by Jen Blood
Bishop said no.
I thought of Red Grivois, a retired cop haunted by the broken bodies of two girls he hadn’t been able to save. How many others’ lives had been destroyed by whoever had killed these girls? How many more interviews would we have to do like this?
And what did my father have to do with any of it?
Juarez was quiet as we pulled out of the drive, back past the rolling hills and the chestnut horses.
“They thought it was a kidnapping at first,” he said out of the blue. He stopped at the end of the drive, staring blankly at the road ahead. “That settlement Brian was talking about was huge—it was in all the papers. They waited a solid week for a ransom demand.”
“So whoever this was—or is—has no interest in money,” I concluded.
“That much is clear, at least,” Juarez agreed. “The killer has never made any attempt to contact the families, keeps his victims’ bodies well hidden after the fact, doesn’t seem to feel the need to be in the public eye or involved with the investigation like so many serial killers. Dennis Rader, Javed Iqbal, Gacy… They were all bold, occasionally even flamboyant. Lived to taunt the cops and shock the public.”
“So the act of killing is the reward for him,” I guessed. “It’s not about the publicity.”
“There’s something else that’s been bothering me. The bodies they found buried in Canada were wrapped,” he said.
I looked at him in surprise. “What do you mean?”
“In a sheet, buried with their faces covered. He tortured them when they were alive, but the way he disposed of the bodies suggests he felt some remorse. Or at least showed the victims some respect after their deaths.”
I considered this. Bright sunshine had given way to dark clouds rolling in fast, the heat as oppressive as ever. I pulled my hair up off my neck and stared at the approaching storm. When I looked back at Juarez, he was watching me. I gave him an awkward smile.
“What a shitty case,” I said.
He nodded. “It is.”
“Is it the worst you’ve ever seen?”
He shook his head.
“Top five?”
He thought for a second or two before shaking his head again.
“Top ten?” I persisted.
“Top ten,” he agreed.
I shook my head. “Jesus. How do you do this day after day? I mean, I’m assuming there aren’t a lot of happy endings for homicide cases—the final bell’s pretty much rung by the time you come in.”
“It’s a good ending if we can catch someone. Prevent them from killing again. It’s not a happy ending… But it’s a good one. Sometimes, it’s the only solace you can provide a victim’s family.”
Something about the way he said it made me think this wasn’t just idle speculation on his part; he was speaking from experience. I thought back to a rainy night in Littlehope last spring in Juarez’s arms. A tan line on his ring finger. You’re married, I’d said. Not anymore. Not for a long time.
“Your wife…” I began.
There was no guile in his eyes when he looked at me, no mask. “Lucia. She was killed six years ago, in Guatemala. She’d been volunteering at a school there.”
“I’m sorry.”
“Yes. As am I.” He disappeared for a second or two, lost in his memories. Then, he met my eye and smiled. “It was a long time before I could think of anything that reminded me of her. Remember any of the reasons that I loved her.”
“But you can now?”
“It seemed dishonorable not to. I couldn’t protect her before she died; the least I could do was honor her memory after she was gone.”
Honor. It wasn’t a word people used that much anymore, but it seemed completely natural hearing it fall from Juarez’s lips—a tenet he held fast to. “And you found the person who did it? The man who killed her?”
He shook his head. “Not yet. But I will.”
He put the car back in gear before I could comment any further, already speculating about the woman who had first stolen Jack Juarez’s heart, and the tragic end that she met. She would have been beautiful, I was sure. Someone who shared his faith, his unshakable sense of right and wrong.
After a few minutes of silence, Juarez now lost in his own thoughts, I turned the radio on. I barely winced when Clay Aiken launched into Somewhere Over the Rainbow. Hell, if I spent enough time in Juarez’s dark, dark world, I suspected I might even start to see the charm in Taylor Swift.
◊◊◊◊◊
The remaining four interviews that day weren’t any more helpful than the first, and they definitely weren’t any more fun. After Brian Bishop’s reaction, Juarez wisely took Hank Gendreau’s photo out of the mix in his Big Book of Suspects. Two mothers we talked to thought they’d seen my father’s face before, but they couldn’t say for sure. Beyond the loss of their daughters and the fact that they lived in northern Maine, there didn’t seem to be any tie between the victims’ families. The Bishops were a respectable, upper middle-class family, while eighteen-year-old Grace Starke’s father was cooling his heels in jail on drug charges when she was taken. Seventeen-year-old Becca Martineau was a high school soccer star active in student government; nineteen-year-old Stacy Long was a high school dropout whom everyone thought had run away until her body was discovered in that grave just north of the Maine/Canada border. One of the victims was still unknown, but Riley Thibodeau was a cheerleader from Madawaska who survived lead poisoning at eighteen only to be murdered in the woods two years later.
The only thing all the victims had in common was the fact that they were all young, pretty, active girls of a certain age. And they’d all suffered unspeakable physical pain and mental torment before they were finally killed and buried in a shallow grave deep in the woods. And, of course, the prime suspect in each of their murders just happened to be my father.
Things lightened up on the drive back to the Budget Inn, thanks in large part to Juarez, who seemed to take murder and mutilation in stride. It was a little disconcerting, actually. We stopped for dinner at a dingy roadside diner with red and white checked tablecloths and mind-blowing bacon Swiss burgers. I whipped his delectable ass at a game of pinball at the back of the diner, all the while grilling him about the case.
When we sat down for dessert, I pulled out the files again.
“We should go over what we have so far,” I said.
He looked around, a spoonful of ice cream halfway to his mouth. “Here?”
“Here,” I confirmed. I dug out pen and paper and started writing. “We can start with Erin and Jeff Lincoln’s disappearance in 1970.”
“That sounds reasonable.”
I wrote down Erin Lincoln murdered: October 1970
“Then came Jeff Lincoln’s stay in the psychiatric ward in Michigan,” Juarez said.
“1972, right?” He nodded without consulting any notes. I wrote it down.
“And then he drops off the radar,” I said.
“When did your father join the Payson Church?”
“1978.”
“And he never said anything about where he’d been before that?”
I shook my head. He didn’t say anything, eying my notes. I finally gave in and scribbled: Adam Solomon joins Payson Church of Tomorrow: December 1978
“And then in 1982, Jenny Bishop disappears from her house in Houlton, Maine,” Juarez said.
“And five years later, Hank Gendreau finds his daughter murdered in the woods. According to Gendreau, Jeff Lincoln was there.”
From there, we outlined the remaining disappearances Juarez had dug up from ’81 to ’90. He had specific dates for all of them, but I was lost when it came to figuring out where my father might have been for each one. The Paysons lived on an island ten miles off the Maine coast; we prayed and baked and grew tomatoes. Calendars weren’t really a priority.
When I was done writing everything out, the timeline was holier than the good book itself. Juarez and Diggs were both right about one thing, though: the only consi
stent thread in any of it seemed to be Jeff Lincoln. He was with Erin Lincoln; Hank Gendreau claimed he’d been at the scene the day Ashley was killed; his fingerprints placed him at the body dump in Canada, and at several of the crime scenes of other victims along the way.
“Erin and Jeff went to Eagle Lake alone the weekend they disappeared?” Juarez asked out of the blue.
“That’s the story.”
He didn’t look convinced.
“Why?” I asked. “You think someone else might have been there?”
“I know you said they were close, but it still doesn’t seem like the kind of trip a fifteen-year-old boy would take his little sister on without a reason.”
“That reason being?”
He shrugged. “I have no idea, really. But having been a fifteen-year-old boy myself, I can tell you that, if I had a sister, there were probably only two things that could have convinced me to take off into the woods with her.”
“Unless you really are a saint, a girl has to be at least one of those things.”
He nodded. “Or a party.”
“Or some combination of the two?” I guessed. It was a good point—one I should have thought of before. Score one for the Fed. “Okay… So, whatever the reason was, we know at the very least that Jeff and Erin went camping that weekend. Then in 1987, Hank—” I stopped. “Do you have anything in that big thick file of yours about the cops questioning Hank after the Lincoln murder?”
The waitress approached while Juarez was leafing through the file and left us with the check. Three minutes in, he’d found what I was looking for.
“Here it is. I don’t think they questioned him after the body was found—just when Jeff and Erin first went missing. Since he’d been in Quebec at the time, they never followed up.”
He handed the pages to me. I scanned through until a single name stopped me dead in my tracks. Juarez had gone to take a powder; by the time he came back, I was on my feet with my jacket in hand, ready to declare the entire case solved.
“What?” he asked cautiously.
I looked up from cruising the white pages on my iPhone. “We need to get back to Black Falls,” I said.
“For?”
“Will Rainier.” Juarez looked at me blankly.
“Will Rainier was Hank’s alibi when Erin Lincoln went missing.” He still wasn’t making the connection. I reminded myself that just because I’d committed the entire case to memory didn’t mean the rest of the world had. “Will Rainier was the third member of their trio in the picture Hank showed me at the prison. He also happened to be the only suspect in the Ashley Gendreau murder, besides Hank himself.”
Chapter Nine
Diggs, Einstein, and the Jeep were all missing when Juarez and I got back to the motel. Juarez returned to his room pleading official FBI business—whatever that meant—and I tried to reach Diggs for an hour before he finally deigned to call back, at just past nine that night. I could hear a crowd in the background and Waylon Jennings on the jukebox. It took a couple of false starts shouting over one another before I heard a door close and things quieted on the other end of the line.
“Where the hell are you?” I asked.
“I got a lead—I’m just down the road a ways. Grab the Fed and come meet me.”
I tried to tell him about the Will Rainier tie-in I’d found between the Lincoln and Gendreau murders, but there was way too much excitement on Diggs’ end for me to get far. I gave up, got directions on where to meet him, and went to fetch Juarez.
The Black Falls VFW was on a dead end street in the center of town, just over the railroad tracks. There was no parking lot per se, which meant trucks and beaten-down SUVs lined both sides of the road going back a good half mile. Juarez and I parked on the next street over, in front of a trailer with freshly-mown grass and a muddy ATV in the yard. What had been an uncomfortably warm day had cooled to sweater weather, though a cluster of boys we passed on the street were still playing soccer in shorts and t-shirts. Juarez and I took a shortcut along the railroad tracks through patchy woods, and came out the other side to find a couple of teenagers locked in a steamy embrace and a few others with cigarettes and beer hanging out by a giant boulder and a few scrubby spruce trees. Apparently, this was the place to be on a Friday night in Black Falls.
The jukebox was going strong and the party was going stronger when Juarez and I walked through the front door of the VFW. A giant American flag, a slightly smaller Acadian one, and three mounted moose heads were the first things patrons saw on their way inside. Diggs was holding court at a pool table at the center of the action, a pool cue in one hand, cigarette dangling from his lips, fedora perched far back on his head. He winked at me as I joined him at the table.
“I found the party.”
Great. I eyed the nearly-empty glass at the edge of the table.
“Just Coke, Mom,” he said. “I’m soaking up the local color.”
“I’m happy for you. What’d you do with my dog?”
He pointed to a pretty, dark-haired girl who couldn’t have been more than twenty, working behind the bar. She had a gap between her teeth, a sizable chest, and a rose tattoo that twisted around her muscular left arm. “Rosie’s taking care of him.”
Sure enough, when I went over and looked behind the bar, Einstein was lying comfortably at the girl’s feet. He got up as soon as he saw me and ambled over to say hello, tail wagging. Rosie poured two drinks without looking at either one, her eyes on me instead.
“Il est bon chien, oui? Great dog.”
“He is. Thanks for looking out for him.”
She finished pouring the drinks, then said something in French to an older, significantly fleshier woman behind the bar. Apparently her shift was up, because she handed me a couple of beers without asking for our order, poured another Coke for Diggs, and followed me over to the pool table. She sidled up to Diggs with unmistakable interest, nodding toward the table.
“We playing?”
I looked at Juarez, who shrugged agreeably. He’d changed from his FBI gear to jeans and a fitted black tee. It fitted very well.
Diggs racked ‘em up while a Nickelback triple play started on the jukebox. I checked out the bar, where an odd mix of mellowed old-timers and hard-drinking youngsters rubbed elbows over beer and French fries drowned in gravy. Luke Saucier—the resident grave keeper—was at one end of the bar, his sister nowhere in sight. He sat apart from everyone else, a beer in one hand and a bowl of pretzels in front of him. I smiled and gave a little bit of a wave in his direction when our eyes met. He waved back, then frowned and focused on his pretzels.
Once we started playing, I was relieved to find that, despite her age, Rosie wasn’t the kind of girl who needed a man to guide her through every corner shot. I’m no Minnesota Fats, but I can hold my own in a pinch; she made me look like a chump, and didn’t make Diggs look much better. In between, she still managed to cop a feel or flash her cleavage every time she passed Diggs.
Juarez proved surprisingly good with a pool cue in his hand. He loosened up after a couple of beers, moving with ease around the table as he chose his next shot. I hip-checked him when he rejoined me after his second successful jump shot.
“Where’d you learn to play like that? I thought you were a good Catholic boy.”
He leaned in, his breath warm in my ear. “I’m not that good.”
My game faltered after that.
Half an hour later, we were getting ready to wrap up our game when Juarez pulled me aside, suddenly serious.
“That man over there,” he said quietly. “At the bar. Do you know him?”
I looked in the direction he’d indicated. Luke Saucier was staring at me openly now, something haunted in his gaze. “Diggs and I met him and his sister yesterday—the Sauciers,” I said. “They were friends with Erin Lincoln. I think he’s got some kind of autism… He’s harmless.”
“No.” He shook his head, subtly taking my elbow to turn me a little to the left. “Not that guy. Tha
t one.”
On the other side of the bar, about four seats over from Luke, was a mountain of a man with a full-on Grizzly Adams beard and small, piercing eyes. He dropped his gaze the second I looked at him.
I snagged Rosie on her next pass through after molesting Diggs. “That guy at the bar—the one who looks like he had gravel for breakfast and now he’s having trouble passing the stones… With the beard?”
She followed my gaze, neither of us taking much care to be subtle. “Will?” she asked.
My heart may have stopped, for just a second there. “Will Rainier?”
“Oui. He practically lives here. You know him?”
Not yet, but I planned to. I started toward the bar, but Juarez caught me by the elbow and reeled me back in. “Where are you going?”
“You heard her: That’s Will Rainier. I’m going to talk to him.”
Juarez pulled me a little farther aside. “I’ll talk to him tomorrow. Not here.”
“Are you nuts? He’s half in the bag, not expecting it, and he’s in a public place. In my world, that’s what we call a perfect storm. I just want to ask him a couple of questions.”
Juarez shook his head. “Just trust me, all right? This isn’t the way to go about it—I’ll have a conversation with him, but this isn’t the time.”
“So you have a conversation with him some other time. I’m talking to him now.”
I started toward him again. Juarez blocked my path. Over his shoulder, I could see Will Rainier watching the entire exchange. This time when he realized I was watching him, he didn’t look away. His eyes had all the warmth of a rattlesnake, and none of the charm.
“Listen to me,” Juarez said quietly. “Whatever we may know, I don’t want to tip him off until I’m able to confirm a couple of things through my office and do a proper interview. Tomorrow. Away from here. If you want to find out what really happened to your father and his sister, you need to trust that I know what I’m doing.”
I caught Diggs’ eye. He was watching all of this with great interest, waiting to see what I would do next. I looked at Rainier one more time. His mouth quirked up in a faint half-smile, as though he knew exactly what was happening.