Shuttered Secrets

by Melissa Erin Jackson

  “Hi!” she said, with more pep than this early hour ever required.

  “Hi, Riley,” the detective answered slowly.

  Despite proving that her skills could be an asset to him, and that he was returning her call, he still spoke to her with an air of trepidation. Riley hadn’t convinced him yet that “psychic medium” wasn’t synonymous with “mind reader.”

  “I would have called you back sooner but I needed to do a little digging to refresh my memory on the Brynn Bodwell case,” he said. “Hearing that name threw me for a loop … it’s been years since I’ve heard it.”

  Riley forgot all about the small puddle of milk on her pants. She hoped the detective would have some insider information that had been left out of the true crime shows. “What can you tell me about her?”

  “I suppose you were too young to have lived through the media hoopla,” he said. “What were you … six?”

  Riley laughed. “I think I was nine.”

  “You’re even younger than my daughter!” the detective said, chuckling. “Anyway, her body had been dumped in the Orilla Verde Recreation Area after she’d been missing for about a week. Taos really went to bat trying to find her when she first went missing. There was media coverage every night for weeks. Her name and picture were plastered all over newspapers. Every few years it seems like a new documentary comes out about her, adding more suspects to the ever-growing list.”

  Suppressing a sigh, she said, “Yeah, I found most of that on an episode of Unsolved Mysteries.”

  “You sound disappointed in my intel,” he said, the smile evident in his voice. “Did your research turn up the name Shawna Mack?”

  Riley cocked her head. “No. Who’s Shawna?”

  “About six months before Brynn was found, the body of another woman was found in that same recreation area at one of the campgrounds.”

  Sitting up straighter, Riley said, “Really?”

  “There were striking similarities between Shawna Mack’s disappearance and later murder—as well as the disposal of her body—and what happened to Brynn. Both had been strangled and nude. It’s believed she was also washed prior to being left there, but because of the location—a fine layer of dirt and plant debris had coated her body—that part of it has been hotly debated,” he said. “Yet Shawna barely made the news. There’s still no consensus among law enforcement about whether the two cases are even connected.”

  “Seems like you think they are,” Riley said, then hopped off the counter and hurried into the living room where her laptop lay on the coffee table. While Detective Howard talked, Riley powered on her computer, sat on the floor using the couch as a backrest, and pulled up a search engine.

  “I do. There are too many similarities for it to be a coincidence, if you ask me. We heard about it in Santa Fe, since Taos is relatively close and several of the officers here have family out there and vice versa. A buddy of mine worked the case,” the detective said. “Both cases went cold, but Shawna’s went colder a lot faster than Brynn’s. Maybe it was because Brynn’s family had more resources to keep the search going. But my guess is that Brynn got all the coverage because she was blonde and blue-eyed and was well on her way to becoming a veterinarian, while Shawna was a Black single mother working three jobs and had had a few run-ins with the law.”

  Riley lightly shook her head. As an avid consumer of true crime, she’d read about dozens of similar stories, yet somehow each instance managed to disturb her all over again. She typed “Shawna Mack, Taos NM” into her search bar, then hit the images tab. The pictures that popped up were of a very pretty Black woman in her early twenties. Riley wasn’t sure how she felt about the fact that Shawna wasn’t the woman in the yellow dress. “So the suspects in Brynn’s murder didn’t overlap with the suspects for Shawna’s?”

  “They had tunnel vision when they went searching for Shawna’s killer,” the detective said just as Riley’s internet search pulled up an article about the arrest of a Black man named Rodney Elgin in connection with Shawna’s death. She didn’t immediately see anything about a murder conviction.

  “Rodney Elgin?” she asked.

  “Yep. There was a rumor that someone in the department had an informant who pinned it on Rodney, but the name of the informant was never revealed. Rodney had been Shawna’s on-again, off-again boyfriend for years. They’d gotten together young and had a son, but there had been a lot of problems in the relationship. Police knew of Shawna and Rodney because of how many times neighbors had called the cops on them for domestic disturbances. Shawna eventually got a restraining order against him.

  “It was well-known among Shawna’s neighbors that she loved taking her son to the recreation area to go hiking. It’s about half an hour outside of Taos. Rodney and Shawna had taken the kid out there dozens of times, too. It was a cheap place to take kids and spend the weekend—most campsites are five to seven dollars a night—so it wasn’t uncommon for neighbors to run into each other out there. The police figured Rodney had been there without the kid one day and killed her. Her body was found by the campsite host early one morning.”

  “Did Shawna or Rodney have a campsite booked for that night?”

  “Nope,” the detective said. “The theory is that they were out there for some kind of tryst that went sideways.”

  Riley’s brow furrowed. “Wouldn’t other campers have heard it? Or heard him leave?”

  “It never sounded plausible to me either,” he said. “When you compare that to what happened to Brynn, it was clear that they’d both been killed somewhere else and then dumped in the recreation area. Wildlife is very active up there—the killer left the bodies in locations where tourists, campers, or nature guides were sure to find them before the animals did.”

  A click of the images tab pulled up Rodney’s mugshot. She knew appearances didn’t account for much—the gorgeous Francis Hank Carras, who was capable of terrible things, was proof enough of that—but Riley didn’t see a dead-eyed killer when she looked at Rodney. She saw a man who had made a lot of bad decisions early on, and then life had chewed him up and spat him back out. She switched to the news tab.

  Murder suspect arrested for role in drug trafficking ring, read a headline. He was only twenty-five when he had been arrested. The same Riley was now.

  “So he was suspected of the murder but convicted for something else?” Riley asked.

  “Yep,” the detective said. “The day Shawna’s body was found, they opted not to announce it to the media right away. They must have paid off that poor campsite host and the campers to keep their mouths shut about the whole thing for a while. Police picked up Rodney after they pulled him over for running through a stop sign. He had a flimsy alibi for the week during Shawna’s disappearance, and his story changed so often during his interrogation, they were convinced he was lying. Truth was, he’d been pretty heavily involved in a drug trafficking ring that sold crack cocaine, which was why he was cagey about giving up his whereabouts. But when they broke the news to him that Shawna was dead, he told them everything, unwilling to go down for the murder. His confession about the drugs eventually got him thrown in prison for twenty years.”

  “Damn,” Riley breathed.

  “According to my buddy, there was enough chest pumping going on after Rodney’s arrest that it was clear they all thought they’d gotten Shawna’s murderer. They didn’t have the evidence to nail him for it, though. Everything they had on him was circumstantial at best. I think Rodney’s arrest got a couple of media spotlights, but it was more about getting a ‘lowlife’ like Rodney off the street rather than focusing on the fact that a young mother had been murdered and carelessly discarded. Those campers finally got their fifteen minutes too. But even that turned into commentary about the increase in crime rates and the idea that people can’t even go camping anymore without stumbling over a body.”

  “Ugh,” Riley said. “And then Brynn disappeared six months later and was killed in the same way, but left in a different part of th
e recreation area?”

  “Correct. But Shawna’s case was considered solved at that point. Shawna’s had been labeled as a domestic abuse case gone awry, while Brynn’s was treated as something else entirely.” After a beat of silence, with the faintest hint of hope in voice, he asked, “What’s your interest in this?”

  “I had a dream about Brynn. Well, sort of. It was about a friend of hers reading the newspaper about Brynn’s death,” Riley said. Then Riley told him about the box of film cameras Jade had recently purchased. “Ever since the cameras were here, I’ve been visited by a Black woman in a yellow dress. She’s twenty-something, too. The storage unit where the cameras came from was in Clovis, though, not Taos. And I just looked up Shawna Mack—it’s not the same woman. I have a bunch of pieces and I don’t know how any of them fit together.”

  The detective let out a sigh, but Riley couldn’t tell if it was one of relief or not. “There weren’t any other homicides that matched the M.O. after the discovery of Brynn’s body, which lent credence to the Taos police department’s conviction that the cases hadn’t been connected. Both were one-off homicides where the killers happened to use the same dumping grounds. But if your woman in the yellow dress is connected to Brynn and Shawna, it could mean that the killer didn’t stop after Brynn, just changed tactics.”

  “Unless the woman in the yellow dress came before Shawna,” Riley said.

  “True,” he said. “It’s too bad your ghosts don’t come with time stamps.”

  Riley managed a faint laugh.

  “Well, if you get any insights on the Shawna Mack case, let me know, yeah? It’s one of those cases I think about a lot. When Shawna was killed, my daughter was around the same age. She looked a bit like Shawna, too. It rattled my daughter so badly, I think it’s a big part of why she became a prosecutor.”

  “I will,” Riley said.

  She hung up and dropped her phone onto the couch. Shawna Mack’s smiling face was displayed in several small boxes on her screen. One of the pictures was of Shawna holding her son on her hip. He looked about six years old in the picture. If Shawna had been killed eighteen years ago, Riley supposed her son was about the same age as Riley now, maybe a few years younger.

  Sitting cross-legged on her couch, she grabbed the computer and settled it in her lap. She scoured the internet for Shawna first, finding most of the same information the detective had just told her, as well as Shawna’s son Malcolm. He was twenty-four and was married with kids of his own—newborn twin girls from the few public posts of pictures she could find on his social media. It didn’t look like Malcolm had done any interviews about what had happened to his mother. Riley wondered if that was because Malcolm had refused to give interviews, as the privacy settings on most of his pages might suggest—or if no one had asked.

  She only found one article that made the connection between Shawna Mack and Brynn Bodwell. The article had been published in the Taos Daily Journal.

  Reddit had a thread for each individual woman’s death, as well as one that speculated that the two were not only connected, but that there were more bodies the police hadn’t found yet. There were theories about the investigations being botched—whether on purpose or not. Some speculated that since the small town of Taos hadn’t ever had a case like this before, they hadn’t known how to deal with not only one homicide, but two.

  Forensic science had made leaps and bounds by the early 2000s, and more was known about the psychology of the small percentage of murderers who killed strangers. But Taos hadn’t had a formal homicide unit then; they still didn’t. Had the police force in Taos not connected the Brynn and Shawna dots because they hadn’t had the experience to know what they’d been looking at? Of course, maybe there had been no connection to find. Maybe Rodney Elgin really had murdered Shawna, high on the same drugs he’d been convicted for distributing. Perhaps Brynn had been murdered by an ex who had been jealous of her relationship with Liam. Could her disappearance on the night of her two-year anniversary hold any significance?

  But, as Detective Howard had said, if the cases were connected, and confirmation bias had snuck in, it was possible the connection hadn’t been made due to reasons that had little to do with experience or availability of evidence.

  Riley leaned back against the couch and crossed her arms, staring at the Reddit thread for so long, her eyes ached.

  As she rubbed them, Michael’s voice echoed in her head. “You don’t have to look into any of it. It isn’t your responsibility.”

  She tried to let that thought carry her off to sleep that night, but the dead women she’d learned about in the past few weeks got jumbled up in her dreams. Riley relived the horrible tumble down the stairs, yet the woman who was splayed at the bottom was Brynn Bodwell. Julie sat at a table weeping over an article that featured Shawna’s name, but with a picture of the woman in the yellow dress.

  Riley woke in the middle of the night, sweaty and with a head full of ghosts. The sound of the woman falling down the stairs replayed in her mind, the thud and crash of flesh losing its battle with gravity. Riley recalled her scraped skin and unfocused eyes. Her gut told her something had happened to her before her overdose. Did she continue to haunt Julie’s house because she regretted what she’d done, or because of something else? Did she have family who mourned her loss now?

  As Riley lay in the dark staring at the ceiling, she found herself thinking not about the deceased women, but the people they’d left behind. The friend weeping over Brynn’s death. Malcolm forever without his mother, and his newborn children without a paternal grandmother. The unknown loved ones of the woman in the yellow dress who had no doubt gone years without answers.

  When Riley and Michael had returned Pete Vonick’s Scooby Doo shirt to his mother, Riley and his mother Janet had held each other and cried for what felt like hours. They wept for the little boy they both missed, even though Riley had only known him in death. Even Michael had gotten choked up. As much as unraveling a mystery could thrill her, what kept sucking her back in was the living people who made up the tapestry of the story.

  They were who she did this for.

  This time when she fell asleep, the ghosts let her be.

  CHAPTER 7

  The next day, Riley’s phone rang as soon as she got out of her car behind The Laughing Tiger, ready to start her one-to-nine shift. She expected it to be Michael calling to say hi at the end of his lunch break as he often did, but it was Jade’s smiling face that filled her screen.

  “Hey,” Riley said. “You all right?”

  Jade laughed. “You can’t assume the worst every time someone calls you.”

  “Try and stop me,” Riley said, pausing a few feet from the back entrance of the restaurant and leaning against the brick wall. Nosey-ass Roberto was loitering in the lot having a smoke, and though he was navigating his phone with his thumb, she knew he was doing his best to listen in.

  “Anyway,” Jade said, “something you said the other day clicked with me. We’re millennials! None of my friends know how to use film cameras!”

  Well, at least she’d come to her senses before she dragged Riley on another thrift shop run.

  “So, thanks to your astute observation …” Jade began. Riley narrowed her eyes suspiciously even though Jade couldn’t see it. “I booked an appointment with one of the photographers you researched for me a couple of months back. His name is Ian Chambers and not only is he a full-time photographer, he also gives classes at the adult school a few times a year on film cameras.”

  Riley had no idea where Jade was going with this. Did she want her to help interview photographers now? At least when they interviewed chefs, Riley got to sample so much food, she hadn’t needed to eat dinner that night. According to the color-coded spreadsheet, Jade still hadn’t chosen a chef, though. The idea of meeting half a dozen photographers wasn’t terribly appealing. Maybe she needed to call Jonah and ask him to split some of this wedding prep stuff with her.

  “I was thinking,” J
ade singsonged, “that I could kill two birds with one stone. I can interview him to see if he’ll be a good fit for the wedding, but we could also bring the cameras to him and see if he knows anything about them? Maybe one of them is really rare and was only made in 1975 or something and it’ll help you narrow down who might have bought the things.”

  “I’m in.”

  “Whoa, that was easy,” Jade said.

  “I’m not always disagreeable, you know.”

  Jade laughed long and loud. “Good one. Thursday is still your day off, yeah? Ian said we can come by his classroom at the adult school Thursday evening around 5 pm before his class at 5:30.”

  Jade hadn’t yet been filled in on the added wrinkles to Riley’s current mystery, mostly because Riley only had bits and pieces. But at this point, she didn’t know what to try next. She still felt resistant about the séance idea, but it was also the only one she had.

  Just before 5 on Thursday evening, Riley pulled into the parking lot of the school. Apparently the place was mostly geared to adults working toward their GEDs, but it also offered several art classes. It was a plain, unassuming place. She’d actually driven by here zillions of times and never registered what it was. Several blue doors lined the length of the beige façade, and a mowed, patchy lawn ran along the front of the building, bisected by a sidewalk periodically dotted by benches.

  Jade arrived within a few minutes and headed for one of the benches. After placing the cardboard box of cameras on it, she pulled her phone out of her denim jacket and tapped at her screen. Riley’s phone chimed a moment later.

  Stop loitering in your car like a weirdo.

  Riley rolled her eyes, snatched her phone off her dash, and joined her.

  “So … did you do your obsessive internet wormhole thing and stalk Ian Chambers?” Jade asked.

  “Nah,” Riley said. “Why?”