Vanishing Girls

by Lisa Regan

  * * *

  Wayland Harris’ hunting lodge was little more than a single-level two-bedroom modular home halfway up a mountain. The last two miles of road leading to its driveway was unpaved, as was the driveway. In the winter he needed an ATV to get from the road to the house, kept in a small shed at the bottom of his property for that very reason. As Josie and Noah drove, bouncing mercilessly in Noah’s truck, she noticed that the padlock on the outside of the shed was still intact.

  It had been a long-running joke in the police department that the chief never actually went hunting but maintained a hunting lodge so he could get away from all the estrogen in his household. When most men in the area were showing off photos of the eight-point bucks or the seven-hundred-pound black bears they’d shot, Chief Harris would return from his lodge after every hunting season empty-handed, with no stories to tell. One year, Josie remembered, he had shot a turkey. The rest of the guys joked that was just so his wife would stop urging him to sell his beloved lodge. He had called it a lodge and not a camp. Most hunters belonged to a hunting camp, which was just a house or cabin in the woods where a group of them stayed together during hunting season. But this was a lodge. His lodge, and his alone.

  Josie only knew where it was because the chief had loaned the department his ATV a few years in a row—mostly to rescue dumb kids who got lost in the woods. The chief had commissioned Josie twice to go with him to return the ATV. She’d never been inside the infamous lodge though.

  So that anyone at the lodge wouldn’t hear their vehicle driving over the gravel, they parked at the bottom of the chief’s long driveway and walked the rest of the way. Soon Noah was panting beside her. She glanced over at him, alarmed by the shade of white he had turned. He was still nursing his gunshot wound, and she was working him like crazy. “You okay?” she asked. “Want to wait in the car?”

  He scoffed at her and wiped the sweat from his brow with the back of his wrist. “Are you crazy? Leave you alone? No way.”

  “You don’t look so good.”

  “I’m fine.”

  At the top of the driveway the chief’s lodge sat silent and implacable. The chief had replaced the siding since the last time Josie had seen it. She pulled her service weapon out and held it pointed toward the ground. Together they circled to the back of the house.

  After two circuits of the house, Josie walked up to the front door and knocked, while Noah stayed back in the tree line, his pistol drawn, ready to fire. She holstered her own gun but left the holster unfastened. She waited several minutes, knocking periodically until finally she heard movement from inside. It sounded like more than one person—and a dog barking. She heard footsteps and what sounded like a whispered argument before the door creaked slowly open, and Misty launched herself into Josie’s arms.

  “Thank God. Thank God you’re here,” Misty cried. Josie tried to mask her shock as she attempted to disentangle herself from Misty’s vise-like embrace. It was like trying to get a frightened child to let go. Josie peeled one of Misty’s arms from around her neck and the woman quickly slung it back around Josie’s waist. Tears streamed down her face. Her blond hair looked dull and uncombed. “Thank God,” she repeated. “The chief said you would come. He said you would. But you didn’t answer any of my calls. How come you didn’t answer any of my calls? I would have left a voicemail but the chief made me promise not to just in case someone else got their hands on your phone and accessed the messages. He didn’t want anyone knowing we were here.”

  Noah stepped from the tree line and approached. Misty clutched Josie harder and squealed in panic. “He promised you would come alone,” she shrieked.

  Josie glanced back at Noah and he froze in place. “That is Officer Fraley,” Josie explained. “He’s helping me. The, uh, chief said I could trust him.”

  Misty’s body relaxed. “Okay. Okay.”

  Josie made one last effort to free herself, curling her hands around Misty’s shoulders and holding her at arm’s length. “Misty,” she said. “What the hell is going on?”

  A figure stepped into the doorway behind Misty. A young woman with sunken cheeks and skin so pale it had a blue, vampirish hue. A men’s sweatsuit hung on her, and she too looked unkempt, her blond hair in a tangle. In her arms was a tiny dog that looked like a miniature fox. Before Josie could completely register the young woman’s identity, she heard Noah murmur, “Isabelle.”

  Chapter Seventy-Six

  Misty sat at the table in the Denton police department’s conference room, a half-empty bottle of water in front of her. She raked her fingers through her hair over and over again, trying to tame it, her tiny dog snoring in her lap. Across from her sat Special Agent Holcomb. Josie sat all the way at the end of the table, as far from Misty as she could get without actually leaving the room. Noah stood behind Josie like a sentry. She was glad of his presence. They had had to break the news to Misty on the way back from the lodge that both Ray and the chief were dead. Josie could barely handle her own grief, let alone Misty’s, which was emotional to the point of seeming insincere.

  “You didn’t even know the chief,” Josie had snapped at her in the car.

  “Boss,” Noah had interjected softly. “Everyone deals with grief differently.”

  She had kept her mouth shut since then because she was afraid if she spoke again she would say things she would regret—even to Misty. Special Agent Holcomb readily agreed to take down Misty’s statement.

  Isabelle Coleman had been taken to the nearest hospital. Josie had called her parents, reveling in the pleasure of delivering some good news at last. Holcomb would take her statement later, after she’d been examined by a doctor and reunited with her family, although she had told Josie enough to confirm what they already knew. The Gosnells had kidnapped her after seeing her at her mailbox and held her in the bunker. When she first arrived there she had been imprisoned with June Spencer. The Gosnells had been arguing so fiercely about whether or not to keep Isabelle that Sherri had unwittingly left the girls with a flashlight for two whole days. It had been Isabelle’s idea to give June her tongue piercing after she heard the Gosnells talking about selling June. It was her only way to send a message in the event that June somehow escaped. Once they took June and started administering the drugs, her memories took on the same flash-cut quality as Ginger Blackwell’s memories. She had escaped after Sherri was no longer there to administer the drugs on a regular basis, and had wandered through the woods for some time before coming across Misty.

  “Take me through it, Miss Derossi,” Holcomb said to Misty, his tone so gentle Josie wanted to slap him across the face. But then she realized that there was no reason for him not to be gentle with Misty. She had found Isabelle and kept her safe.

  “Well, I was driving down Moss Valley Road,” she said, referring to one of the rural roads that ran past the Gosnell property between the strip club and Denton’s central area. “It was early in the morning. I was leaving work, you know, the night shift.”

  “What do you do for a living, Miss Derossi?” asked Holcomb.

  Misty stroked her dog’s head. “I’m a dancer at Foxy Tails.”

  One of Holcomb’s eyebrows lifted. “Foxy Tails?”

  “It’s a strip club,” Josie said pointedly, unable to stop herself.

  Misty glared at her.

  Holcomb watched the two of them stare icily at each other for a long moment before posing another question. “What time of the morning were you on the road, Miss Derossi?”

  Slowly, Misty turned her attention back to Holcomb. “It was probably around five. I don’t usually work that late, but we had a lot of private parties that night. Anyway, I was going slow ’cause of the deer, you know? They’re always running out. I almost hit her. She ran out just like a deer. Stark naked.”

  “Who?”

  “Isabelle. At first I didn’t know who she was. She scared the shit out of me. I braked just in time not to hit her, and got out. She was screaming and just, you know, totally freaked
out. She wouldn’t let me touch her. I was going to call 911, but my battery was dead.”

  “What did you do?” Holcomb asked.

  “I had a jacket in the car so I gave her that. I stood by the side of the road and talked to her. She said she was Isabelle Coleman and someone had taken her but she wasn’t sure who. She kept talking about someone putting a needle in her arm so she wouldn’t remember. She was really freaked out. Like, hysterical.”

  “Did she get in the car with you?”

  “Well, yeah, eventually. I said I would take her to the police or the hospital. She said she just wanted to go home. I said a lot of people were looking for her but she should really go to a hospital before she went home. To get checked out, you know?’

  “But you didn’t make it to a hospital,” Holcomb pointed out.

  Misty glanced over at Josie and Noah briefly, and then back at Holcomb. Her tiny dog sighed in its sleep. “She got in the car, and I started driving. All of a sudden she started saying she could smell one of them.”

  “One of who?”

  Misty held her dog tighter to her body. “One of the men, she said. She said she thought there were a lot of men who, you know, did stuff to her. She said where she was she couldn’t really see because they kept her in the dark, and even when they took her out of the dark, the light dazzled her eyes so much she didn’t get a good look at any of them. But she could smell them. She said she… She said she smelled one of them in my car.”

  “Ray said he was never there,” Josie said. Or had he lied about that as well? They hadn’t found him on any of Gosnell’s videos.

  Wide-eyed, Misty turned to Josie. “Not Ray,” she said. “Dusty.”

  Before Josie could respond, Holcomb said, “Officer Branson?”

  Misty turned back to him. “Yeah. He had been in my car that morning. He came by my work, and we went out to the car.”

  Holcomb looked perplexed. “For what?”

  “It was for sex, wasn’t it?” Josie interjected. “You were sleeping with Dusty too? Ray thought you were in a relationship, Misty.”

  Misty was all wide-eyed innocence. “We were in a relationship. We were going to move in together.” Her eyes welled up with tears. “We were going to get married.”

  And yet, Ray wouldn’t sign the divorce papers to end things once and for all between him and Josie. Had he had reservations about things with Misty? Or had he just been reluctant to let go of a relationship that had lasted almost all of his life? Josie slapped a palm on the table, making everyone jump. Misty’s little chi-wiener dog popped its sleepy head up to see what the commotion was. “Then why were you fucking Dusty in your car?”

  Noah said, “Boss.”

  “It wasn’t something we planned,” Misty said. “Ray and I were already together. One night Dusty and I got drunk together and things just kind of happened. We were going to stop once Ray and I got married.”

  “Did Ray know?” Josie asked accusingly. Somewhere in the recesses of her mind she wondered why she even cared. But she couldn’t stop herself.

  “I don’t know,” Misty said. “I didn’t tell him. I don’t think Dusty did. Look, the stuff that happened with Dusty didn’t really mean anything. I loved Ray. It was just that Dusty was under a lot of stress. He said he needed it.”

  Josie said, “Oh my God.”

  Noah put a hand on her shoulder. “Boss.”

  Holcomb said, “Okay, okay. That’s not really germane to the issue at hand. Officer Branson had been in your car, and Miss Coleman said she could smell him… or, to be more accurate, Miss Coleman advised that she could smell the scent of one of her rapists. You believed it was Officer Branson because he had most recently been in your car?”

  “Yes,” Misty said.

  “So what did you do at that point?”

  She looked down at her dog. Its eyes were trained on her face, alert and tuned to her emotions. “Ray had told me that he thought Nick Gosnell was… taking women and pimping them out and that a lot of guys on the force knew.”

  “What?” Josie said. “When did he tell you that?”

  “The day before that. He had just told me. He was really rattled over it. He thought maybe Gosnell had Isabelle, but he didn’t know what to do, ’cause he said everyone was in on it. He said guys had been killed over the whole thing. He was worried about what would happen to me if he blew the whistle or whatever. He never specifically said that Dusty knew, just that a lot of guys knew. So when Isabelle said she smelled Dusty, I knew. I knew he was involved. I realized I couldn’t just take her to the police. So I took her home. To my house.”

  “Why didn’t you call Ray?” Josie asked.

  “I did. I called and asked him if Dusty was involved in the Gosnell thing, and he lied and said he wasn’t. So I thought, why would he lie? Why would he protect Dusty?”

  “Because they’ve been best friends since kindergarten,” Josie said.

  “Ladies,” Holcomb interjected. He asked Misty, “Did you tell Ray Quinn that you had Coleman?”

  “No. I didn’t know what to do. So I called the chief.”

  Noah said, “But how did you know the chief wasn’t involved too?”

  Misty shifted uncomfortably in her chair. The dog whined. “Well, when Ray’s friends found out that Ray and I were, you know, in a relationship, all of a sudden they all started showing up at the club. It was weird, like they wanted to check me out or something. It got to the point where it was a little creepy with some of them. Anyway, the chief never came to the club. Ever. But I met him a couple of times. I had brought Ray some coffee and food to the station during the Coleman search.”

  “Oh, but not Dusty?” Josie asked.

  “Boss, please.”

  “Chief Quinn,” Holcomb said.

  Misty shot her a dirty look and went on as if she hadn’t spoken. “I called and asked for him directly. They must have thought I was his wife ’cause they didn’t even ask who I was. I told him what was going on. He came right over. He said he had an idea that something strange was going on in his town, but he didn’t know what. He said he wasn’t sure how far things went, and until he sorted it all out he wanted me and Isabelle to hide. So he took us to his lodge. He said if he didn’t come back for us in two days, I should call Josie and only Josie. From the landline, not from my cell phone.”

  “Did he say why?”

  “He said she was the only person in this godforsaken town he could still trust.”

  Chapter Seventy-Seven

  On the day of Ray’s funeral, Josie woke at five in the morning. She tried on a half dozen variations of funeral attire before finally settling on a simple sleeveless black dress with a pencil skirt. Around her neck was the diamond pendant that Ray had given her before they went away to college. He had saved up for months to buy it for her. It was his parting promise to her that they would return to one another. She spent an hour pinning her hair back and then letting it flow down her back and then pinning it back again before finally deciding to leave it down. Ray had always liked it that way. She stood before the full-length mirror in her bathroom and thought how silly it was to be dressing up for the funeral of a man who had betrayed her, cheated on her, and then been complicit in the abduction of Isabelle Coleman.

  Her Ray.

  She slid into a pair of black heels. He had always loved her in heels. She thought about pinning her hair back up as a concession to the conflicting emotions she was having about him. But no, she decided. Today she wasn’t laying to rest the man who had wronged her. She was laying to rest the sweet boy who had saved her from her childhood nightmare, who had let her push every boundary he had, who had loved her in spite of the bad things that had happened to her. Today she was laying to rest the man she had married—decent, honest, loyal Ray. She might never reconcile the boy and the husband she loved with the man Ray had become in the last year or so of his life. But she would have to say goodbye to him. She had no choice.

  A knock sounded from her front door. She
took her time getting downstairs, expecting Trinity but instead finding Noah on her doorstep. He wore his sling over an impressive black suit. His brown hair was expertly tousled. Only his face looked pained. Her heart leaped into her throat. “What is it?” she asked, thinking of Lisette, of Luke.

  Please, oh God, please. I can’t lose another person.

  “Josie,” he said. “Can I come in?”

  “Just tell me.”

  “Alton Gosnell died in his sleep last night.”

  She sagged against the doorway. Noah stepped forward and took her elbow with his left hand, guiding her inside and nudging the door closed behind them with his foot. He directed her toward her living room but froze when he saw it was empty.

  She smiled sheepishly. “I don’t have any furniture.”

  He looked behind them, put a hand on her lower back and steered her in the opposite direction, toward the kitchen. She let him pull out a kitchen chair for her and pour her a glass of water. She, at least, had glassware. He sat down across from her. “You okay?”

  She took a sip of water. “That son of a bitch,” she said.

  “I’m sorry,” Noah said. “Not that he’s dead, but that we didn’t have a chance to put him away. The director of nursing called this morning. She said his infection had been improving. A bed had opened up at Denton Memorial. They were going to move him today. She said he was finally well enough to be moved. He wasn’t in the best health to begin with, but she thought he had turned a corner, might have a few years left.”

  “My grandmother said he would never make it to prison. But still, I hoped…” she trailed off. A moment passed. She met his eyes. “Noah, would you mind driving me to Rockview?”

  He stood and offered his good arm. “Of course,” he said. “You and Lisette can ride with me to the service.”

  * * *

  Lisette waited for them in the lobby, dressed in a smart gray skirt suit, a wide-brimmed black hat elegantly covering her gray curls. When she saw them enter, she sprang up, clutching the handles of her walker and making a beeline for the double doors. “Let’s go,” she told Josie and Noah, pushing past them into the parking lot. Josie and Noah looked at one another, shrugged and followed her out. Josie sat in the back with Lisette as Noah drove them to the funeral home.