
Stevie agreed. “It could be his savings. Maybe he doesn’t trust the bank.” She slid the cash into an evidence bag. The last time she’d found a big stash of cash in a search, the owner had been involved in drug dealing, and the rumors of drug dealing at the truck stop and Hank’s assertion of Bob’s drug addiction were firmly at the forefront of her mind. They moved to the kitchen and living room of the home.
“Oh shit. Look. We didn’t see this when you first took the pictures in here.” Zane opened the door to the small concrete back patio, and Stevie saw the outside doorjamb had been splintered next to the lock.
“Someone broke in. But when?” she asked.
“Bob never reported a break-in,” said Zane. “But if he was doing something illegal, I can understand why he wouldn’t. I think if he’d known about it he would have tried to secure the door somehow . . . he has a lot of cash to protect. But it doesn’t look like someone dug through his things, right? He’s a slob, but nothing is broken or emptied out as if a search had been done. And the cash wasn’t hard to find. Why leave it behind?”
“Could the cash have been planted for us to find?” Stevie asked.
Zane nodded slowly, weighing the idea. “But who has that much extra cash lying around for the sole purpose of incriminating someone?”
“No one in Solitude,” agreed Stevie.
She knelt next to the jamb and sniffed. “Smells like fresh-cut wood.” She pointed at the light layer of snow that the wind had blown onto the patio. “There’re splinters of the doorjamb on top of the recent snow. Not that Bob would have cleaned it up, but I think we need to consider that it happened after we locked him up. Or even after he was killed.”
Tension crept up her spine and she stood, scanning the woods behind the house. The snow was pristine in the open areas, no footprints. She closed the door, wishing she could lock it. “This place gives me the creeps.”
“If he killed Vanessa Phillips, he didn’t do it here,” said Zane. “I haven’t seen anything that indicates someone was murdered or held here. In a location as remote as this, he could have easily done so without raising suspicion.”
“So if he was smart enough not to bring them home, where would he have taken them?” She’d looked up the photos of the missing women from Medford and their faces were stuck in her memory. She hoped Solitude hadn’t harbored a serial killer with a taste for young women. “If Bob did it, he had a hiding place where he felt safe. Maybe we need to look deeper into the woods for some sort of outbuilding. He has three acres. Maybe we can’t see it from here.”
“I think he would need to drive to the area if he was transporting victims. There’s no driving around in those woods with the trees so close together.”
“He was a muscular guy,” countered Stevie. “He could have carried a woman or forced her to walk.”
“Let’s finish up inside and take a look around out back.”
CHAPTER EIGHT
Bob’s property had revealed no more clues, and two days later Zane felt like he’d hit a dead end in the investigations. Stevie suggested he step away from his desk and take a few hours off from work. Off from police work, anyway.
A dozen people hustled about in the big grange hall, following Patsy’s orders as they set up for the New Year’s Eve party in two days. Somehow Zane had been assigned duties that required muscle. That was fine with him. His brain was preoccupied, and it felt good to follow someone else’s orders for a change. “Pull that table out from the wall,” Patsy ordered Zane. “People need to be able to walk behind it. We’ll need access to the food from both sides of the table or it’ll take forever for everyone to get fed.”
Zane grabbed the long banquet table and slid it out. Patsy nodded her approval, covered it with a red tablecloth, and pointed at a second table. “That one too.”
Patsy could deftly command a crew, and the people didn’t realize they were working their tails off. The big hall was being cleaned from top to bottom, the decorations were going up, and the sound system and band stage were coming together. Stevie was on decoration duty.
“Eyes on your work, son,” Patsy said.
Zane grinned at the petite woman. She’d caught him eying her daughter’s jeans-clad ass as Stevie stood on a ladder, stretching to attach a banner. “Yes, ma’am.” He slid the
second table into place and then followed Patsy to the storage area to bring out more chairs.
Tonight he could pretend Solitude wasn’t deep in the middle of unsolved murders. Yesterday he’d talked to a Medford Police Department investigator about the two missing women from his town. The detective had admitted they’d exhausted all their leads. One of the women had struggled with depression and drug addiction, and he believed she might have left town on her own. But the other young woman had been active in her community and had left behind a boyfriend and family who were distraught and confused.
“You’re looking at the cases as being related, right?” Zane had asked.
“I am,” the detective had replied. “But I’m telling you, there’s nothing similar about these two women except their ages.”
“And that they’re both missing,” argued Zane. “I’ve got one missing young woman and two dead. You’re less than an hour away, so I have to look at the big picture.”
“But you said your suspect is dead and you’ve linked him to only one of the cases.”
“Right, but we’ve got him footage of him putting a different young woman in the back of his vehicle. Most regular guys don’t do that. I think it’s just a matter of time before we discover his tie to the rest of these women.”
“Well, let me know when you’ve got something concrete. It’s like these women were abducted by a spacecraft. We can’t find any sign of outside involvement in either case.”
Zane had spent the rest of the day and this morning poring over the case files from Medford. The police work looked solid, but he disagreed with the investigator that the only thing the women had in common was their age. He’d immediately noticed they both had long wavy hair. Just like Vanessa Phillips. And Samantha Lyle.
If the abductions had all been committed by the same man, he definitely had a type.
“Put the chairs in small circles so people can talk, Zane,” Patsy directed. He obeyed, unfolding the chairs and arranging them in circles.
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