School Girl

by Dan Ames

  It was clear to me that the seclusion was what had attracted the perpetrator to the location. Plus, an abandoned structure, somewhat open to the elements that could wash away fibers and fingerprints. It also included a transient population that left its own collection of evidence. A public place to kill someone, but with privacy.

  Ideal in many ways for someone to kill a young woman and hide the body.

  Back at the SUV, I used the map app on my phone to locate the police department on Grande Isle.

  It was less than forty minutes away.

  5

  Emerging from the farmland and hunting tracts along Old Highway 254, the wide and well-paved Highway 23 marked the beginning of the community of Grande Isle.

  It sat along the upper shore of Lake Huron. I’d been there before, many years back and knew that the town had actual neighborhoods, a marina, and somewhere to the east, a limestone quarry that provided a steady source of work for ships. The quarry also created a lot of jobs and in essence kept the small town going.

  The Grande Isle Police Department was off of Highway 23, on 3rd street, which ran right down to the lake. It was located in a strip mall that also included a bar, a Laundromat and a dollar store.

  I parked outside the Black Bear Tavern and walked into the police department. Frankly, I wasn’t expecting much out of the process but decided to at least give it a try.

  A man sitting at a desk looked up at me. He had a bushy beard and sported a uniform that looked a couple sizes too small.

  “Help you?” he said.

  “I’d like to talk to the detectives in charge of the Kelsey Bennett case.”

  “What for?” he asked.

  Someone emerged from an office to my right and leaned in the doorway.

  “I’ve got some information that might help,” I offered. It wasn’t true, but there was no other way to go about it.

  The shape in the doorway broke away and came into my line of vision.

  “I’m Detective Hagerstrom,” she said. I turned and saw a woman also in a cop uniform. I figured Grande Isle didn’t have a full-time detective on board. “Why don’t you come into my office?”

  I followed her in and sat in a chair across from her.

  She had a notebook out and a pen at the ready. Her red hair was tied back, and green eyes that matched the color of Lake Huron peered out at me. She had some grit to her and I figured to be a woman cop in a town like this she probably wasn’t a lightweight.

  “First of all, who are you?” she asked.

  “I’m a private investigator, hired by someone interested in finding Casey Bennett.”

  “Let me see your license,” she said.

  I showed it to her and she handed it back to me.

  “So what kind of information do you have?”

  “Well, I know that the mother is dead and the father is an ex-con somewhere out in California. And I know that if Kelsey died six months ago, he couldn’t have done it because he was in prison.”

  She put her pen down, leaned back and looked at me.

  “Already know that.”

  I nodded. She had seen my trap and deftly avoided it. See? You can’t underestimate people just because they were small-town. My attempt to get her to cough up the coroner’s estimated time of death had fallen flat.

  “What else you got?” she asked.

  “Not a thing,” I said and smiled at her.

  That, too, fell flat.

  “If there’s anything I can do to help,” I said, sliding my business card across the desk to her.

  She made no move to pick it up so I walked out of the office and down two doors to the Black Bear Tavern. After my eyes adjusted to the darkness, I walked up to the bar and took a seat directly across from the bartender.

  “I’ll take a Bud if you’ve got one,” I said.

  He was a big guy wearing a flannel shirt and an ancient black leather vest that was tattered at the edges.

  “Two bucks,” he said. I slid the singles across to him and took a drink of beer.

  It was good. And cold.

  “Heard a storm is moving in,” the guy said.

  “Yep, I heard that, too. I just applied for a job up at the quarry and that’s what they were saying.”

  “They hiring?” he asked.

  I shrugged my shoulders. “They didn’t really say one way or the other. You know how those things go.”

  “Sure do.”

  “They couldn’t stop talking about that girl they found out underneath the old schoolhouse,” I offered.

  “Helluva thing,” he said.

  “I’m from Detroit, I thought I’d get away from all that up here.”

  He pulled a glass out of a trough filled with soapy water, rinsed it off, and dried it, put it on a shelf.

  “Don’t happen hardly ever,” he said. “She’d been missing for a while.”

  “Poor thing,” I said. “Anyone know how long she’d been out there?”

  If there was one thing I knew about cops. They love to drink. And they love to talk. I said a silent prayer that they occasionally walked two doors down to the bar and had a beer.

  He looked at me.

  I took out a hundred-dollar bill and pushed it across the bar to him.

  It was easy to see the calculations in his eyes. What that hundred bucks would buy. What he could do with it. Or even if it was money he needed to share with the wife.

  “They’re saying she was probably killed in the summer,” he said softly as my hundred-dollar bill was swept from the bar into his pocket. “When kids like to use that place for all kinds of shit.”

  Summer.

  That would have been four months ago.

  It made sense.

  I drank the rest of my beer and nodded to him.

  He didn’t nod back.

  6

  Social media is the biggest waste of time I’ve ever seen in my life. Stupid pictures of people’s meals. Political diatribes. So silly.

  But if your job is to find people, you have to understand how it works.

  It was one of the longest and most painful training periods of my life.

  And I’ve crawled through mud, hiked mountains, fought bad guys and taken bullets.

  But wade through Facebook, Twitter, Tumblr and Instagram?

  Yuck.

  But wade I did. I found Kelsey’s accounts, starting with Facebook. She had the privacy setting set at the strongest, however, so I couldn’t see much. Same with Casey.

  But Kelsey’s Instagram account was wide open.

  There were mostly shots of various lakes and sunsets, very few people.

  Only one person showed up more than once. A guy with a scruffy goatee and a left arm covered with a cheesy tattoo.

  I dragged the photo onto my computer’s desktop, emailed it to my phone and then sent it via text message to my employer’s cell phone, along with a question mark.

  It took nearly a half hour before the answer popped up on my phone.

  Mark Banner.

  I found two Banners in the phone book. One was a couple so I decided to start there.

  They were on Erie Street.

  I parked in front of their house, a modest Cape Cod with a Toyota sedan in the garage and a Toyota pickup truck in the driveway. The pickup was covered in mud and had big off-road tires. Along with a bumper sticker that said ‘This truck protected by Smith & Wesson.’

  Wonderful.

  The doorbell worked and I heard modest commotion inside. The door opened and I stood face to face with Mark Banner. No doubt about it.

  “Hi Mark,” I said. “I’d like to talk to you about Kelsey Bennett.”

  “Who the fuck are you?”

  I could smell cigarette smoke mixed with liquor on his breath.

  “Mark, who is it?” a voice called from the living room.

  “Good goddamn question, Dad,” Mark answered, staring at me with a tough-guy pose. I idly wondered how he would take it if I broke his nose.

  “
I’m looking into what happened to Casey and Kelsey,” I said, instead of rearranging his facial construction.

  He started to shut the door on me but I caught it with my hand before it could close.

  “Don’t be rude, Markie,” a man said.

  A face appeared in front of me and it was Mark’s face, plus about thirty years.

  “Mr. Banner?”

  “Can I help you?”

  “I’d like to ask a few questions about the girls,” I said.

  “Who wants to know?” he asked. Mark Jr. walked away. Probably to go practice his bad-ass face in the mirror. It needed improvement and I wasn’t sure rehearsals would be able to do the job.

  “I’ve been hired to help find out what’s going on,” I said. I flashed my investigator’s license long enough for him to get a look.

  He stepped away and let me inside.

  7

  “There’s nothing to talk about!” Mark barked at me after we were seated in the living room. He had suddenly reappeared from the kitchen area after he’d somehow ingested a small amount of pseudo-toughness.

  “I already told the cops everything and there was hardly anything to tell,” he said.

  “Why don’t you go over it once with this fella?” the old man said. “Sounds like he’s just trying to help.”

  Mark rolled his eyes but did what he was told.

  “Kelsey and I dated for the last two years of high school but just before graduation she broke it off with me. Wouldn’t return my calls. And I didn’t take it well,” he said, ducking back into the kitchen. He returned with a bottle of beer and began pointing it at me as he continued. “Called her all the time. Harassed her. Said some horrible stuff to her on her voicemail. But I didn’t mean any of it, I was just hurt.”

  He was practically crying and trying to cover it by drinking from his beer. I knew immediately he didn’t kill Kelsey. He was the type of guy who just didn’t have it in him. He was weak.

  “Did she say why she broke it off?”

  “Hell no,” he said. “She was all secretive and shit. She spouted some crap about how she was re-examining her life and wasn’t sure she wanted me in it. What a load of horseshit.”

  “What did you think when you first heard they had disappeared?” I asked. It was an abrupt question and I hoped it would catch him off guard.

  “At first, I was like ‘good riddance.’”

  His Dad shook his head.

  “The cops talked to me but around the time they actually disappeared I was working on a charter boat in Florida,” Mark said. “No way I could have done it. But then when it went on for a couple of months without any news of where they might be, I started to worry.”

  “We all did,” the old man said.

  “So who do you think did this?” I prodded.

  Both of the Banner men looked at me, their faces blank.

  “We have no idea,” the old man finally said.

  8

  Grande Isle High School was on the edge of town a block from the lake. In a bigger city, say Chicago, there would probably be a huge fancy expensive school, but here it was a utilitarian building that could have doubled as an agricultural machinery storage unit.

  There was aluminum siding, glass doors and the requisite flag with a block of local stone emblazoned with the school’s name.

  Obviously it had been built with stuff probably from the Home Depot down the road.

  However, it was an actual school, I could confirm that. I could see the football field with one section of aluminum bleachers and half a dozen stadium lights that looked like a repurposed parking lot lighting system.

  It was a school day so there were cars in the parking lot, mostly rust buckets and pickup trucks.

  I pulled the SUV into one of the two visitor spots at the front of the parking lot, got out and walked to the school’s front door.

  In other parts of the country I knew that some schools had installed a bunch of security measures with all the school shootings but not Grande Isle High School.

  If there was a doorbell or entry system I didn’t see it. I just walked right inside.

  The lobby smelled like every school I've ever been in during my entire life. The aroma consisted of a mixture of floor polish, new paint and teenage angst.

  The administrative office was to my right and its door was open. Inside was a middle-aged secretary sporting quite a bit of makeup. She was tapping away on the computer and the screen was reflected in the window behind her. I could see she was playing online solitaire.

  “Hello,” I said.

  “How can I help you?” she responded. Her voice was deeper than I’d imagined.

  “Is there someone I could talk to about Kelsey Bennett?” I asked.

  She stopped and I saw the game of solitaire disappear from her computer screen.

  “May I ask who you are?” she responded.

  I explained I was a private investigator and I was looking into the disappearance and was really just wanting to get some background information on Grande Isle High School. A total lie but there you go. I also threw in that there would absolutely be no requests for private information regarding the girls.

  The woman seemed to buy what I was selling. But she was still wary.

  She told me to have a seat and went to the office behind her. A quick knock, followed by a man’s voice and then she cracked the door and spoke in low tones for a minute. She came back and looked at me with a smile.

  “Principal Van Boren will be able to see you in a minute,” she said.

  While I waited I looked at the shelf behind her which had various plaques and awards which said Grande Isle High School was certainly something special in this part of rural Michigan. Some blue ribbon awards. A plaque about attendance. And a few token sports trophies.

  It took about five minutes before Principal Van Boren came out to greet me.

  He was a small man, very slight, with a thin mustache. While his physical presence was less than impressive, his eyes were a startling blue and had a piercing intensity.

  “Hello, I’m Martin Van Boren,” he said.

  I got to my feet and shook his hand. It was cool and surprisingly strong. I followed him into his office. He sat down and looked at me, waiting for me to take the lead. Again, I felt the intensity of his eyes, an impression of fierce emotion behind them. Was he angry? Had I interrupted something?

  His office was immaculate and I could smell his breath mints from across the room. He seemed very fastidious, probably a good trait for a high school administrator.

  Finally, he couldn’t take my silence. “What would you like to know?”

  “Well, I know you can't tell me anything about the girls and their school records but I'm just curious if you can tell me what kind of effect their disappearance had on the school and was everyone surprised?”

  “Yes, of course,” he said with some degree of impatience and condescension. “We were all surprised and dismayed and shocked. It was urgent that we hold several support sessions with various groups of students who were scared and anxious,” he explained. “Anxiety is not good for scholarly pursuits. Not if they are to be undertaken with true academic vigor.”

  He smiled and his teeth were crooked. They were very white but I wondered if Principal Van Buren was the kind of guy who every morning when he brushed his teeth was frustrated by the fact that they weren’t in even, nice rows. That they refused to cooperate for him.

  “When you talked to the police did you have any insight to give them regarding any information about who might've wanted to harm the girls?” I asked.

  “No,” he said. “Because I didn't really have any information to give them. They were well-liked, popular and for the most part stayed out of trouble.”

  “For the most part?”

  He shrugged his shoulders. “I can't comment but it was nothing major, believe me.”

  That made me wonder. I made a note to go back to ask Mark Banner what minor disciplinary incident may ha
ve occurred at the school by either of the girls.

  We talked a little longer and I had some more questions which he very deftly deflected and I thanked him for his time.

  I went back out to my car, fired it up and decided that I had done enough for one day and it was time to get some dinner and a good night’s sleep along with some computer research at the hotel.

  9

  Other than a vacant motel on the edge of town that would have been right at home in a movie like Psycho, there was only one hotel option in Grande Isle. It was the Best Western right off of Highway 23. I pulled in and saw two SUVs each with a boat behind them big enough to go out on Lake Huron.

  The hotel had a sign that proclaimed all-you-can-eat breakfast with HBO.

  I checked in, brought one bag along with my computer gear up to my room and dropped it on the bed. The room was clean but the floor seemed to sag under my weight. I’m not a huge guy so it spoke more to the quality of the builder.

  From my window, I could see Lake Huron. Long gray clouds hovered above the horizon and a few seagulls hovered over the marina, probably hoping to catch some scraps from the salmon fishermen.

  Down in the dining room I ordered a steak with fries and a beer. The view through the giant picture windows was magnificent and I had another beer. There were stuffed animals on the walls along with some trophy fish.

  The waitress approached my table. She was chubby and tired and in another time I might've thought of ways to cheer her up including things done after hours but I was anxious to see what I could find out with some internet research.

  So I ate my rubbery steak and undercooked fries, left a very nice tip for the waitress and went up to my room. I connected to the Wi-Fi and used my encrypted laptop which sends any request for IP addresses bouncing around Europe for a while.

  Casey and Kelsey’s father was a man named Curtis Redville. After a cursory search on public databases didn’t turn up much I launched my more thorough programs.