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

by Kathryn Casey

  Fifteen minutes later, I arrived at the Smith County Courthouse. I felt a pang of concern when I saw Gerard’s black Suburban parked crooked out front, taking up two spaces. It looked like the chief arrived in a hurry and hadn’t paid attention. Of course, he probably didn’t worry that anyone would write him a ticket.

  At a quarter past eleven on a Monday morning, the sheriff’s department buzzed with activity, every desk taken. Deputies milled about, and two women worked the phones. I started back toward Max’s office, but one of the women rushed to stop me. Grandmotherly with a silver-gray French twist, she had the manner of an agitated canary. She introduced herself as Helen Jamison, the sheriff’s personal secretary.

  “This way, Detective,” she said.

  “Isn’t Chief Deputy Anderson’s office over there?” I said, pointing in the opposite direction.

  “The sheriff wants to talk to you,” she said.

  It felt like a replay of my meeting at the police station. Perhaps I would have to get used to being greeted by angry shouts. I heard raised voices before I made it down the hallway. I hesitated before walking in, wanting to hear the discussion. This time Gerard was on a rampage.

  “Max, why would you send Clara Jefferies into my town to rile those folks up?” Just a few hours earlier, Gerard had been the calmer of the Barstow brothers, but he sounded spitting mad. He must have heard that I’d dropped in on the Heaton and Coombs families and wasn’t pleased. “I have a hard enough time convincing those polygamous folks to talk to me. Now they think I sent in some outside cop, an apostate to boot.”

  “I told you, I didn’t send Clara,” Max said. I sensed he was struggling to keep his voice level. “But she’s a seasoned investigator. Let’s just wait and hear what she has to say before we get all bent out of shape. Sheriff Holmes, Clara must have had a reason to—”

  “What reason? Those parents aren’t worried about their girls,” the chief roared like a referee shouting over the crowd to call a foul at a ball game. “Then some woman cop shows up, bribes a little kid with a fistful of bills and demands the kid tell her where his sister is. Dragging Hannah Jessop with her. Stirring up trouble in Alber, when we all know the town’s a powder keg with all the strangers moving in. What good could—”

  Max tried to calm him. “Gerard, I don’t think Clara meant to stir anyone up.”

  “No matter what her intentions were, we can’t have that Dallas detective barging in on people. We can’t tolerate it,” said a voice I assumed belonged to the sheriff.

  I’d heard enough.

  “Max is telling you the truth. He didn’t send me anywhere. I didn’t consult him on my plans,” I said as I entered the lions’ den. “That said, I guess you could say that I did bribe the Coombs kid, although I saw it as more of a donation.”

  “Clara, let’s talk about this. Please explain what’s—” Max started.

  “I got two complaints about you this morning, Detective,” Gerard said, holding up the sausage-size index and middle fingers on his right hand to drive his point home. His anger raised his round cheeks until his eyes were slits. “First Alma Heaton calls, upset because you demanded information on Eliza. Then Mrs. Coombs gets lathered up about you giving her kid money and asking questions about Jayme.”

  “Come on, Chief.” I tried to defuse the situation. “Mrs. Coombs couldn’t have been that upset. Not when she needed money to turn her electricity back on. She didn’t give the cash back, did she?”

  Gerard didn’t answer. “What my brother Evan said this morning is right. You’ve got no right to push your nose into my town. I want you gone.”

  Max moved forward, looking as if he wanted to interrupt, but unsure what to say. I’d admittedly crossed lines, and I knew I’d become hard to defend, but I felt a wave of disappointment when the sheriff put his hand on Max’s shoulder. Max took two steps back and said nothing. Just the sheriff’s touch was enough to silence him.

  “I may not have jurisdiction, but I have rights,” I insisted. “I’m Delilah’s sister.”

  “No matter what crazy ideas you have, that’s over. Your mother said Delilah is fine,” Gerard said, spitting out the words. “But we’re not talking about Delilah anyway. This is about the Heaton and the Coombs families, Eliza and Jayme. There’s no reason to think there’s anything wrong with those girls.”

  “Some people in town find the girls’ disappearances troubling,” I said.

  “Hannah,” Max whispered. He looked as if I’d opened a box he’d closed. “She mentioned it to me, but I didn’t think… Are you worried that they could have been…?” His voice drifted off.

  “Maybe all three girls are safe. Maybe there’s no problem here. But what Hannah describes is strange. The girls left too abruptly,” I said. “Hannah was close to both girls, and neither one confided in her that they were leaving.”

  “Clara, kids take off. They run away,” Max stammered. “After Hannah talked to me about Jayme and Eliza, the chief talked to their families. Both told him that the girls left on their own, that they ran away.”

  “They did tell me that. There’s not a lick of evidence that there’s anything wrong here.” Gerard shook his head, as if in astonishment. “This is getting more ridiculous by the minute.”

  “What if the families are wrong? What if all three girls are missing, and no one is looking for them?” I asked. “Sometimes, disappearances are connected. One perpetrator, multiple victims.”

  “You think Eliza Heaton and Jayme Coombs have been abducted, don’t you?” Max asked.

  “This is ridiculous!” Gerard looked at the other men as if asking for help. Max had a worried expression, perhaps thinking through my scenario. The sheriff? He appeared uncomfortable enough with the conversation to want to order us all from his office.

  “The Heaton and Coombs families say their daughters ran away, not that they were taken,” Gerard said. “And I told you last night that your mother told me Delilah is on a mission.”

  “All three girls disappeared under questionable circumstances. Eliza and Jayme without notice, and with Delilah there’s the note,” I said.

  “That damn note. They didn’t—” Gerard started.

  “And Gerard, I remember other things, too. Things that make me question how cases like these are handled by your department.”

  “What the?” he sputtered. “You can’t talk to me like—”

  “Alber PD has never had a good reputation. For decades it was under the thumb of the church hierarchy and the police haven’t always been on the right side.”

  At that, Gerard’s eyes focused hard on mine. “The town’s changed. You can see that. The police department has changed,” he bellowed. “And I’m not part of the old establishment. I’m like Max. I got railroaded out of Alber when I was a kid.”

  That had been bothering me. “Why?”

  Barstow looked baffled. “What do you mean, why?”

  “No Barstow boys were ever run out of Alber. Not in my memory, and I bet no one else can recall an instance. For decades, your family ran this town, including city hall and the police department. No one dared cross the Barstows.”

  “What’s your point?” Gerard gave me a look that challenged me to answer.

  This was becoming personal. “Detective Jefferies, this isn’t productive,” the sheriff said. “Let’s not dig up old history.”

  “I want an answer,” I said. “I want to know why Gerard was the only Barstow boy ever forced out of Alber.” I turned to the chief and asked, “What did you do?”

  Gerard Barstow tracked toward me, as angry as I’ve ever seen a man. But at that precise moment, the phone on the desk buzzed. The sheriff latched onto it, perhaps pleased with the distraction.

  Not ready to let up, I prodded, “I think you should answer, Gerard. Tell me why you were forced out.”

  Gerard turned to the sheriff, I supposed to enlist his aid. But Sheriff Holmes had refocused his attention on the phone call. We all stopped talking and stared at him, as
his face blanched pale.

  “I’ll be right there,” he said, and then he hung up. “Chief, we need to put this to bed, at least for now.”

  “Sheriff, I shouldn’t have to tolerate—” Barstow started.

  “Max, round up everyone you can find and the CSI folks,” the sheriff ordered. “We need to head over to Alber. Someone found a body.”

  “That’s my town,” Gerard objected.

  “Not the back of the trailer park, Chief,” the sheriff said. “That area below the mountain is outside the city limits. It’s in the county. It’s mine.”

  Without asking a single question, Max rushed from the room.

  The trailer park. My family. My mother. Delilah. A body.

  “A man’s or a woman’s body? A child?” I asked. “How long dead?”

  “I don’t know,” the sheriff said. “They found it hidden behind the cornfield.”

  Twenty-Four

  I trailed the caravan of squads and the crime scene unit’s mobile base, fashioned out of a converted horse trailer, to Alber. We passed fields planted with alfalfa and wheat, herds of cattle and bison. I wondered whose body had been found, if it was Eliza or Jayme. If it was Delilah. My mind wandered back to Dallas. As hard as I’d tried, I couldn’t save him.

  Driving past the trailers, I flashed back to the boy’s body, dismembered, nearly destroyed. I tried to blot out the image. At least his parents had been held back, not allowed inside the house where they would have seen the horror of what remained of their son. His mother dropped to her knees when I told her the boy was dead. I knelt beside her and held her. I tried to soften the blow, but there is pain that it’s impossible to lessen.

  As well as horrors that are impossible to unsee.

  Overwhelming dread flooded through me, as I wondered what waited for us in the cornfield. My grip on the steering wheel tightened as the grisly vision refused to leave. The blood. The slaughtered child. In seconds the image transformed from the body of a young boy to that of a girl—ivory skin, long auburn hair. When I saw freckles on her upturned nose, I fought to stifle a scream.

  We reached the two dozen or so remaining rows of corn, and the cars at the lead pulled over, the deputies and officers hastily disembarking and advancing on foot. I grabbed my bag with my badge and gun inside. Behind the cornfield, we picked our way around and over rocks, the mountain looming above us. Boulders, some as tall as we stood, had fallen from the mountaintop over the millennia. I guessed townsfolk discarded many of the smaller rocks a hundred years earlier when they first cleared the fields to plant.

  Up ahead, the troopers congregated at the far east corner, below Samuel’s Peak.

  “What’ve we got?” I shouted as I walked up.

  Apparently everyone was still trying to figure that out for themselves and no one responded. I found Max talking to a man with two dogs on leashes standing separate from the rest, a black Lab and a small gray-and-beige fellow that looked like some kind of terrier mix.

  “A body, no description yet. It’s buried under a layer of rocks,” Max pointed to a mound fifty yards away. “Not sure how long, but it sounds like whoever it is has been dead for some time.”

  “Looked like that to me at least,” the man told Max.

  I knew him. His name was John Proctor. A mechanic, he used to repair my father’s saws at the mill. In my decade away, Mr. Proctor had acquired the heavily lined face of a man well into his eighties. His bushy hair had turned stark white, and he carried a wooden cane with a carved stag’s head at the top.

  “Somebody notify the coroner?” I asked Max.

  “Yeah. I did before we left the office. Doc Wiley from Wilbur. He’s been ME for the county for the past four or five years. He’s on his way. Should be here soon.”

  “I remember him,” I said. “He trains the midwives in town.”

  “That’s him,” Max said.

  That settled, I turned to our companion. “Mr. Proctor, tell us what happened here.”

  The old man looked at me warily. I’d pinned my badge on my shirt during the walk to make sure I wasn’t stopped from entering the scene. Proctor recognized me. I saw it in his eyes. His jaw worked as he undoubtedly considered what must have struck him as an untenable situation. If he didn’t answer me, he’d be refusing to talk to a cop. If he did, he broke his prophet’s decree and spoke to someone who’d turned her back on the church.

  The situation was uncomfortable. Max pulled me to the side and whispered, “Clara, I don’t think the sheriff would approve of your being here.”

  “You know what, Max? I’m not leaving. If you want me gone, you’ll have to haul me away.” I wondered why he’d sold out, when he’d stopped following his best judgment to kowtow to his boss. “That could be Delilah out there. So I don’t care what the sheriff wants.”

  Max glanced around. In the distance, the sheriff and Gerard talked on their phones, most likely calling in help. Max gave me a look I couldn’t interpret, but I knew he was worried. He nodded at me and walked back to the old man. I stayed glued to his side. “John, you remember Clara Jefferies. She’s a detective in Dallas,” Max said. “We invited her here on a consult. You need to tell us what happened.”

  Mr. Proctor was missing his lower teeth, and his chin crumpled so flat it nearly disappeared as he apparently considered how to respond.

  Not far away, the forensic unit cordoned off a semicircle around the body with yellow crime scene tape. A deputy started to draw a map of the area. Another had a video camera rolling. I saw Jeff Mullins, the Alber PD detective who’d railed against my presence that morning, circulating with a pad of paper, recording the names of everyone who’d made the scene.

  Mullins saw me and immediately tracked toward us. “Max?”

  “Yeah,” Max responded.

  “It’s okay that she’s here?” Mullins said, giving me a sideways bob of the head, frowning.

  Max heaved a sigh. This was the second time since we arrived at the scene that he’d been asked to vouch for me. “Yeah. It’s okay, Mullins.” He shot the guy a look that signaled him not to protest. “I’ll take responsibility. Put Detective Jefferies on the log.”

  Mullins gave me a sour look, wrote down my name, and walked off. Max turned back to John Proctor and said, “We’re still waiting. Tell us what happened.”

  If the moment wasn’t so tense, the reason for our meeting so serious, it could have been amusing. It appeared that Proctor had figured out a way to cooperate, while technically keeping in line with the prophet’s decrees. Max was one of the lost boys, not a traitor to the faith.

  The old man could talk to Max; he just couldn’t talk to me.

  “Well, you see, Max, I was watching the women pulling off the cobs, the men felling the stalks, when it was time to take Bruno and Jazzy out for a walk. I take them on the same route every day and let them run along the front of the field. But today, since it was so congested and noisy with the work, I took them behind the field. I let them loose, so’s they’d get a good run. And that’s when they found it.”

  “Describe what you saw,” I said.

  Still refusing to look at me, he focused intently on Max. “The dogs did it. I let them loose, like I was telling you, and they took off. We’d never been this far back before, so close to the mountain. No one comes back here. It’s hard to walk, too rocky. But the dogs had a great time, jumping over the rocks, chasing each other. Then Bruno, the Lab, got interested in that pile of rocks over there.”

  At that, Proctor pointed at the mound in the center of the section being cordoned off.

  “Pretty soon, Bruno started nosing in between the rocks, pushing at them with his paws, his nose, like he was after something. Jazzy angled over and joined him, did the same thing. I walked over and…”

  “And what?” I asked.

  “Max, that was when I seen it.”

  “Describe what you saw,” Max nudged.

  The old man’s head bowed and his eyes focused on his tattered tennis shoes. For
a moment, he appeared too overcome to say anything. Proctor wasn’t being evasive. It’s not unusual for witnesses, after seeing something traumatic, to have to have information dragged out of them. He hadn’t assimilated it yet. The experience fresh, he needed time to make sense of it.

  “What I saw, I’m not positively sure about. But it kind of looked like something that used to be a face,” Proctor said.

  I thought about his choice of words: used to be a face. I considered what I knew about decomposing bodies, how bacteria causes them to bloat and turn different colors: reddish-purple from lividity where the blood settles, then a nasty greenish-yellow, before they finally darken. These changes suggested a timeline, by giving an indication of how long a body had been dead. Delilah had been missing four days. If that was her…

  “What did the skin look like?”

  Apparently wrapped up enough in his story to forget he was violating the rule of God, Proctor turned to me. His bushy white eyebrows bunched the skin between them into vertical rows. “I don’t know. I didn’t take a good look. I never saw anything like that in my life before. I got scared. I rounded up the dogs, ran and called for help.”

  Max took notes, writing everything down, including Proctor’s contact information, while I walked away a bit. Once I reached the crime scene tape lying on the ground and secured with rocks, I stopped. I stared at the rock pile and thought about the body hidden inside it.

  Was it Delilah?

  I approached the sheriff and Chief Barstow standing back, arms folded, watching as the video tech recorded the scene. A cameraman taking still shots followed him. “We’re going to wait for Doc Wiley before we uncover it, right?” I asked.

  “Yeah,” the sheriff said. “Not that it’s any of your concern, Detective.”