The Fallen Girls: An absolutely unputdownable and gripping crime thriller (Detective Clara Jefferies Book 1)

by Kathryn Casey

  After the accident, the practicalities of life had overwhelmed him. Brooke’s doctor and hospital bills overflowed in each day’s mail. Tortured by crushing regret, Max knew he’d made mistakes. He’d lost his job and their security. Sheriff Virgil Holmes’s call had saved him.

  “I’ve got a big county to police, and it includes a handful of these polygamous towns,” the sheriff told him that day on the phone. “Listen, Anderson, I hear you grew up in Alber, and that you were a hotshot cop in Salt Lake, a lead investigator. I know you’ve hit tough times, but I’m willing to give you a chance to turn it around.”

  “Sheriff, I can explain what happened with my job in Salt Lake. I’m a good cop. I—”

  “No need. Just sign on and come help me,” the sheriff had said. “I need a chief deputy who can head up investigations, and I need someone like you who can talk to these polygamous folks. Someone who speaks their language.”

  It was more than Max could have asked for: a good salary, health insurance and a means to support Brooke. He couldn’t undo all that had happened, but this, perhaps, could enable him to repair some of the damage.

  Unfortunately, it hadn’t been easy to start over.

  Alber had always been clannish and that hadn’t changed. Max had history with the people, but not the kind that opened doors—this case was a vivid example of that. He’d spent most of the day investigating and no one would talk to him about the note. He couldn’t even find out if it was real or a sick hoax.

  I better tell Sheriff Holmes that Clara’s coming, Max thought.

  The sheriff should have been home with his family on a Saturday evening, but earlier Max had heard a familiar voice in the building. When Max peeked in the sheriff’s open office door, he had his phone propped up to his ear and was slipping files into his briefcase.

  “Yeah, yeah, I’m ready,” Sheriff Holmes said. “I’m getting everything together right now. I’ll work on it tomorrow.”

  The sheriff gave Max a nod.

  “You know, I think this is going to work. The whole area’s excited about it,” the sheriff told whoever was on the phone. “Sure, I’m in. No problem. Got the money set aside for my contribution. Let’s talk next week.”

  At that, the sheriff hung up, and Max noticed that his boss looked particularly pleased. “Good news?”

  “Yeah. On the ski resort. The governor found a group of investors out of Salt Lake, and they’re drawing up plans. It looks like this might come together.” A slight man with a round belly, Sheriff Holmes had big cheeks and bushy gray sideburns, but a bald head that glistened under the overhead lights. He wore his politician’s smile as he peered at Max from behind a pair of aviator glasses. “You sure you don’t want a piece of this? Those who get in early, throw in a bit of cash at the start, all goes well, we’ll make a fortune.”

  “I can’t afford it,” Max said, turning down the offer for what wasn’t the first time. “There’s not a lot of extra money these days.”

  “Tough break. This could be a gold mine.” Sheriff Holmes gulped a healthy dose of air. “Speaking of that, how’s your girl?”

  “Hanging in there.” Max didn’t like to talk about Brooke. He changed the subject. “Sheriff, I’m working on that missing person case, the Jefferies girl, Delilah, and—”

  The sheriff furrowed his brow, decidedly unhappy.

  “Didn’t I tell you to turn that case over to the local PD?” From the beginning, Sheriff Holmes had been dubious about the tip. A missing twelve-year-old, one would expect the parents would be begging for police help. As the day went on without any cooperation from the Jefferies family, the sheriff became convinced it was a ruse. Earlier that day, he’d ordered Max to refer the case to Alber’s chief of police. “I told you not to put any more resources into it. We had that talk, right?”

  “We did. And I did as you asked. But the chief tried and couldn’t get anywhere either. The family wouldn’t let him in the door.”

  “Those damn polygamists. They’re a cult, I tell ya. They keep everything so hush-hush,” the sheriff snarled. Once he started complaining about the polygamous towns, the complications of having the communities as his responsibility, Max’s boss could rail on for hours. Max had tried to explain the realities to the sheriff, to help him understand why towns like Alber were so resistant to law enforcement, but to no avail. The reclusive towns were a testy thorn in the sheriff’s side. “Always hiding something. Won’t talk—”

  Rather than listen, Max cut in. “Chief Barstow offered to give it another shot tomorrow, but I decided not to wait on him. A young girl like that. This could be bad. So I put in a call to Clara Jefferies. Delilah’s sister.”

  The sheriff looked even more displeased. “You told me about her. She’s a cop? A detective?”

  “In Dallas.”

  “She agreed to come?”

  “On her way.”

  The sheriff stuffed a few more files into his briefcase. “I wish you hadn’t done that,” he said. Max shot him a questioning look, and the sheriff said, “Chief Barstow won’t like it, you going past him when he offered to keep working it. We need to maintain good relations with the locals.”

  “I know,” Max said. “But we’re losing time. If the girl has been abducted, time is important.”

  “That’s the crux of your problem, having to say if,” the sheriff said. “A day into this, it shouldn’t be if the girl is missing.”

  “You’re right. We should know,” Max admitted. “But while I can’t be certain, I think this is real. Like I said, I’m convinced Delilah is—”

  “You told me what you think, but where’s the evidence?” the sheriff snapped. His brow puckered with concern, and he shook his head. “Not the way I would have played this, Max. I would have held back and made sure I had a case before I locked horns with the local PD.”

  Everything the sheriff said was true, all of it standard procedure. Max knew that, but what choice did he have? A young girl could be missing. “Sheriff, I—”

  “What’s done is done,” the sheriff said. “But in the future, when I give you a direct order, you obey it.”

  Max’s right eye twitched just slightly. He thought about how he couldn’t afford to lose his job. With his past, there weren’t a lot of others waiting for him. “Of course. Absolutely.”

  “Glad we’ve got that settled.” Sheriff Holmes grabbed his briefcase and walked toward the door. “Now, let’s both head home for the night. And let’s hope this Dallas cop has some sway with these people.”

  Four

  My roll-on waited in the closet. I’d lived in the studio apartment for five years and hadn’t used the luggage since the day I’d moved in, but had never bothered to put it in storage. I folded shirts and slacks, and lined them up on the bed. It was the end of August and it would be searing hot in Utah. Then I heard my mother’s voice. “Clara, a virtuous woman is modest. Only a loose woman exposes her arms and legs. Only brazen women tempt men by showing their skin.” I pictured the prairie dresses of my youth.

  While I’d never return to those days, I needed to fit in enough to make the townsfolk, my family in particular, feel comfortable around me. I removed the short-sleeve shirts I’d packed and added two with long sleeves. I took out a knee-length pencil skirt in favor of a second pair of tan slacks.

  Almost done, I packed my black leather holster and slipped my Colt .380 Mustang Pocketlite into my bag’s side pocket. With my credentials and badge, I’d bypass TSA and carry onto the plane. Just in case I needed it, I added a seven-round backup magazine to my luggage.

  As the suitcase filled, I replayed Max’s phone call in my head. Was Delilah really gone? Over the years, I’d worked enough child abductions to know that when a kid disappears, the reasons can be terrifying.

  A year earlier, a ten-year-old Dallas boy hadn’t shown up for dinner. His parents called his friends—no one had seen him. Searching the neighborhood, they found their son’s bike abandoned near a playground. The chief asked me to l
ead the task force, and we jumped on it fast. We sent out an Amber Alert and plastered the news stations and Internet with the kid’s face. I called in a forensic team, FBI profilers, and helicopters. We collected and analyzed video from every camera we could find in a two-mile radius.

  Despite our efforts, the case spun out of control. Media crawled all over us, circling the kid’s house and the neighborhood with drones. False leads poured into my office, and we had to investigate all of them. We had no idea if one could be legit.

  Then we got a tip. A grocery store manager reported that she saw a guy act strangely, staring at the headlines on the newspapers in the rack, talking about the case to another customer standing nearby. “The guy gave that lady the creeps,” the manager told me. “Something about him was off. He looked excited about the case.”

  We had a list of every sex offender in Dallas, and we zeroed in on those who lived or worked near the store. I took driver’s license photos of all of them to the grocery manager and she identified the man. Minutes later, I knocked on the door of a well-kept ranch house.

  Just in case this lead was the right one, I had a SWAT team back me up.

  The guy answered, looking like any other homeowner, wearing a T-shirt and shorts. At first, he couldn’t have been more cordial, but that changed when I tried to talk my way into the house. Visibly agitated, he’d slammed the door and shouted at me that he had a gun. He ordered me to stand back and threatened to kill the kid.

  I worked for hours trying to talk him out, and finally convinced him that he had no other option that brought him out alive.

  Hands in the air, he’d strolled through the front door, but I knew the moment I saw the grin on his face that the boy was dead.

  As hard as I’d tried, I couldn’t save that boy. I wasn’t going to let that happen to Delilah.

  I was hoping to fly out that night, but there was nothing available and a twenty-hour drive from Dallas to Alber wasn’t a reasonable option.

  I texted to tell Max I’d arrive on the first flight in the morning and tried to get some sleep. The day had been long, and the one to come promised to be tough. But as I crawled into bed, memories of Delilah kept me from drifting off. I saw her as a baby in her mother’s arms, Sariah beaming at her, so proud. My father and mother, Mother Naomi and Mother Constance stood around them, all welcoming our new baby. I remembered Delilah’s softness on my lap, the sweet smell of her neck as we cuddled on the couch. I remembered her at one, newly walking, tottering with my sister Lily and the other children, singing “Ring Around the Rosie,” giggling when they all fell down.

  At 2 a.m., I gave up and turned on my computer. I surfed the web, skimming newspapers and missing person articles, searching for cases of missing children in Utah, any unexplained disappearances of minors, but found nothing recent. After that, I logged on to NCIC, the National Crime Information Center, and searched the files on missing persons. There were dozens, but none anywhere near Alber—I kept looking until I eventually fell asleep.

  The plane touched down in Las Vegas at ten, and I rented a black Nissan Pathfinder for the three-hour trek northeast into the mountains. After I entered Utah and passed St. George, the worn asphalt highway cut through great valleys covered with spindly pines and low brush. For the first half of the drive, campers and tourists, tankers and eighteen-wheelers drummed past, but as I swung southeast, the road became nearly deserted. I wound between mountain ridges, past grass-covered fields and through thick pine forests that were crisscrossed by thin streams and dry creek beds.

  The drive gave me ample time to consider what waited for me, but I pushed back memories, held them at bay. I’d never intended to return to Alber, never thought that I would even consider it. I’d put my past behind me—the prairie dresses, the cinder block school where I taught kindergarten, all of it.

  “I’m a cop, a detective,” I said out loud. “Ten years on the outside. Nine years with Dallas PD. I’m a different person.”

  Yet at the same time, I pictured our rambling house, my sisters and brothers running through the yard, our mothers sitting on the porch knitting and watching us play.

  As I drove, the towns became smaller. They were spread farther apart, surrounded by wilderness, and I considered the isolation of living in the mountains, especially in the winters, when icy roads became nearly impassable. The town elders liked the solitude, and the separation served as a barrier to protect them.

  I crossed a bridge over the Virgin River and, a short distance ahead, a brown and white sign greeted me:

  ALBER, UTAH

  ELEVATION 5,841 FEET

  POPULATION 4,346

  Tucked into a notch at the base of a pine-covered mountain ridge, Alber spread across a sloping valley. At the far end, Samuel’s Peak guarded the town, a silent sentry keeping watch. Glowing against the clear blue sky, the afternoon sun glistened off the summit’s stark gray wall of stone. I remembered how in sunset’s dwindling light the mountainsides sometimes shone a burnished gold. When I was a kid, my mom told me the spirits of our founding fathers lived on that peak. She said our dead ancestors protected us from the dreaded outsiders, those who condemned our way of life and our faith.

  In Alber, we trusted no one outside our sect. Other Christians, including mainstream Mormons, we labeled Gentiles. They were not of us. Only Elijah’s People were the chosen ones. Those held up as the greatest sinners were people like me—ones who had once been part of the faith but willfully turned their backs on the teachings. We were labeled apostates, and the townsfolk, even our own families, considered us traitors. The sect’s prophet ruled it a sin to eat at the same table or converse with an apostate.

  On the road into town, I pulled to the side, sat on the shoulder and considered the view. I thought about driving Alber’s streets and seeing familiar faces. Many of those I knew, old friends, family, would turn away when they recognized me. Only thoughts of Delilah kept me from turning the Pathfinder around and retracing my route to the Las Vegas airport, or to begin the long drive east back to Dallas.

  A semi hauling a load of massive tree trunks rumbled past, dust clouded and the SUV shook. Ahead I saw the truck pull through the gates into my father’s sawmill.

  Father.

  It had been nearly a decade since I last saw him. That crisp fall afternoon I stopped at the house and visited with him and my mother. The sweet smell of apples filled the air, and we made plans for a gathering the coming weekend. I said nothing about my visit being a goodbye. As I strode away, I’d passed my brothers and sisters hoeing the garden, the younger ones playing tag in the yard, and I’d waved.

  How would they react when I walked back into their lives? I pictured the frown on my mother’s face when she first saw me, the judgment in my father’s eyes.

  Yet I wanted to see him, and Mother. The years had passed, but they were still my parents. Despite all that had come between us, what my father had done, I loved them.

  I considered following the lumber truck into the mill.

  Once it parked in the receiving dock, Father would emerge from his office to examine the load. I pictured him in his white dress shirt and black trousers. As a young girl, he let me help measure the logs and check each for splits, fissures that rendered them unusable. How proud I’d been.

  At the thought of seeing him again, I felt not only an overwhelming sense of trepidation, but something elsea fleeting pang of remorse.

  I should have said goodbye, I thought. But I knew that if I had, Father wouldn’t have let me leave.

  Instead of driving directly into town, I put the Pathfinder back in gear and continued down the highway. Thirty minutes later, I entered Pine City, the county seat.

  In the center of town, I parked in front of the Smith County Courthouse, an unremarkable, low-slung, cream brick building with a tarnished bronze statue out front—a ten-foot rendering of a battle-weary soldier dedicated to the area’s World War II dead. I showed my badge, walked around the metal detectors, and asked for directions
. At a door marked SHERIFF’S OFFICE, I asked for Chief Deputy Max Anderson. A young deputy in uniform buzzed me in.

  When I walked up, I found Max reading a report. I noticed framed photos on his desk of a pretty blond woman and a little girl who looked just like her. I waited, watched. I thought about how he didn’t look so terribly different. Back in the day, the sight of him made my heart flutter.

  “Uh-hum,” I coughed.

  He looked up. “Clara.”

  “Hi, Max.”

  “Thank you for coming.” Max walked around his desk and raised his hand to shake mine. “I didn’t think I’d ever see you again.”

  I took his hand in mine and was close enough to smell his musky aftershave. “I never thought you’d return.” He’d told me how he’d been offered the job, but I still wondered why he’d taken it.

  “I decided it was time to come back,” he said. “And I’d heard that the area was changing. Towns like Alber were opening up. I wanted to be part of that.”

  Nearly eighteen years older than when we’d parted, Max’s hair had sprinkles of gray at the temples. I thought about touching the familiar dimple in his chin, brushing my hand across the day’s stubble. I remembered when I first noticed he shaved. He was sixteen and I was fifteen. I’d convinced him to hike to the river west of town, to run off for an afternoon. That day I cupped his smooth cheek with my hand and pressed my lips against his, soft and tentative. That was how Father caught us, in the midst of our first kiss. Mother had grown suspicious and sent Father to find me. A year later, Max became one of the lost boys.

  I’ve always wondered if he was forced out because of us.

  The town leaders, as it would turn out, had other plans for me.

  “Alber, changing?” I scoffed. “Max, Alber never changes.”

  “Haven’t you been following the headlines?”

  I had been reading the newspapers. Over the past years, authorities had moved in on some polygamous towns and arrested the leaders for marrying off young girls to grown men. The raids made headlines and monopolized the news. One day at Dallas PD headquarters, I stood with the others watching a breaking news report on the raid of a polygamous commune in Texas. The detectives around me chuckled, amused by the women in prairie dresses, their long hair falling to their waists, being led away with their children to buses, transported to an area for processing.