“And you believed it?” I asked.
Grace looked at the other two women, and I knew before they spoke that they’d feared something might be wrong, but they’d buried their suspicions.
“Well, we did think it was odd,” Grace admitted, glancing over at Alma.
“Odd how?” I asked.
“Eliza didn’t take her clothes. We couldn’t tell that she took anything.”
Moments passed. The women looked one at the other, and then their eyes closed and their heads bowed. I sensed that they each silently acknowledged the truth. Perhaps they’d always known but refused to accept it.
“Is there a way to tell if that’s Eliza’s body?” Savannah asked, her voice quiet with resignation.
“We’re doing DNA, but that will take time. We’ll need a sample from you, Alma, as Eliza’s mother,” I said. Alma nodded. Then I asked, “Is there anything in particular Doc can look for during the autopsy? Does Eliza have any identifying scars? Any old injuries, like broken bones?”
Alma opened her purse and pulled out the photo of Eliza we’d asked her to bring. In the image, a pretty young girl stared back at me, one with inquisitive green eyes and a self-confident smile. I hoped it wasn’t her we’d found in the field. “No broken bones. But she has a mole above her lip,” Alma said, pointing at the dark, round spot on the photo.
Alma had a twin blemish on the right side of her face, half an inch north of her upper lip.
“Just like yours?” I observed.
“Yes,” Alma agreed. “We… she inherited that from me.”
“Max, call the doc. Ask him to look for the mole,” I said, and Max left the room. “While Max does that, let me show you photos of the dress on the body. See if it looks familiar.”
I’d brought the file with me. I sifted through, not wanting them to see the gruesome photos of the mummified body of what had once been a vibrant young woman. I pulled out two that I wanted them to look at. One showed the collar on the dress, the other a close-up of the green fabric with the flowered stripes. They inspected them, one woman handing the photos to the other, and put their heads together and whispered.
“No,” Alma said. “We don’t think this is Eliza’s dress.”
Minutes later, Max returned. “Doc doesn’t see the mole, but the condition of the corpse, well, it’s bad. So he can’t be sure.”
“Can you tell us anything else about how Eliza disappeared?” I asked the women. “Anything at all?”
“No. There’s nothing else.” Alma frowned. “Clara, can’t you put our minds at ease? Can’t you give us hope that it isn’t our girl?”
I decided to speak in a language I knew they’d understand. “Lord willing, Eliza is healthy and well and you’ll see her again soon. But we need to look at all the possibilities, Alma. I need your help to figure this out.”
All the anger Alma had shown earlier in the day had washed away, leaving only sadness. “What can we do?”
“You can give Doc Wiley a sample of your DNA,” I explained. “Right now, that’s all you can do for your girl.”
Alma Heaton nodded as tears filled her eyes.
Max left to get a DNA collection kit, and I said my goodbyes and hurried to interview room one, where Genevieve Coombs and her sister-wife waited. Their attitudes had changed as well. The finding of the girl in the field had shaken all of them.
“Tell me what you can about Jayme leaving,” I asked once I sat down.
“We were worried at first, because Jayme just disappeared. She was outside, and then she was gone,” Genevieve said. “But she’d run away before, to the shelter, telling Hannah Jessop crazy stories about our family. So we thought she did that again. But Hannah came to see us the next day, and she said Jayme wasn’t at the shelter.”
I assumed the Heatons had left, as Max walked into the room holding another DNA kit in a clear plastic bag. He stood off a bit, near the door, observing.
I didn’t question Genevieve about the abuse Jayme claimed. This wasn’t the time to get to the bottom of that. I needed to zero in on the girl’s disappearance. “What did you do? Did you tell anyone?”
“We were worried something happened to Jayme. All her clothes were still at the house, not like she took anything. So the following day, we went to the police station,” Genevieve said. “We talked to Chief Barstow. He looked worried, too. He took a few notes, and then he left us and made a few phone calls. A little while later, he came back with a sheet of paper, the phone number of some crisis center in Salt Lake written on it. He said Jayme was there. Someone saw her there. He said that she wasn’t coming home.”
“You reported her missing to Chief Barstow?” I asked. I looked over at Max, and he shot back a questioning glance. This wasn’t what we expected to hear.
“Yes,” Genevieve said. “I took the phone number home, but it made no sense to call. Jayme was gone, like so many of the other kids in town. Ran out and left us.”
“We have some photos. Of the dead girl’s dress and hair. I’d like to show them to you.” I laid them out on the table. Genevieve and her sister-wife looked at the photos and murmured.
“Jayme’s hair is lighter, more blond,” Genevieve said, relief in her voice. “And the dress, it could be, but we’re not sure. She had one something like that, but maybe different.”
“We don’t believe this is Jayme, but we want to make sure,” I explained. “Would you be willing to give us some of the cells from inside your mouth, Genevieve? We want to compare DNA.”
Jayme’s mother agreed. Max swabbed the inside of her cheek, and we said goodbye. As she turned to leave, she looked at me. “If that’s not Jayme, do you think she’s safe somewhere? Maybe in Salt Lake like the police chief told us?”
“I don’t know,” I said. “We’re going to try to find out.”
As soon as the door closed behind the Coombs women, I turned to Max. “I was at Alber PD earlier. The chief wasn’t in. Can you try to reach him?”
“Yeah.” He pulled out his cell, dialed the number, and put the phone on speaker.
“Gerard,” Max said when the chief answered. “Clara and I have a question. We just had Genevieve Coombs in here. She says she reported Jayme missing to you in May. Did she do that?”
Barstow huffed. “Max, you’re questioning me?”
“We need to know, Gerard. We’re trying to pin some of this down.”
“Yeah, she talked to me. Told me what happened, that Jayme had disappeared or taken off. I made some calls to the usual places, the youth centers and stuff. I called a place in Salt Lake, some crisis center. A woman told me Jayme was there. So I gave the phone number to Genevieve.”
“Why didn’t you tell us that earlier, Chief?” I asked.
Barstow sounded furious. “I didn’t see where it was any of your business, Detective. The bottom line was that Jayme wasn’t missing. Like her mother told you, she ran off.”
“Gerard, we have a dead body. Everything is our business.” Then I thought about my own phone call with the crisis center. “How did you find that out so quickly? I’ve checked with that organization about the girls. They couldn’t offer much help. They don’t have a lot of computerized records. And the woman I talked to didn’t have any information on Jayme.”
“You think I’m not telling you the truth?” he railed. “Max, what the hell is this?”
“Clara’s not questioning your truthfulness, Gerard,” he said. “But we need to understand what’s happening.”
Silence, and then Gerard Barstow said, “Clara, listen. I didn’t get into the particulars with the woman. But I talked to a lady there. And she said someone staying at the shelter from Alber knew Jayme and saw her at the center. This was just a couple of days after the girl left town. Maybe she moved on. But that day they said she was there.”
We hung up. There was still so much we didn’t know. I was frustrated that Alber PD’s chief hadn’t told us everything earlier, but I tried to put that to the side. All I could do was move f
orward. “Let’s file missing persons reports on Eliza and Jayme and circulate them to the media. We have photos of both girls, the dates of their disappearances and descriptions of how they went missing.”
“I’ll get right on it,” Max offered.
“While you do that, I’ll skim the files I brought,” I said, pointing at the mounds sitting on the table. “Then we’re going to visit my family.”
Thirty-One
“I don’t think you should keep her chained up like that,” Jayme said, while Delilah listened through the vent. The man had returned a few minutes earlier. As soon as he walked in her room, Jayme turned the conversation to Delilah. “You’re gonna make that girl hate you if you treat her bad, mister. Why don’t you treat us better? Then we’d maybe learn to care about you.”
Delilah and Jayme had come up with their plan while the man was gone. To carry it out they needed two things: to have Delilah unchained, and for them both to gain more freedom in the house. Once the chains were off and he let his guard down, they might find a way to escape.
“You girls don’t need to care about me,” the man said. “That doesn’t matter.”
“I thought you wanted us to be a family,” Jayme said. “Ain’t I your wife? That girl upstairs, when she gets older, you’re gonna marry her, right?”
“I’m gonna marry her soon. I’m not waiting much longer. She’s old enough,” the man scoffed.
Upstairs, Delilah felt a wave of revulsion and her skin chilled.
“When do you think?” Jayme asked.
“Soon as I get a few things done,” he said. “Some things I have to take care of came up. Gotta handle those first.”
“You don’t want to marry her chained, do you?” Jayme prodded.
The man didn’t say anything that Delilah could hear, but there was some murmuring. She strained hard, listening. “If we was a family, you could trust us. We could cook for you, take care of you, like we were trained to take care of a husband,” Jayme said. “Don’t you want us to be a real family, with babies and all?”
“Babies?” he repeated.
“Yeah,” Jayme said. “That girl and me could take care of you. Wives do that for husbands. If we’re gonna be living here the rest of our lives, like you say we are, I think it’s better if we become a family.”
“How do I know you two won’t try to get away?” he asked.
The girl stared wide-eyed at him. “Because we know what you’d do. You told us you’d kill us and our families. We wouldn’t risk that.”
“I would,” he said. “Kill you all.”
“If we were a real family, if you were our husband, we wouldn’t want to leave,” Jayme argued. “Wives take up for their husbands. Like my mom always told me, women obey their men.”
The man said, “I’ll think on it.”
A short time later, Delilah heard a door close downstairs, as if the man had left Jayme’s room. Then she heard a slight commotion outside. Somewhere a dog barked and a horse neighed. Time passed, and she heard horse hooves clomping on the hard earth.
The house grew quiet.
Thirty-Two
I divided the secret files by year. Ten stacks. I leaned over the table and opened the first file and found a photo of a woman with a cut cheek and an eye so black it was rimmed in purple. “Damn,” I whispered. The notes said it was a five-month-old unsolved sexual assault. The woman was forty-six years old. I felt my anger rising, thought of my own history, the physical and emotional scars. But as horrific as the case looked, this wasn’t the time.
The guy I was looking for liked teenage girls.
I set that file to the side. As I combed through the others, I found photos of men, women and children who’d been sexually abused, assaulted, raped and murdered. Not a lot perhaps by outside standards, but for a town of 4,346 souls, a substantial number. What stood out? It appeared from the files, a few scarce sheets of paper that mainly served as witness statements, that none of the cases had been investigated before being filed away.
One by one, I browsed through.
I thought about my father. Being a polygamist took planning. To keep track of which of my four mothers he slept with each night, Father had a calendar posted in the kitchen rotating their names. With so many children, he set aside one day each month for an hour alone with each of us. On my days, we hiked through the woods and talked.
“What’s the outside world like?” I’d asked him once.
“Not like it is here, Clara,” he’d told me. “There are bad people in the Gentiles’ world. Every morning in the newspapers, every evening on the television, reporters recount horrible crimes. Here we don’t hear about such things, because here we stand unified as children of God.”
In my hands I held the reports that disproved his words. I looked at the victims’ photos, their bloody faces, and I wondered if my father had known the truth.
We didn’t live on a mountain of righteousness. Far from immune, our little town apparently had its full share of violence. The only difference: In Alber, a conspiracy of silence hid it behind a virtuous veneer. Alber took such pains to deny the truth, that I fled believing I was the only battered woman in our town. I felt responsible, believed that I’d brought the horror on myself. Looking through the files at photos of other faces like mine, bruised and bleeding, I recognized some of the victims. Others were strangers.
According to the files, none of them had gotten justice. I saw no record of anyone ever being charged with a crime.
I kept searching. In one file I found the three-year-old case of a mother who claimed a man harassed her thirteen-year-old daughter. The woman revealed the man’s name. On the report, someone had used a thick marker to black it out. I held it up to the light. I couldn’t see a first name, but over the second the marker thinned, enough so I could read: BARSTOW.
Evan Barstow? I wondered. I started a pile of possibly related cases. This would be the first.
Anything that didn’t involve girls, teenagers, young women in their early twenties, I set aside. Many of the cases were appalling, but I couldn’t consider them. I had a dead girl. Others missing. I had to find Delilah.
Then, in the files that dated nine years back, I found something of particular interest.
Fifteen-year-old Christina Bradshaw’s family lived on the outskirts of the town. According to the file, she watched the younger children in the yard that afternoon. The little ones went inside for a snack, while Christina waited outside. When they returned, she’d vanished. In the week before she went missing, Christina complained repeatedly that a particular man stalked her. “This man had been warned before to stay away from Christina,” the report read. “Christina’s mother believes that this man has taken her daughter. An officer contacted the suspect. He denied it.”
The paperwork didn’t reveal the man’s identity.
Bradshaw? Why did it sound so familiar? Then I remembered. Evan Barstow’s second wife was Jessica Bradshaw. I picked up my cell phone. “Hannah, it’s Clara,” I said. “Does Jessica Bradshaw have a younger sister named Christina?”
“Let me think,” she said. “It’s a big family. I’m not sure. Is it important?”
“It could be,” I said.
“I heard about the body. I hoped you’d call. I got worried. Is it Delilah?”
I felt a catch in my throat. “No.”
“Do we know who it is?”
“Not yet,” I answered. Max walked in and waited in the doorway. I needed to get off the phone. “Hannah, I’m in a hurry. I need to know about Christina.”
“I don’t know the girl, but hold on and I’ll ask. I have a Bradshaw here at the shelter. She’ll know.”
I put the phone on mute and concentrated on Max. “You got the missing persons reports out?”
“Yeah,” Max said. “Jayme and Eliza are both on NCIC, and I notified the Center for Missing and Exploited Children. The sheriff’s secretary is sending out notices to the media in St. George, Salt Lake, and some of the small
er cities in the area. It should all be on the news tonight.”
“Great,” I said.
“Clara, I got one ready to go on Delilah, too. What details we know. When we get back from talking to your family, we can add a photo and get out an Amber Alert. I listed her as ‘endangered missing.’”
“Good work,” I said. “Just a minute, and I’ll be with you.”
Hannah came back on the phone. “Christina is one of Jessica’s younger sisters. They’re both from the same mother, their father’s third wife.”
“Okay. That helps.”
“But there’s something strange.”
“Go on.”
“The woman I spoke to is a cousin. She says that Christina hasn’t been seen in years. They were told that she’d run off with a boy when she was a teenager.”
“Did she know the boy’s name?”
“No.”
I thanked her and then hung up before she could ask any questions. I took the two files that caught my attention, the one on Christina and the one on the thirteen-year-old’s stalker. I handed both to Max. “We’re going to split up,” I said. “You have two cases here, a harassment charge and a missing person. Take a look.”
Max opened the files and flipped through the reports.
“Where did you get these? I don’t remember seeing either one,” he said. “I searched for missing persons when I first got the note on Delilah. This report on Christina Bradshaw didn’t come up.”
“It’s a long story. Talk to their families. See what you can find out. Find out who the Bradshaws suspected in their daughter’s disappearance.”
“They had a suspect?”
“It says they did,” I said. “And the other report, the thirteen-year-old, the family named the man they say stalked their girl.”
“Who was it?”
“It’s been redacted. All I can read is the last name. Barstow.”
“One of the Barstows was involved?” His voice rose in alarm.
“It appears that way.”
“Clara, I can do this, but are you sure you don’t want me to go out to talk to your family with you?”
The Fallen Girls: An absolutely unputdownable and gripping crime thriller (Detective Clara Jefferies Book 1) Page 19
