First Girl Gone: An absolutely addictive crime thriller with a twist (Detective Charlotte Winters Book 1)

by L. T. Vargus

  The coffee machine coughed a few more times and then fell silent.

  Charlie barely heard it. Didn’t bother pouring herself a cup. She dressed quickly and headed out the door.

  Chapter Fifty-Six

  Charlie parked in the lot next to the public beach. She’d passed a few cars on the ride over, headlights gleaming in the dark of the morning, but this area, out near the water, was utterly dead at this hour. Empty. Motionless save for the water lapping at the sand.

  It was a gray morning. Misty and murky. The predawn twilight was just poking its head over the horizon.

  Down the beach, she could make out the rusting hulk of the Poseidon’s Kingdom Ferris wheel. The skeletal metal thrust up from the land, its rounded top reminding her of a skull.

  The cold breeze rolled off the water to nip at her as she climbed out of the car, reaching right through her jacket as though it had punctured the fabric. She hugged her arms around herself, wishing she’d thought to wear a heavier coat, not to mention a hat and gloves. She’d forgotten how much colder it felt down here by the water. At least she still had a touch of sleep warmth in her core to help fight it off.

  She walked north, crossing the parking lot and moving away from the swimming area where she and Allie had spent hours of their childhood collecting shells, sea glass, Petoskey stones. Her trajectory pointed her toward the secluded area beyond the sand, where the rolling dunes extended to within just a few feet of the shore.

  That was where the bench was. That was where, she supposed, the package would be. Whatever it was.

  Her mind fumbled at the possibilities as she traversed the asphalt parking lot. She kept picturing a small cardboard box there on the bench, perhaps wrapped with twine. But what lay inside?

  A clue. It had to be a clue, didn’t it? That was all she could think of.

  Whoever was sending these emails clearly knew she was working the case of the missing girls. But if they were trying to help, they were being awfully cryptic about it. First the White Rabbit riddle and now this.

  And yet the White Rabbit message had been a clue, one that pointed to the drugs, to the club, to Robbie. And even though they’d ruled Robbie out as a suspect, all of those strands still led back to Kara Dawkins and Amber Spadafore. It was a piece of the puzzle, if not the solution.

  And if that logic held up here, the mystery package would be the same. She hoped.

  Then again, who was to say the person sending the messages was trying to be helpful?

  She stepped off the concrete and onto the moist sand along the shore. The tides kept the beach clear of snow, mercifully leaving her a path to walk. She passed a stand of windswept pines, their craggy trunks jutting up from the banks of sand.

  A big gust of wind ripped off the water and gave Charlie a stiff shove. The force made her feet stutter-step beneath her. Almost like the wind meant to stop her progress, keep her from whatever lay ahead.

  Then the cold rushed over her, clutched at the fleshy parts of her, penetrated the skin to touch her cheekbones and chin and knuckles. Goosebumps fattened everywhere, but they were no help in warming her, no use.

  She pulled her hands up into her sleeves, hugged herself tighter, and pressed on, shivering. The wind didn’t let up. A constant gale blew into her face now, swirled a frigid mist at her. The breeze fluctuated, growing stronger and weaker by the second but never really stopping.

  Charlie didn’t let up either. She leaned into it, fought through it. Persisted. Even with the wet and cold seeming to accumulate on her skin and clothes, she kept going.

  The sky gradually lightened as she progressed, but she could sense no warmth accompanying the rising sun. If anything, the day seemed to grow colder.

  The bench emerged from the void, taking shape little by little as she descended the slope toward the low point where the water and land meshed. Soon she could see the details of the steel bench, the outline of the concrete bed below.

  She squinted as she got closer. Tried to see anything sitting on the bench. She was looking, she realized, for that cardboard box she’d pictured, the one with the twine coiling around it, the one that surely held some clue.

  Instead she saw nothing. An empty park bench.

  She stopped beside it. Brought her hand down, rested it on the back of the seat, touching it as though to reassure herself that her eyes weren’t betraying her somehow. It was really there and really empty.

  That didn’t make sense.

  She remembered the words of the email. Pictured the all-caps text in her head.

  PACKAGE FOR YOU.

  HARBOR BEACH.

  BENCH ON THE BLUFFS.

  YOU KNOW THE PLACE.

  Part of her wanted to sweep her arm across the seat, to verify once again by touch that there was no package there. Nothing at all.

  The cold seemed to sharpen then. A bitter chill sinking deeper into her flesh. And she realized that a creeping awareness accompanied this fresh sense of the cold. Something that left her feeling vulnerable and violated.

  Her skin crawled. The goosebumps refreshing themselves.

  She swiveled her head. Eyes scanning everywhere. Was someone watching her?

  She saw no one. Not even so much as traffic lights or noise in the distance. No movement beyond the churning of the water and the shivering of the dry beach grass.

  The goosebumps only intensified as she took in the desolation. She felt alone. Very alone.

  The shadows elongated around her, their forms somehow turning sinister and strange. She swallowed.

  Why had someone summoned her at this hour? Alone in the gloomy light of the morning.

  Just as she turned to leave, she spotted it—the pale bulk lying on the sand in the distance—even if it took her eyes a moment to fully process what was there.

  She swiveled her head back. Froze. Stared.

  She felt something brush her bottom lip, realizing only after that she’d brought her hand to her mouth. It trembled there just shy of her face.

  The hairs pricked up on the back of her neck, one by one. Quivering with some pulsing energy.

  The bulk lay motionless. Sprawled and pallid.

  Charlie’s shoulders heaved up and down with her breath now. Wind sucking in and out with a grating scrape.

  The color around her shifted, all the drab gray going a couple shades brighter, as though she could instantly see the results of her pupils dilating.

  She had to get closer. Had to know for sure.

  She put one foot in front of the other, shoes sinking into the sand with each step.

  The camera in her mind seemed to zoom in on the mass laid out on the beach. Naked and gray and lying right on the border of where the waves reached their apex and rolled back.

  The details filled in one at a time.

  Hair fanned out on the ground. Wet. Moving along with the water lapping up and retreating every few seconds.

  Skin leached of color. Faded. Bleached. Gone so dull it almost seemed milky, save for that ashen tone underlying it all.

  Eyes closed, the lashes thatched and dark and delicate. Some ephemeral beauty still present there.

  Just focusing on the eyes, Charlie could almost believe the girl was sleeping. Almost.

  And then her gaze drifted lower. Where pieces were missing.

  The sorrow grew too big then. Swelling until it burst in Charlie’s skull. Somehow overtaking the shock. Throttling her.

  Pain.

  It grabbed Charlie by the shoulders, fished an icy hand into her ribcage to grasp after her heart. The impact made her whole body shake.

  Pain.

  Tears budded and overflowed at the corners of her eyes. Muted whimpers spluttering from her lips.

  And suddenly she felt far away from here. Thrust back into the past. All those old feelings flooding through her again. Losing Allie.

  Pain. Familiar pain.

  How could this make any sense?

  Life. Death. The universe. Any of it?

  How?r />
  The body of Amber Spadafore lay strewn on the beach. Both feet had been cut off.

  Chapter Fifty-Seven

  Charlie huddled in her car, sheltered from the wind and the chill. Still, she trembled, teeth chattering.

  She stared through the windshield. Part of her trying to remember what she was in the middle of doing. The rest of her mind gone blank.

  Gray clouds scudded out over the water. Brighter now as the daylight began to seep into the world in earnest.

  Her eyes drifted down the beach. Glided toward that place just past the crest of the hill, where the girl lay. From here, she couldn’t see the body, and that felt wrong.

  She couldn’t just leave her out there. Couldn’t abandon her.

  Alone. All alone. Vulnerable. It was wrong, even if there was nothing to be done.

  She blinked. Refocused on the world within the car, on the task at hand.

  Her phone perched in her right hand. The screen gaped at her. Ready. Waiting.

  Charlie moved a shaky finger to the phone. She needed to call it in. Tell Zoe what she’d found. That was all.

  She scrolled to Zoe on the contact list. But her finger hesitated shy of hitting the call button. Something stopped her.

  She blinked again. Why was she waiting?

  She turned her head. Coughed into her fist. The sound was unpleasant. Dry and throaty. Flecks of spittle spattered her fist.

  She waited for Allie to chime in. To make some joke like, Cough it, don’t spray it.

  No joke came. It occurred to Charlie that Allie had been awfully quiet all morning.

  She coughed again, and some distant part of her mind prickled with childish fear. What if I never stop coughing?

  She pinched her eyes shut. Hot tears streamed down her face now, rivulets of wet tracing lines down her cheeks. Her throat felt raw.

  The coughing turned suddenly to something more like choking.

  Charlie panicked.

  She couldn’t breathe. Couldn’t move. Could only retch and gasp for air.

  Hyperventilating. She needed to relax. Needed to—

  A voice in her head spoke to her then. Calm. Strong.

  Not Allie’s voice. It was her own.

  Stop fighting it. Just relax.

  You’ve just seen a dead body—a murder victim—and you are in shock.

  She rested her forehead on the steering wheel, the tears now spilling down to the floor instead of her cheeks. And the coughing slowly retreated.

  She leaned there a long time, even after the attack had passed. Breathing. Wiping the wet from her eyes and face.

  The puzzle pieces clicked together at last. If Charlie found Amber’s killer, she might be solving Allie’s case as well. The fact that the killer had mutilated Amber’s feet suggested a connection to Allie’s case, didn’t it? It was almost undeniable.

  Right away her mind snapped to Leroy Gibbs, the suspect who was never charged all those years ago. His picture bloomed in her head, the shambling weirdo with the crazy eyes and unkempt beard.

  Her mind reeled. Lightheaded. A little dizzy.

  Could this really be the lead she had searched for all this time? Charlie’s heart thundered at the prospect.

  She lifted her head and blinked again, the last of the tears falling away.

  At last, she pressed the button to dial Zoe’s number and brought the phone to her ear.

  Chapter Fifty-Eight

  A small group of observers, almost exclusively law enforcement save for Charlie, huddled in the observation room. The sense of anticipation was palpable: bouncing legs, trembling fingers, twitchy movements, picking at imaginary fuzz on their shirts and pants.

  Across from them, visible through a pane of two-way glass the size of a big-screen TV, the interrogation room waited for the main event to begin—a dingy-looking affair, Charlie thought. Drop ceiling. Cinder-block walls painted eggnog yellow. In the center sat the star of today’s show.

  Leroy Gibbs hunched over a glossy tabletop, gouged and scraped by years of use. His forearms rested on the edge of it, the tips of his gnarled fingers brushing the veneer.

  His beard covered most of his face like frizzy gray ivy, reaching up almost to his cheekbones. The hair atop his head was a messy salt-and-pepper tangle matted over his forehead, strands reaching down to partially obscure his eyes.

  Charlie could see enough in those eyes to get a sense of the faraway look in them. The man struck her as bewildered, perhaps a little confused. Like a hermit pried out of his cave, aghast to see the daylight after so long alone in the dark.

  An image of Amber Spadafore’s closed eyes surfaced in her mind then. Dark tendrils of her hair undulating with the movement of the waves. Charlie kept getting these flashes of what she’d seen that morning on the beach. Snapshots burned into her memory that she’d never be able to unsee.

  She hugged the hoodie Zoe had let her borrow tighter around herself. Hours had passed since she’d first discovered the girl’s body on the beach, the bureaucratic machine of the Salem County Sheriff’s Department working at the speed of a glacier, and still Charlie couldn’t seem to get warm. Even after forcing down a cup of coffee and a stale donut from the station’s break room, she remained chilled to the bone.

  She turned to Zoe, her mouth etched into a frown.

  “So your tech guy wasn’t able to trace the source of the email at all?” Charlie asked.

  “Nope.” Zoe shrugged. “He said it isn’t even that hard, sending an anonymous email like that.”

  The sheriff’s department had been all too eager to see the mystery email that led Charlie to Amber Spadafore’s body, and she’d hoped they’d have the resources to figure out who sent it. Apparently not. Another dead end.

  Charlie balled her hands into fists at her sides, her mind tumbling the same thought around over and over: only Amber’s killer could have told Charlie where to find the body. He was taunting her.

  Zoe leaned in, her voice low.

  “You need anything? A bottle of water or another coffee, maybe?”

  Charlie shook her head.

  “I’m fine.”

  It was starting to drive Charlie crazy the way Zoe kept fussing over her. Zoe wasn’t the mother hen type, but every time she thought Charlie wasn’t looking, she gawked at her with a nervous expression on her face. All the worrying made Charlie feel like a helpless child.

  She stepped closer to the glass, her focus on Leroy Gibbs. He squirmed in his seat, seemingly unable to get comfortable, still waiting for his lawyer to arrive. He looked older than when she’d last laid eyes on him. Grayer. Face and torso starting to go gaunt. Something sallow in his complexion that hadn’t been there before.

  Had he done it? Killed Amber, then sent her that email?

  She saw Amber again, unbidden. White sand against whiter skin. Flecks of dirt dotting her cheeks like freckles. Everything mottled and ashy in the dawn light.

  Charlie dug her fingernails into the flesh of her palms as she pushed the ghostly vision away. She needed to concentrate on Gibbs. He was what mattered now.

  Gazing through the window, Charlie tried to get a read on him. Above all, he seemed a blank figure to her—expressionless face, monotone voice. He rarely even made eye contact with anyone. During the whole preamble to the interview—the reading of his rights, the testing of the mic and camera—Gibbs just seemed disengaged. Aloof.

  He was like a specimen of some kind, she thought. A test subject kept under glass. Observed and experimented on in his little cage.

  Earlier Charlie had overheard one of the detectives suggest in a hushed tone that this was all an act, that Gibbs’ behavior was a calculated effort, the first step in making a play at an insanity plea. Watching him with her own two eyes, she didn’t think so.

  A murmur spread through the observation room, traveling faster as it went like a cresting wave building up momentum. Finally, the accused’s lawyer had arrived, the whispers reported. He was on his way into the interrogation room now.<
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  The door jerked open on the other side of the glass, and a tall man wearing a suit moved across the screen, slapping his briefcase on the table as he took a seat next to Gibbs. Charlie recognized him straight away, but it took three full seconds of staring at his face for it to register, and when it finally did hit, it came with a shudder.

  Will. The lawyer representing Gibbs was Will Crawford.

  Chapter Fifty-Nine

  Charlie’s chest tightened. Her face felt flushed and hot.

  Will was representing Gibbs. How did that make any kind of sense? Why would he do it?

  She needed out of the crowded observation room. Needed somewhere she could breathe and think. Fumbling with the door handle, she escaped into the hallway.

  Fluorescent bulbs buzzed overhead. She blinked against the sudden brightness, but the air out here felt better. Cooler. Less stuffy.

  She shuffled toward the drinking fountain down the corridor as her thoughts tumbled. Of course, she knew Will was a lawyer, that he represented people from all walks of life, but Gibbs? Leroy Gibbs? The man most people presumed had killed Allie for all these years?

  She stooped and thumbed the button on the fountain. Took a sip of water.

  Just then a door opened behind her. She turned.

  Will poked his head out of the interrogation room, his eyes locked on a deputy standing just outside the door.

  “Can I get a Pepsi for my client?” Will said, his voice low. Then his eyes shifted up. Met Charlie’s. He flinched. “Charlie.”

  He stepped out into the hall as the deputy went off for the beverage, and the two of them were suddenly alone.

  “Charlie. I was hoping I’d get a chance to talk to you. To explain.”

  “Explain what?” she asked, her tone bitter.

  “OK, look. I know you’re probably upset, and believe me, I wish I wasn’t in this position, but—”

  “Oh, you mean the position where you’re representing the guy who killed my sister? That position?”