Savage Lake

by Dan Ames

  “He knows now though, right? Any girl goes missing. I hear immediately. We investigate immediately.”

  She nodded. “He knows and he’s feeling pretty bad that he didn’t act faster for this one.”

  I put a hand on Peyton’s shoulder. “He wasn’t the one who did this to that girl. Hell, we could be eating lunch next to this guy every day and not realize it. What matters is that we go forward and leave no stones unturned. We take all leads seriously. That’s how we’ll catch this killer, not beating ourselves up for something we didn’t know yesterday.”

  Peyton nodded. “I know I haven’t been…” She let her words trail off. Her eyes darted over the ground as if the right words might be found there. Then she shrugged. “I know I’m kind of, uh, laid back. About the job. Nothing ever happens here, y’know? And then Maddie goes off a cliff and you sort of feel like what’s the point?

  “And now this girl’s dead, and--”

  “I’m not saying I wouldn’t appreciate seeing you with a little more spring in your step,” I said. “But playing the ‘if only’ game is going to hurt just one person: you. And it’ll help no one. Don’t ‘should’ all over yourself.”

  Peyton gave a small laugh. “I’ve never heard that one. ‘Should’ all over yourself. Nice.”

  I smiled. “All right, sounds like I have another call to make, to Emily’s parents.” I pulled in a breath. “Then let’s see if management will let us into Emily’s hotel room. Maybe she got a note, too.

  Chapter Twenty

  Talking to the second girl’s parents was no easier than the first. Maybe harder because they had called us. They understandably felt their daughter could have been saved if only we’d acted immediately when they first notified us. I told them we were fairly certain that by then it was already too late.

  That didn’t make anything easier.

  It didn’t make them less upset or less angry. Yelling at me didn’t either, but I let them. It was part of the job.

  I asked them if Emily had a boyfriend, if she knew anyone in the area, and if they could think of anyone who would want to hurt her.

  With the answers to my questions and the names of the friends she’d been traveling with so we could follow up with them, I assured them that I’d be in touch if we learned anything new.

  Then I found Peyton and we started at the hotel. We had called before we left the station and had gotten ahold of the girl’s friends: a guy and a girl this time. They were waiting for us in the lobby when we arrived.

  Both were dressed for a day in the woods. Shorts, sturdy boots and they smelled like sunscreen and bug spray. We moved into the hotel manager’s office and I gave them the news that I could tell they were already expecting.

  “Dead?” the girl repeated. “But how?”

  I gave them the briefest of descriptions.

  The guy jumped in. “Wait. You mean like that other girl? In the lake?” He glanced at the girl and the two of them instinctively moved closer together.

  “Yes,” I responded. “It looks like Emily died in a similar manner.”

  They both sat still, shock obvious on their faces.

  The girl started shaking her head. “We should have made her come with us. When we heard about the other girl. We should have insisted…”

  “But how?” the guy asked. “Did he grab her off the street? That other girl was at a bar, right? A party girl? Emily wasn’t.”

  “He’s right,” the girl added. “Emily’s idea of a big night was a Diet Coke and an 800-page novel.”

  I hadn’t realized our first victim was being portrayed as a party girl in the news and I wasn’t happy about it, but correcting this pair wouldn’t fix that. I ignored that part of their questions and addressed the first.

  “We don’t know how,” I responded. “We were hoping you might know something.”

  Sadly, it seemed neither of them knew anything. They were in Good Isle as part of a research team, working on their master’s in environmental science.

  “Emily came along just to get away. Her parents are kind of stifling. We were going to go visit some lighthouses this weekend. She was a history major…” The girl shook her head, obviously trying to process that her friend was gone. That their plans were for naught.

  “We are in the woods, most days,” the guy added. “We saw Emily at dinner and then sometimes she’d get up before we headed out and we’d see her at breakfast.”

  “How long have you been here?” I asked.

  “A week.”

  The last time they had seen Emily was two nights before at dinner.

  “Did she say anything about what she’d done that day? If she’d met anyone?”

  They exchanged guilty looks.

  The guy explained, “We’d been fighting. No one said much of anything.”

  “With Emily?”

  The girl shook her head. “No.” She pointed at the guy. “The two of us. Dinner was awkward.”

  I nodded. Which maybe explained why Emily had gone off with the killer. Being alone or feeling alone in a strange place might have made her an easier target.

  I didn’t say any of this to them. I could see they were already thinking it.

  Plenty of guilt to go around today.

  We left them to work through their grief and headed upstairs to Emily’s hotel room, which she’d had to herself.

  The bed was made.

  Peyton picked up a trash can and looked inside. “Empty,” she commented.

  “Looks like the maid is the last person who was in here,” I said.

  We walked around, searching through the drawers where Emily had neatly stacked her clothing and going through her books, which included a romance novel and three books on local history. I held one up. “History major.”

  Peyton nodded.

  We spent another hour searching every nook and cranny. Behind the bed, under the bed, even inside the toilet tank. We found two bobby pins, a used tissue, and the plastic lid to a fast food restaurant cup. All of which had probably been missed by the cleaning staff for months if not years.

  Finally, Peyton leaned against the wall and stared at me.

  I closed my eyes briefly before reopening them and admitting what we both already knew. “Nothing. We got nothing.”

  Chapter Twenty-One

  The next morning Peyton, Donovan and I met to discuss what we’d learned. Or not learned.

  When he entered my office, I could tell by Donovan’s face his news was no better than ours.

  “Well, we canvassed all of Good Isle. Every bar and restaurant. Hit the gas stations and fast food joints too.”

  “Grocery stores?”

  He nodded.

  “Send them back out.”

  Both Donovan and Peyton looked at me, incredulous.

  Donovan replied, “Where? I told you we went everywhere.”

  “Did they talk to everyone?” I asked. “Every employee? People work different shifts, different days. People remember things they thought they didn’t know.”

  He shook his head and muttered under his breath. Peyton followed him, looking uncertain.

  So, they both thought I was crazy and wasting their time. It didn’t matter. Someone had to have seen this guy. He wasn’t a freaking ghost. He had to eat. Had to live somewhere. Had to talk to people. Someone would have to remember him at some point.

  Maybe the guy wasn’t in Good Isle or didn’t stay here. Maybe he just hunted here. My officers had been everywhere. Maybe the guy saw them. Maybe he was smart enough that he kept to himself anyway. And certainly, smart enough not to show up while we were so visible.

  It was frustrating. We had no leads. No witnesses, no new evidence, nothing. Just a general description and a sample of handwriting.

  I stared down at the sketch which I’d kept on my desk for inspiration. There had to be a way. As I’d already concluded, the guy wasn’t a ghost. He ate and slept just like all of us, and if he was just driving in to hunt, he still had to buy gas for his bo
at, park his car… live.

  And living meant people seeing you. Somewhere.

  We just had to get creative.

  How did people go about getting the attention of a lot of people at one time?

  There was a whole industry for that.

  Advertising.

  Time to stop playing it safe and by the rules. Time to turn up the heat on this guy big time.

  I was going to buy… or hopefully get for free… the biggest, most widespread form of advertising that existed.

  Billboards.

  After a brief search online, I found one media company that managed most of the billboards in this part of Michigan.

  There was a phone number and I placed the call, asked to speak to a manager. After I explained who I was and the current state of the murder case, he agreed to give me space on all of their unrented boards. Some might think I’d totally lost my mind and that plastering a suspected killer’s face all over Good Isle and the surrounding areas wasn’t going to cause a panic, or maybe more importantly, outrage among our very dependent-on-tourism businesses.

  The wording had been essential, though, as I’d chosen “person of interest” as opposed to serial killer.

  But the public would know. I got the sketch and a snip from the note scanned and sent electronically over to the billboard company.

  Within hours they were working on our boards.

  Two days later, I started getting calls.

  Chapter Twenty-Two

  The billboards themselves caused a bit of a stir. Social media and the Good Isle gossip network were on fire discussing what they meant and who exactly the guy might be. What case he might be connected to, although they all knew. The two dead girls were all anyone in town was talking about.

  My first call was someone who was certain their next-door neighbor was the man that we wanted. I wasted some time sending an officer out only to discover that the guy bore only a passing resemblance to the sketch and apparently, the two neighbors had been in a feud for a while over something to do with property lines. The officer concluded that this was Neighbor A’s way of getting back at Neighbor B. Or maybe their feud just made him willing to believe the absolute worst of the guy.

  Wasting time on it was annoying, but it told me the billboards were doing what I wanted them to do. They were being seen. Our guy’s face was being seen.

  More calls came in, none of them lead anywhere—but at least these people were earnest in thinking that the person they were reporting might be our killer, or at least the person on the billboard.

  The billboard hadn’t said who the man featured was, just that we were looking for him. Although, as expected, everyone suspected the sketch was of the two girls’ killer. This definitely added a layer of hysteria to some of the calls.

  In fact, some calls weren’t about the billboard at all. They were parents wondering if it was safe for their daughters to go to the movies. Or business owners bitching us out for scaring their customers.

  By the end of the day, I was feeling beat and not at all popular. Not with my officers, not with the town. Not even with myself.

  It was late when I dragged myself home.

  I hadn’t expected company, but Dawkins was sitting in my yard in one of the lawn chairs. There was a pizza box on his lap and he was fast asleep.

  He looked so peaceful, I thought about leaving him there, but I wasn’t sure he would have appreciated waking up to my neighbors staring at him in the morning.

  I nudged him with my knee. “You awake?”

  He jerked upright. “Yep.” Then he blinked and rubbed his eyes.

  I laughed. It was good after the day that I’d had to have something to laugh about.

  “That pizza for me?” I asked.

  He glanced down as if surprised to find the box on his lap. “Oh, yeah… what time is it?”

  I glanced at my watch. “Eleven forty-six.” Almost midnight and I had to be back at the station by six. Not much time to do whatever Dawkins had planned.

  He seemed to realize this too. “Damn and you’re probably going back in…?”

  “By six.” I didn’t want to tell him that he couldn’t stay and I honestly wanted him to stay anyway, but I also needed sleep, if I could get any with the way my brain was spinning.

  “Oh, then… I guess I should go…” He looked at me expectantly.

  I felt the corners of my mouth raise. “Since you are here… and you have the pizza, you might as well hang around while I eat it.”

  “Wait while you eat it?” he asked, rising from the chair and following me into my house.

  In the kitchen, I took the box from him and set it on the counter. “Yeah, me.” I paused a beat. “But I’ll leave you some crust.”

  “Wow… thanks.” He shook his head and then lifted the lid to the box and snagged a piece. I whacked at him half-heartedly with a wooden spoon, then we both laughed, grabbed some beers and went into the living room to settle on the couch and eat.

  “It’s cold,” he said, after taking a bite.

  “Yeah,” I agreed, but my mind was already wandering. Already drifting back to our case, or lack of case.

  He sighed and dropped his half-eaten slice back into the box. “You want to talk?”

  I shook my head. He didn’t need to hear everything we didn’t know. Didn’t need to hear the doubts that were circling around my conviction that we could catch this guy, and my hopes that we’d do it before he killed again.

  I finished the slice of pizza and then rested my head on his shoulder. This… the silence, the knowledge that I was with someone who understood my need for it… was what I needed right now. I closed my eyes just for a minute… and I was out.

  Chapter Twenty-Three

  When I woke up the next morning, I was lying on my couch with an afghan tucked in around me. My phone’s alarm was beeping. I shut it off and realized Dawkins must have set it for me. Five thirty a.m. Just enough time to brush my teeth and head out.

  He knew me well.

  The pizza and beer had been put away too and he’d locked my front door behind him. The man was, I was starting to suspect, a keeper.

  It was six in the morning when I made it into the station, ready to deal with another round of craziness.

  Officer Lewis raised his hand when he saw me, and held out his phone receiver.

  “Chief, I think we got a good one.”

  I hurried over. Lewis had put the guy on hold. “He says that the man looks like this contractor who did some work for him. The guy on the phone’s renovating a cabin, and he recognized the handwriting too, says he remembered it from a quote he got because of how unique the writing was. Says the guy was a drywall hanger from a nearby town.”

  Finally, someone who was able to recognize the sketch and the handwriting. “Get all the information that you can,” I told Lewis.

  Five minutes later, Lewis was off the phone and in my office.

  I was already feeling funny. Drywall contractor from another town. There had to be a few of those… but not that many. And, of course, even if this contractor was the same contractor who Dawkins and I had met with in my basement, it didn’t mean he was our killer.

  Still, by the time Lewis handed me the sheet of paper with his notes from his research, I had an impending sense of recognition.

  The name leapt off the page. Jake Terrace of Dave’s Drywall.

  Same guy. My drywall contractor who had stood in my house and talked to me for a good twenty minutes was potentially a suspect in these murders.

  Sometimes the universe just likes to smack you in the face with some bricks and have a good laugh.

  I thought back, trying to remember what the guy looked like.

  Was Terrace the guy last seen with the first victim, or was the power of suggestion swaying my memory?

  I needed a picture to see for myself. I turned to my computer and entered Terrace’s name into the search engine. Seemed there were a thousand men by that name. I typed in the name of his dr
ywall business. His site came up, but there was no picture. I scanned the About page anyway. Terrace certainly made himself sound like an upstanding guy. Local guy who inherited his father’s family business. He was thirty-seven and had been married for eight years. He even had three kids--a four-year-old, three-year-old twins--and a dog. He didn’t list the age of the dog.

  I cleared the search and tried again, this time I added “Michigan” and “rape” to the string.

  A blog post came up, some kind of warning to others, name and shame kind of thing. Possibly pure gossip, but I was just looking for a picture and possibly leads. I clicked through to the post.

  It was written by a woman who claimed that when she was a junior in high school she had dated Jake Terrace. She’d included a prom photo, confirming it was the same Jake Terrace who’d given me my quote and who today’s caller had said looked like the sketch.

  I stared at the photo for a couple of minutes and then motioned Lewis over so he could look at it too.

  “Kind of old,” he commented. “But yeah, that could be the same guy.”

  I scanned the post. According to her account, the night the picture was taken, Terrace had gotten her drunk and raped her while she was passed out. She had gone to a school counselor about it, but he’d convinced her at the time that since she’d been drinking no one would care. That basically it was her fault.

  I growled under my breath. It was a story I’d heard before. Back then, even more so than today, boys were given a pass and girls were judged, especially if alcohol had been involved. Today, things might have gone further with an actual investigation. Or not. It was hard to say, which needless to say pissed me the hell off. I made a note of the site and shut down the laptop with more force than was probably necessary.

  Lewis gave me a cautious look.

  I handed him the note with the site’s url written on it and told him to go look it up. “Then contact her. Get her story. Her whole story.”