A Trace of Hope

by Blake Pierce

  The elevator doors closed before Weymouth could pick his jaw up off the floor.

  CHAPTER TWENTY NINE

  It took less than a half hour of interviews with the sorority sisters for Keri and Ray to come to two conclusions. First, no one was entirely sure what had happened to Tara Justin last night. Second, no one seemed to be as concerned as they should be.

  After talking to multiple sisters and pledges, all with the Greek Advisor sitting unobtrusively in the corner of the room, they were able to at least nail down the basic situation and timeline.

  Last night had been the final evening of a weekend-long pledge initiation. It culminated with all the pledges, in this case seven girls, being driven, blindfolded, to a semi-remote mountain road in Malibu, where they would be dropped off individually around 10 p.m. at night. They had to find their way back to the sorority house by 6 a.m. this morning. The sisters called the event The Expedition.

  According to the sisters, it wasn’t as challenging as it sounded. All the pledges were dropped off within a half mile of each other. And while their surroundings seemed remote at first, they were actually only about three miles from a popular campground and the heavily traveled Pacific Coast Highway.

  They were allowed to keep their wallets and phones, which didn’t get cell signals where they were dropped off, but did once they got lower down the mountain. Most girls joined up with some or all of their pledge class with an hour or so.

  They were allowed to get back to campus however they liked, whether via bus, Uber, cab, or even calling a friend to get them. They were not, however, allowed to hitchhike. Typically, girls made it back by 3 or 4 a.m. No one had ever missed the 6 a.m. cutoff until today.

  None of the other six pledges reported ever running into Tara at any point on their walk down the mountain. But since they arrived back at campus in two separate groups of two and four and basically crashed right away, neither group realized she wasn’t among them.

  It turned out that the sister who had called 911 was the one who’d dropped Tara off in the first place. Her name was Jan Henley and she was a senior. She’d just happened to drop by the house this morning on her way to her job at the student center to see how things had gone.

  She wasn’t able to determine for sure that no one could recall Tara coming back until around 7:30 a.m. because most sisters were sleeping in after staying up much of the night partying while waiting for the pledges to return. Due to the extended Easter holiday, there were no classes today or tomorrow (the reason the pledge initiation was planned for tonight). As a result, reaching everyone was a challenge.

  Eventually, when it became clear she wasn’t back, people called her cell, her dorm phone, and her roommate, all without success. That’s when Jan, against her sisters’ wishes, called the police.

  “I need you to show us where you dropped Tara off,” Keri told her.

  “Now?” Jan asked. “I’m already on break from work to talk to you. They won’t be happy if I just bail.”

  “Yes, now,” Keri said, trying not to sound annoyed at the girl’s myopia, “It’s after ten a.m. That means’s Tara’s been missing for over twelve hours. As to your job, we’ll smooth it over. You’re helping with a police investigation, Jan. No one’s going to give you a hard time. And I need the number for Tara’s roommate too.”

  On the way to Malibu, Keri called Edgerton to have him trace the GPS on Tara’s phone. He said the battery was dead but the GPS was active and still in the general area that Jan claimed to have dropped her off.

  “Do you have a photo of Tara?” she asked Jan, who nodded and scrolled through her phone until she found one. “Send it to me.”

  When it arrived, Keri studied the image. Tara was an extremely attractive but unpretentious-looking brunette. She appeared to be a typical eighteen-year-old college freshman, with her hair pulled back in a practical ponytail, her smile warm but slightly guarded. Keri thought there was something familiar about her large brown eyes, as if they’d perhaps met before, but she couldn’t quite place it.

  Frustrated, she shook off the feeling and called Tara’s roommate, a girl named Alice Oberon. She got voicemail and left a message making it clear that she needed a return call urgently. But she hadn’t heard anything by the time she lost cell service as they started into the mountains an hour later.

  Keri tried to ignore the shiver of anxiety that rippled up her spine as they drove past the road that led up to Jackson Cave’s place and the canyon where she’d almost died three months earlier. She saw Ray glance at her out of the corner of his eye but he said nothing.

  Jan had them turn right at Mulholland Highway, just past the Leo Carrillo Campground. They drove up the mountain road about three miles before she pointed to a small turnout off to the left. Ray pulled over and they got out.

  The turnout abutted a small wooded area with a bench and a covered trash can. They wandered around for a while but didn’t see anything unusual.

  “When did you take off her blindfold?” Ray asked.

  “Once I parked,” Jan answered.

  “And did you tell her anything?” he asked. “Give her any hints?”

  “Yeah, I said ‘everybody likes going down.’”

  “Really?” Keri asked incredulously.

  “It was the only hint we were allowed to give,” Jan said, sounding embarrassed. “I didn’t come up with it. The guys in our partner fraternity thought it was funny.”

  “They sound like real charmers,” Keri said, feeling a mix of disgust and something else she couldn’t quite put her finger on.

  Jan looked like she wanted to reply but bit her tongue at the last second. Before Keri could call her on it, Ray jumped in.

  “What do you want to do now?” he asked Keri, choosing to steer clear of discussion of sexual politics.

  “I’m going to walk back down the road,” Keri said, “follow the path Tara would have likely taken last night. Why don’t you and Jan go down to the campground? If she made it there, maybe someone saw her. I’ll meet you there.”

  Ray nodded and they headed out. Keri walked over to the bench and sat down for a moment, trying to push all the frustrations and anxieties out of her mind. Tara Justin needed her full focus and attention. She closed her eyes, took several long deep breaths, then slowly stood up and looked around.

  Nothing was different but she felt somehow calmer and more alert. She began to walk down the hill, keeping to the edge of the road as she imagined Tara would have. After about a quarter of a mile, she came to another small turnout with a wooded area next to it. This one was slightly more elaborate, with a picnic table and both a trash and a recycling bin.

  She walked over and glanced around but didn’t see anything out of the ordinary. She was about to move back out to the road when she noticed the sunlight reflecting off a surface near a bush about twenty yards deeper into the forest.

  She walked over and looked down. It was partially covered by leaves but easily identifiable as a cell phone. Keri put on her evidence gloves and picked it up. The thing was beat up pretty bad. She couldn’t tell if it had been intentionally smashed or just hit the ground wrong, but the screen was shattered and there were bits of plastic hanging loose.

  She bagged it and continued down the hill. By the time she reached the campground thirty minutes later, she hadn’t found anything else noteworthy besides a blister on her pinkie toe from all the steep walking.

  As she wandered into the main campground area, she saw some kind of commotion and picked up the pace despite the discomfort in her foot. Ray had a shirtless man with a backward baseball cap in cuffs sitting in the backseat of his car. Another guy and two women, apparently his friends, were speaking loudly and getting uncomfortably close to Ray, who was trying to talk them down. They all wore swimsuits and seemed to be in varying stages of drunkenness.

  Jan, standing behind Ray, was pointing at the man with the cuffs on, and sounded borderline hysterical. Keri unclipped the holster of her gun but otherwise staye
d cool as she approached.

  “What’s going on here?” she asked.

  Jan turned to her and she could see the girl was crying.

  “That girl,” she yelled, pointing at one of the women, “is wearing Tara’s headband! And that guy in cuffs had her wallet!”

  CHAPTER THIRTY

  The woman in the headband, who had aggressively bleached blonde hair, gritted her teeth and her face twisted up. Suddenly she was shouting too, leaning in across Ray so that her nose was inches from Jan’s.

  “Bitch, don’t accuse me!”

  “What did you do to my friend?” Jan shouted back, not giving an inch.

  “Don’t get up in my woman’s face like that!” yelled the cuffed guy, trying to stand up.

  “Everybody calm down,” Ray said as he put his left hand on the man’s shoulder, firmly shoving him back down. With his right forearm, he eased the headband woman back a foot, creating some much needed personal space for everyone. Keri followed his lead and grabbed Jan’s forearm, pulling her back behind her.

  “Don’t you put your hands on my woman!” the cuffed guy shouted at Ray from his neutralized position.

  Keri’s patience was already running low after the long walk down the mountain and she didn’t much like the way the guy said “you” to Ray. So she decided it was time to stretch some of the cop muscles that had atrophied over the last few months.

  “You,” she said, pointing at the guy in cuffs, “shut your mouth now. That is, unless you want to spend the next twenty-four hours in county lockup in your swimming trunks and nothing else. You’ll be very popular, I promise.”

  His “woman” started to respond but Keri wheeled in her direction and shut her down with a withering glare before focusing her words on her.

  “You will stop getting in my partner’s personal space and you will stop eyeballing that girl behind me. I have a pair of cuffs too and I’m itching to use them. So take five steps back, along with your friends there, and don’t say another word until you’re spoken to. The first one of you who opens your mouth gets a free trip to downtown LA. And I don’t think that’s what you had in mind for this little vacation.”

  The woman’s mouth twitched in silent agitation but she did what Keri instructed, as did her friends. Keri looked at Ray, who leaned over and spoke quietly in her ear.

  “Wallet definitely belongs to Tara Justin—has her ID and everything. The guy says he found it on the ground last night. Can’t speak to the headband but Jan there seems pretty sure of herself. Hard to imagine that it just fell to the ground too.”

  “What are you thinking?” Keri asked.

  “I’ve already called for backup. One way or another, this guy’s going down for something. But we need to interrogate him back at the station. I genuinely don’t know whether he found the wallet, stole it, or worse.”

  “What about the headband?” Keri asked.

  “Things got out of hand before I could ask any questions about it.”

  “Mind if I take a go at her?”

  “Go for it,” Ray said. “But maybe find somewhere a little more private?”

  “Okay, you got things under control here?”

  “I’m going to try not to be insulted by that question.”

  “Sorry, partner,” Keri said and gave him a quick pat on the butt to reinforce her remorse.

  “You’re forgiven,” he muttered, trying not to smile.

  “Jan, you go hang out in the park ranger’s office until we get you,” Keri said, before turning to the bleach-haired woman in the headband. “And you’re with me, Blondie. We need to chat.”

  She led the woman to the picnic table of an unoccupied campsite about fifty feet away and motioned for her to sit down.

  “Okay, Blondie, what’s your real name?” she asked.

  “Marla.”

  “Marla, I’m going to be straight with you. I’m looking for a missing teenage girl. She was in this area last night. Her friend thinks you’re wearing her headband. I’m inclined to believe her. Despite that, unless you were somehow involved in this girl’s disappearance, your best bet is to come clean and tell me what you know. If you had something to do with her going missing, by all means, lie. But if you didn’t, lying to me now will get you in more trouble than telling the truth. I’m willing to cut you some slack for any minor legal transgressions. But this is a one-time offer. So think before you speak.”

  Marla was quiet for several seconds, seemingly fighting an internal battle between her sense of pride and her good judgment. The latter finally won out.

  “Listen, the girl was crazy,” she finally said, her words coming out in a rush. “We were coming back from the beach and ran into her. At first I thought she was heading out there because she was wearing a bikini. But then I realized they were her underclothes. She was walking around in her bra and panties!”

  “Did she say anything?” Keri asked, choosing to accept Marla’s version of events for the time being, no matter how skeptically she viewed them.

  “She sounded real out of it, like she was high on something. But nothing good, I think. Her eyes were all red like she’d been crying. I didn’t get that at first. I really did say I liked her headband. She just took it off and gave it to me, said she didn’t need it anymore.”

  “And the wallet?” Keri pressed.

  Marla looked at her with equal parts suspicion and hope.

  “You promise nothing bad will happen to Nicky if I tell you?”

  “I can’t promise that, Marla. All I can tell you is that it will be worse for both of you if something happened to this girl, you weren’t involved, and you still keep quiet.”

  “I’m gonna trust you here,” she said reluctantly. “She had the wallet in a little backpack, one of those girly ones. She was just dragging it around. After she handed me the headband, Nicky joked and said could he have something? She just kind of looked at him with a blank stare. So he kind of pried the backpack out of her hand. She didn’t fight him or nothing. After a couple of seconds, she just sort of wandered off. The wallet was in the backpack. Nicky kept it and tossed the pack in the trash.”

  “Where did she go?” Keri asked, forcing herself to ignore her general sense of revulsion. “Which direction?”

  “Just off toward Carrillo Beach, maybe more north. I wasn’t really watching. We wanted to get back to camp and drink some more.”

  “Did she say anything else?”

  “She muttered something about hooking up with her old buddy, Herbie or Hurley, something like that. I’m not totally sure about that. Like I said, she was really out of it.”

  Keri led Marla back to the main group, where she found that the Sheriff’s Department had arrived and Nicky had been transferred to one of their vehicles. Ray was on the phone with someone.

  “You said it would be better if I was straight with you,” Marla pleaded upon seeing the scene.

  “I’ll see what I can do,” Keri said, walking over to Ray and waiting for him to finish his call. He hung up.

  “That was Hillman,” he said. “He wants us to bring this guy in and formally interrogate him, on video. He doesn’t want to risk undermining a conviction with, as he put it, ‘some half-assed question and answer session in a campground.’”

  “We can do that,” Keri said. “But I’m not confident it’s going to get us anywhere. Talking to the girlfriend, I’m not convinced they did anything more than take minimal advantage of a girl who was already compromised somehow.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “According to Marla over there, Tara was already half naked and half out of her head when they ran into her coming back from the beach.”

  “And you believe her?” Ray asked incredulously.

  “She admitted that Nicky strong-armed the wallet from Tara, who didn’t even seem to notice. I just don’t think she’d have copped to any of it if they were behind something worse.”

  “Well, Hillman’s going to need more convincing,” Ray replied skeptica
lly. “I hope you brought your A game today.”

  *

  Ultimately, Keri decided that Nicky wasn’t worth her A game. Back at the station, Hillman wanted to formally question Nicholas “Nicky” Carpenter about the disappearance of Tara Justin himself. Keri didn’t think he was the guy. But on her first day back, getting into a battle of wills with her lieutenant on behalf of some scumbag who had at least taken the missing girl’s wallet didn’t feel like a priority. Marla would feel ill-served but Keri didn’t really care. If the worst he’d done was take her wallet, he’d be okay.

  Besides, she had other priorities. Tara’s roommate had gotten back to her and was coming in to talk. While Keri waited for her to arrive, she walked over to Garrett Patterson’s desk to see if he’d uncovered anything unusual in Tara’s student records. He had.

  “It looks like Tara Justin didn’t exist until about two years ago,” he said.

  “That’s kind of big news,” Keri said. “Who was she before that?”

  “Not sure just yet,” he answered. “I was originally spending most of my time going through her grades, current bills, that sort of thing. I only just started looking through her admission documents a couple of minutes ago when I noticed that the financials were a little fuzzy.”

  “Maybe she fudged something to get financial aid or could it be she’s not here legally?” Keri suggested.

  “Definitely not the first,” he said. “She’s paying full tuition. Not sure yet on the second. Give me a few minutes and I may have something for you.”

  An officer tapped Keri on the shoulder.

  “There’s an Alice Oberon here to see you,” he said, pointing to a petite, black-haired girl standing meekly in the corner of the bullpen.

  “Thanks,” Keri said, waving the girl over before muttering quietly to Patterson, “Let me know what you find, Grunt Work. But not in front of her.”

  He nodded and clicked on a different window as Alice approached.

  “Hi, Alice,” Keri said. “I’m Detective Keri Locke. Thanks for coming in. Why don’t we find somewhere a little quieter to talk.”