by J K Ellem
“So what happened next?”
“Her possessiveness grew worse. I caught her one day going through my cell phone, looking at call histories and texts. When I confronted her she went off in a rage, smashed the phone. It was a side to her I’d never seen before. Then she started to get rough in bed. She was never like that. She was always so gentle, considerate. Things got out of hand.” Tears started to well in Emily’s eyes, but she fought them off.
“You don’t have to tell me anything,” Shaw said. He could see her usual stoic and strong demeanour was showing the first cracks.
“No, it’s fine. I want to tell you.”
Emily went on to describe the first signs of abuse. Small things at first that slowly accelerated into something more sinister. “She first hit me one evening just after we returned from going out to dinner. I just wanted to go to bed and sleep, but she didn’t. It was nothing, just a slap.”
“It’s never just nothing, Emily. Abuse is abuse.”
Emily nodded. “Then one day when I was late home from work—we’d had a parent-teacher evening and some of us went out after for a drink—she was waiting up for me. She screamed at me, accused me of having an affair with another male teacher. Said she would find out who it was and would confront his wife.”
Shaw looked at her questioningly.
Emily shook her head. “God, no. Most of the male teachers at my school were boring as hell. Plus I like women, not men.”
“So what happened?” Shaw could see she was struggling, but she remained strong.
“She threw me into the kitchen counter, broke two of my ribs.”
Emily fidgeted with her hands and Shaw said nothing for a while. All the air seemed to have been sucked out of the room.
“And the police, the hospital, what did they say?”
Emily seemed embarrassed. She should have told the truth, but she was too scared. “I lied. I told them I fell down the stairs taking out the trash.”
Shaw shook his head.
“People think that because it’s a same-sex relationship, abuse like that doesn’t really happen. But it’s just like any other relationship. Domestic violence doesn’t discriminate,” Emily said.
Emily explained that after that, Casey seemed to calm down, she returned to her old self and apologised, said she would never hurt her again. But two weeks later, the abuse started again, much worse.
“And you didn’t tell anyone? Your family? The police?”
Emily took a deep breath, wishing now she had. “I was frightened. She threatened to kill me if I ever told anyone. I was stupid, I know. I needed to escape, but I couldn’t see a way out. She had control over me, manipulated everything. She would follow me to work some days when she wasn’t working just to see who I spoke to, or if I really had a job or was I secretly meeting someone else.”
Emily went very quiet for a moment and when she spoke again her voice was detached, hollow, like all her spirit had gone. “Then one day she raped me.”
31
It was too vile to imagine what Emily meant. It was too dark a place for Shaw to go to, so the darkness came to him in her words as Emily continued.
“She came home one day with a package, something she had bought, something horrible.” Her voice sounded vacant. Part of her decency had been taken away that fateful day. She had been violated in the most demeaning way.
“She strapped it on, held me down and used it on me.”
They sat in silence for a few minutes. Words were not needed. Shaw had a picture in his mind and he slowly burned with anger. It was a vile, despicable act.
Snowflakes drifted outside the windows in tranquil swirls, the wind had abated for a while.
Emily took a long drink from her wine glass. “She said I needed to be taught a lesson, that if I wanted a man so badly then she would show me what it felt like, but she didn’t use it that way, instead she—”
Shaw held up a hand. “It’s OK, I understand. You don’t need to relive it.” He felt so sorry for her, what she endured.
“But I do,” Emily said, tears glistening her cheeks. “Every day.”
After that fateful day, Emily went to a gun store in Scottsdale and enquired about shooting classes. She bought a handgun and took lessons every week on the store’s indoor gun range.
“It was hard to keep it from her, but I went during my lunch breaks at the school. I was determined that she was not going to ever abuse me again. No one was going to, ever again,” she said determinedly.
“So you shot her, in self-defence, like you said.”
Emily nodded. “That was about a month later, when she attacked me for the last time and broke my arm.”
Emily went on to say that the court proceedings went quickly. Shaw was right, she explained. After Casey smashed her cell phone, Emily did document everything and took photos with a new pre-paid phone that she kept at school. She would go into the toilet at school the day after, strip down to her underwear and take pictures of the bruises, hand marks and rope burns. They were the worst kind of selfies you could imagine.
With the evidence she had presented, including the medical report on her broken arm, she was fully exonerated on the basis of self-defense. In Arizona you are justified in using deadly physical force to defend yourself if it is reasonable to believe your life is in danger. Emily, and so did the jury, believed that Casey Eddleton, in a frenzied rage, would have killed her if she wasn’t stopped.
Emily looked up at Shaw. “I’m not in some form of witness protection. I killed her. Shot her dead. She’s not coming back, unless it’s her ghost.”
“So Sheriff Decker knows? She must.”
Emily nodded. “She is very protective of me.”
Shaw had known this from the moment Clare suggested he rent the spare room she had. So if Emily killed her abusive lover, who was following her now?
Emily poured herself another glass of wine and almost reading his mind asked again, “Who do you think it is?”
“Well, it’s not Casey that’s for sure.” He needed to tell her. She was in danger. Whoever it was, the person was extremely confident, like they were sending a message that they could enter the house whenever they wished, enter your private space, touch whatever they wanted and you could do nothing about it. But far more chilling was that they were saying they would be back, and then they would hurt you. “I think it’s the same person I saw on the ridge today, the same person who followed you into town yesterday.” Shaw explained the idea he and Clare had discussed, that it was a person, acting alone, who was choosing victims. He told her about the girl’s body, but left out the gory details. He felt it was her right to know, especially now that she was looking like being the killer’s next victim. If Clare got mad with him for telling Emily, he would deal with that later.
“But why me?” Emily asked.
“You’re young, good-looking, live alone. There could be a whole host of reasons why they chose you. But you stood out for them when they first saw you. You’ve done nothing wrong and please don’t feel like you have.”
“I’ll shoot them dead if they come near me,” Emily said. Her cold, calculating mask had returned to her face.
Shaw shook his head. “You may not be that lucky again with a judge and jury, if you do.”
“It wasn’t luck, it was self-defense.”
“I know and I agree. If this person has a gun, shoot them dead. If they have a knife, shoot them dead. If you feel your life is in mortal danger, then do whatever you need to do. But you can’t go around just shooting people based on suspicion.” Like you almost did to me, Shaw felt like saying.
Emily thought about this for a moment. “So what would you do?” Emily needed to trust him, Clare had told her he was a good person, but Emily was still hesitant.
Shaw knew exactly what he was going to do. It was what they did when he was in the Secret Service when a credible threat arose.
He smiled at Emily, because this was now his territory, his world, what he wa
s trained to do and what he was best at. “I’m going to protect you, Emily, but for me to do that you need to be with me, alongside me.”
Emily frowned. “Alongside you?”
Shaw nodded slowly. “Yes. Because together we’re going to find this person. We’re going to turn the tables and hunt them.”
32
It went smoothly and without a hitch. Mack jemmied the back door of the garage and slipped in unnoticed. The internal door between the garage and the house had a flimsy push-button knob design that he forced open in less than three seconds.
He waited in the garage until he heard the front doorbell ring, then he entered the house. Molly was leaning with her eye to the peep hole in the front door when Mack hit her from behind, knocking her unconscious.
They carried Molly to the kitchen and tied her to a chair, taping her mouth shut.
Micky signalled to Freddy with his torch from the porch and he parked the car away from the house. Micky let him in through the kitchen door. He was carrying his knife case and a duffle bag. The bag was filled with special tools Micky had chosen for Molly.
Mack went around the ground floor double-checking all the curtains and blinds were drawn. They wanted some privacy for the next few hours. He then turned on the television. He was lucky, he found a horror movie on cable that had a lot of screaming and crying in it. “Perfect,” he said, as he cranked up the volume.
Mack walked back into the kitchen and saw Micky standing in front of Molly. Her head lolled forward, still unconscious. Micky had a glass of water in his hand. Mack nodded, “All good boss.”
Micky smiled at screams and cries coming from the living room. Good. He turned back to Molly and threw the water full in her face. A few moments later she began to stir. Micky tossed the glass to Freddy then began slapping Molly’s face, hard.
33
There were pages and pages on the subject, and when Clare clicked on another link, more pages filled her computer screen. The clock on the wall read nine o’clock. Ben had left over an hour ago and she didn’t plan to stay back this long. But when she typed into Google Missing Refugee Children, over twenty-three million hits came back in less than half a second, and for the last hour she couldn’t tear her eyes away from her screen.
She switched on the coffee machine again, took off her jacket and scarf, and began to trawl through the search results.
There were entire websites dedicated to Europe’s missing refugee children. There were websites from Europe, websites from the United Kingdom, websites from Australia. The stories were all the same, harrowing and heartbreaking. One website estimated that twenty-six thousand unaccompanied refugee children entered Europe in 2016, mainly into Germany, and nearly nine thousand of them had vanished. Most of the missing children were aged between fourteen and seventeen, with nearly a thousand of them under the age of thirteen. Most of the missing children were from war-torn regions or places of famine and poverty like Afghanistan, Syria, Somalia, and Eritrea. One global charity organisation said that missing refugee children were never followed up on by local police, because a missing refugee child seemed to be worth less in allocating limited resources compared to a German or an Italian child who went missing.
The statistics and stories were truly horrific and it saddened Clare as she scrolled through the articles and websites. She had desperately wanted a child of her own and couldn’t think of anything more precious in life, and yet thousands of unaccompanied refugee children flooded into Europe over the last few years and no one seemed to care. People spent more time and concern searching for a missing sock in their drawer, or a sentimental plastic pen, than a refugee child.
Politicians had a lot to answer for, Clare thought as she continued reading. They simply opened up their borders with no thought as to the consequences and the strain it would place on policing and monitoring the influx of people. You could hardly blame law enforcement or border security, they were just overwhelmed. Who knows who came into the country pretending to be a refugee? A few of the websites claimed that a majority of the adult refugees were legitimate, but embedded amongst the masses were many men with criminal records who were escaping the authorities in their own country. It seemed all too easy to hitch a ride on a boat, throw your papers overboard or burn them at sea, then arrive in a new country claiming you were someone else. Then you would get issued with papers and a whole new identity, and your past crimes would be erased together with your former self. For criminals, the refugee crisis was a godsend.
Another website claimed they had spoken to known people smugglers who told them of trafficking syndicates running large operations out of many of the European ports and refugee camps, and these were preying on children in particular.
Then Clare’s email pinged and a message slid into the corner of her screen. It was Dan Reynolds from Denver PD. He had discovered a trace of DNA on the Syrian girl’s body and had found a match in the police database.
* * *
It was an obscure case from a few years back. The body of a young graduate student, Anita Hobbs, had been found on a university campus in Memphis, Tennessee. She had been brutally beaten, raped and there were signs of torture, but not to the extent Clare had seen in the autopsy report for the young Syrian girl.
Clare scrolled through crime scene photos that Dan Reynolds had attached in a separate file. His email said that there were over one hundred photos taken, but he attached the jpegs of a dozen or so that he thought summed up the nature of the crime. Clare took a deep breath and opened all the files at once then arranged them on her desktop left to right.
Anita Hobbs may have been once an attractive young African-American woman, but the photos almost made her unrecognisable. Her body had been discovered at night by campus security in thick scrub between two buildings. Cause of death was strangulation, but the autopsy report showed extensive bruising, a broken arm, three broken ribs and a fractured jaw. Several of her teeth were missing and were later recovered, one in her stomach and two a few feet away in the soil. What was the most disturbing to Clare were the photos of the victim’s back. There were several deep cut marks along the upper and middle regions. From the nature of wounds, she had been slowly and carefully cut, not randomly slashed. Pieces of her skin had been removed from her buttocks.
Reynolds had attached electronic Post-it notes to the report saying that the cut patterns were similar to the ones found on the Syrian girl.
Trace DNA had been found on Anita Hobbs for an unknown profile and the results sat on the national DNA databases for two years waiting for a perpetrator match. An hour ago that match happened.
Clare sat back in her chair and stared at the screen. Memphis was more than a thousand miles away.
Clare picked up the phone and dialled Denver PD. Dan Reynolds answered his direct line on the third ring. “Reynolds,” his voice sounded gruff and tired.
“Dan, it’s Clare. Thanks for sending the file over on the DNA match.”
“Sure, no problem, I didn’t know if you were still in the office.”
Clare looked at the wall clock. It had just gone nine thirty. “Look, I thought you found no DNA on the Syrian girl.” She could hear Reynolds tapping away on his keyboard.
“We didn’t initially. But then one of the lab techs found some dried blood on a front tooth. At first she just assumed it was the girl's blood, from her lips or gums. But a few of the front teeth were loose, consistent with some form of blunt force trauma, like someone had punched her in the mouth. So a sample was lifted and we had enough to run a DNA test. The blood found wasn’t the girl’s.”
“So you ran it through the database and it matched DNA left behind at a crime scene two years ago in Memphis?”
“Yep, came as a hell of a surprise to me too. The only problem is that the Memphis DNA is still unknown. There is no profile match for a perpetrator in any of the databases."
"Damn it!" So close, but yet so far. They had a link between two crimes. The same DNA was found on two bodies bu
t there was no identifying DNA match as to whom the killer was.
"Where did you find the DNA in the Memphis case?" said Clare.
More tapping on the keyboard in Denver.
"Skin cell residue from under the fingernails of the left hand."
Clare rubbed her temples, feeling the start of a migraine.
"Look Clare, I haven't gone through the full report, I just wanted to send you some key parts. If the weather improves I'll be up there in full force tomorrow at first light. Until then sit tight and do nothing."
"What about the warrants for the three guys from the logging camp?"
"I've got them sitting right here on my desk. We'll get their swabs tomorrow. It's a long shot, but at this stage we need to follow up on every lead."
Clare was happy. She wanted to see the look on their faces when she and the Denver PD rolled into the camp tomorrow and slapped the warrants down on Ray Taggart's desk. The smug prick couldn't refuse them then.
"OK, I'll sit tight."
Reynolds picked up on the reluctance in her voice. "Listen Clare, the logging camp is a sensitive issue. I've already taken a call from the Mayor's office today telling me to back off. If the swabs come to nothing, then you need to let it go."
"What about the attempted assault on Molly Malone, the store owner up here?"
Reynold’s sigh came down the line. "That is a separate matter and let it run its course. We have video footage and fingerprints. Once the storm clears and I can make it up, after I've set my team up at the crime scene in the forest I want to question both the woman and the man in your office."
"Good," Clare replied. For once she was glad the highway in and out of town was closed. Shaw couldn't leave town and Molly wasn't going anywhere soon either.
