Ninth Grave

by Kathi Daley

  “And you told the police that?”

  Jack knew she had, but I supposed he just wanted to keep her talking.

  “I did tell the police. Maxie and I even tried to work with a sketch artist to come up with a likeness of him, but the police never did identify him. I don’t know what happened to Lisa, but given the fact that her car was abandoned at a gas station, I am going to go out on a limb and say that was where she was abducted. She might have been followed from the concert or she might have just caught the eye of someone who stopped for gas. She was dressed in a way that would suggest that she was an easy mark for a guy looking for a good time.”

  “Did Lisa always dress in that manner?” Jack asked.

  Josie frowned. “No. Not really. I know that she had been arguing with her boyfriend, and it seemed to me that she was dressing to make a statement about her availability. She’d told me that she was planning to break up with Darby, who was a clingy sort of guy. Lisa was just nineteen. She wasn’t looking to be tied down, but he had wedding bells and baby buggies on his mind. It seemed to me the harder he tried to quell Lisa’s wild side, the wilder she got.”

  “And yet she was so concerned about being on time for her early shift the next morning that she left the concert at ten o’clock,” Jack said. “That doesn’t sound like wild behavior to me.”

  Josie frowned. “Yeah, I guess her leaving early was odd. In the past, she hadn’t cared all that much about being late for work. I guess there might have been another reason she left early and she used work as an excuse.”

  “Can you think of any other reason for her to leave early?” Jack asked.

  She shook her head. “Not really. She might not have been feeling well. Or maybe all the texts between her and Darby that night had ruined her mood. To tell you the truth, I don’t know why she even bothered to text him back. She had come to the concert to get away from him, yet she spent the whole night texting with him. There might have been something more going on than I realized.”

  “Does Darby still live in town?” Jack asked.

  “Yeah. I can get you his phone number if you want. He’s engaged to someone else now, so he may want to speak to you somewhere other than his home. He and his fiancée live together, and it turns out that she is as possessive with him as he was with Lisa.”

  Neither Jack nor I thought that Darby had killed Lisa because we knew Sam had, but we thought it might be worth our while to speak to him. Jack called him, and we arranged to meet at the ballpark where he was going to be for most of the day. He told Jack that there would be multiple teams at the park, so he should look for the team with the purple and white jerseys.

  “Darby Denton?” Jack asked as we approached a man in purple and white with the name Denton stenciled on the back.

  “That’s me. You must be Jack Jones.”

  Jack nodded. “And this is Jill. Thank you for agreeing to speak to us.”

  “I only have a few minutes,” he reminded us.

  “That’s fine,” Jack said. “We only have a few questions. I understand that on the night she disappeared, Lisa and you had been texting each other.”

  Darby nodded. “We’d had a fight. Lisa insisted that she wanted to break up, but I knew she was just in one of her moods and after she’d had a chance to think things through, she would realize that she loved me after all and want to get back together. I guess my texts to her were an effort to hurry the process along.”

  “Did you and Lisa fight often?”

  Darby chuckled. “All the time. I loved Lisa, but she had more mood swings than anyone ought to.”

  “Lisa left the concert early on the night she disappeared. Did she tell you why?”

  “She said that there was a guy sitting behind them who had been hanging out near her apartment the past few days and he gave her the creeps. She thought he had followed her to the concert, even though he had arrived first. I asked her how he could have followed her to the concert if he got there first and she got sort of confused. She thought about it and decided that the man who had been hanging out around her apartment had dark hair, not blond, and she admitted that he was older than the guy at the concert. Like I said, she seemed confused about who exactly had been watching her. I think she might have been drinking. Lisa liked to drink. Anyway, I suggested that she leave and maybe come by my place. Eventually, she agreed, but she never showed up.”

  Jack raised a brow. “So she actually planned to come to your place and not to go home for an early night as she’d told her friends?”

  Darby nodded. “She told them that she was going home so they wouldn’t give her a hard time for bailing on them to spend time with me.”

  “Lisa’s friends told the police that the blond-haired man who had been sitting behind them left the concert just minutes after she did. Do you think he could have followed her and then abducted her from the gas station?”

  Darby shrugged. “I have no idea. Lisa called me after she left the concert and we chatted until she arrived at the gas station. She never said anything about anyone following her, but she might not have noticed.” Darby shook his head, a look of regret on his face. “I wish I knew what was about to happen. Maybe I could have done something to change the outcome and Lisa would still be here today. The last thing she said to me was that she was low on fuel and was going to stop but would see me in a few minutes. I can’t imagine what could have happened to her.”

  We thanked Darby and then headed back to the motel room. We hadn’t learned anything new that would help to explain what had happened to Lisa, but gaining new information hadn’t been our goal. Showing Sam that we were taking his request to research each girl’s final days seriously was actually what we were doing.

  “Maybe we should speak to the woman who worked with Lisa, just to be thorough,” I suggested.

  “That might not be a bad idea.” Jack looked down at his notes. “The clerk’s name is Yvette Potter. She was the one who described the woman who harassed Lisa as a middle-aged woman with brown hair. We’ve talked about the fact that a middle-aged woman with brown hair has shown up at every location from which a girl has disappeared. I’ll call Rick to see if he can get a phone number for Yvette. If nothing else, maybe she can come up with a better description of the woman.”

  Rick was able to find out that Yvette was working at a local diner. Jack called her and she agreed to meet us at the diner when she got off work at two. Jack thanked her and jotted down the directions. We still had some time before that, so we grabbed some sandwiches and went to the park. I used the downtime to call Clara. I was curious to hear whether she had suffered another nightmare the night before.

  “It was much the same,” Clara confirmed. “I was trapped in a small space, which I guess was some sort of storm shelter or root cellar. There was a small opening between the ground and the doorway, which latched overhead. It was maybe a couple of inches in height, allowing me to see and hear what was going on outside but not to participate.”

  “There is definitely a common theme marbled throughout all the dreams. Did it get dark in this dream as well?”

  “It did,” Clara verified. “One minute I was looking out the little opening at the people who seemed to be having a party just beyond my cell and the next thing I knew, the people were gone and it was dark. As it had before, eventually, the darkness choked the life from me. It really does seem that there is a message to be had from these dreams. I’m just not sure what that message might be.”

  “Maybe you are channeling someone who died in such a manner. Someone who was trapped and unheard despite their proximity to others. Someone who was eventually swallowed by the darkness.”

  “I suppose that is as good a guess as any. But who is it and how can I help? There must be a reason I am having these dreams.”

  I hoped for Clara’s sake that she figured it out. It must be awful to have those dreams night after night.

  By the time we’d played with Kizzy and eaten our lunch, it was time to meet Yvette
. The café where she worked closed at two, so she led us to a booth in the back where we could chat while several other employees cleaned up.

  “How can I help you?” she asked.

  “We are looking into Lisa Stockwell’s disappearance,” Jack started. “According to the police report, you worked for the same diner that Lisa did.”

  “That’s right.”

  “You told the police that Lisa had been harassed by a middle-aged woman with brown hair on the day before she went missing.”

  Yvette nodded. “I told the police officer investigating Lisa’s disappearance all of that, but nothing ever came of it.”

  “When you said that she was harassing Lisa, what exactly did you mean?”

  “The woman was angry about the way her eggs were served. She not only wanted new eggs but a whole new meal, and she wanted it comped. Lisa told her that she could fix the eggs if they weren’t to her liking, but she couldn’t comp the meal. The lady got mad and started yelling and threatening to get even with Lisa for not being more accommodating. She was a real wacko, I can tell you that.”

  “Do you think she might have followed Lisa that night?” Jack asked.

  Yvette shook her head. “I doubt it. I only mentioned her to the investigator because he asked me if we’d had any customers who’d been acting strange the week Lisa went missing. The lady with the runny eggs came to mind, so I mentioned her.”

  It didn’t seem to either of us that the woman Yvette described could be the middle-aged woman we suspected of killing the girls we’d been investigating, so we thanked Yvette and headed back to the motel. When we arrived, Jack emailed Sam, who replied with the same questions we’d come to expect. Jack outlined the details of Lisa’s last days as spelled out in the police report and mentioned the interviews we’d conducted. We still felt that the killer might be a middle-aged woman but decided to identify the killer as the tall man with dark hair that Darby had said had been hanging around Lisa’s apartment. For all we knew, this man had followed Lisa first to the concert and then to the gas station. The tall, dark-haired man as the killer was a long shot, but it didn’t seem Sam cared who we fingered as long as we did our research, so we’d decided to mix things up to see if we got a different response.

  Sam emailed back with directions to the burial site, which looked to be only about a thirty-minute drive. I felt like in addition to recovering the remains of the victims, we had begun to put together enough facts that it might be possible to begin to develop a profile. The question was, would it allow us to track down the person behind the murders and bring them to justice? More importantly, would we find out what we needed to know to save the ninth victim, as Sam had indicated we would have a shot at doing if we followed the clues to the end?

  As with the other sites, Sam had buried Lisa in an isolated location near a seasonal spring and a beautiful meadow. We uncovered the remains and Jack sent a photo to Sam, who responded back with a date and location but not a name.

  “Potter’s Bay, Maryland, June 6, 2014,” Jack said.

  “Should we go now?” I asked.

  Jack glanced toward the sky. “No. It is late and I am tired. Sam has never determined a specific timeline that needed to be adhered to, so I suggest that we meet my mom for dinner tomorrow as planned. We can head to Potter’s Bay on Monday.”

  “We can do the legwork at the motel tonight,” I suggested. “We’ll need to figure out who went missing on June 6, 2014, and after we do, we can call Rick to ask him about obtaining the police reports. That way we will be ready to dig back into things on Monday.”

  “That’s a good idea. Let’s pick up some dinner along the way. Sam picked an exceptional location to bury Lisa, but it was a long hike in and out and I am starving.”

  Chapter 14

  Sunday, May 12

  “If you ask me, this whole thing makes no sense,” I said to Jack the following day as we drove to Atlantic City. “Sam has been giving us the names and locations of the women that he has abducted and murdered, so why would he give us a date and location where no one disappeared?”

  “Sam has to be pointing us toward the car accident,” Jack said.

  I frowned. “The police report Rick sent us indicates that three teenage girls died when the car they were riding in missed a turn and went over a cliff. The girls had been to a graduation party before the accident and all had been drinking heavily. The accident was investigated, but it was determined that the driver simply missed the turn, most likely due to impaired judgment, and it was simply a horrible accident. How would Sam fit in to this?”

  “I’m not sure, but there must be a reason that he pointed us in that direction. Maybe it wasn’t an accident. Maybe the girls were run off the road. Maybe one of the girls in the vehicle was related to Sam in some way. Maybe Sam’s daughter died in the accident, and that was made him or her go crazy and set off on the killing spree in the first place.”

  I blew out a breath. “Perhaps. I suppose I can see that if it was a tragic event that set off the killing spree, Sam might want to share that with us. But if Sam’s daughter was one of the victims of the crash and that caused him to kill Lisa, Patricia, Kim, and Jessica, each a year apart, who are the other four victims? He said he killed eight people, and I sort of thought he was feeding them to us in backward order.”

  “The victims we have found so far were all killed in June. Maybe Sam really killed two girls per year rather than one and the other four will be revealed once we learn whatever Sam wants us to find out by visiting Potter’s Bay.”

  “Do you think he will be looking for us to respond today?”

  Jack shook his head. “I emailed him to say we needed a day off and would go to Potter’s Bay tomorrow. I didn’t say what we were doing and he didn’t ask, but he seemed okay with it. I got the feeling that his timeline is pretty loose.”

  “Are you sure that in addition to the girls killed in the car accident, there wasn’t also a missing person? Maybe the accident created such an upheaval that the missing persons case was pushed to the back burner.”

  “I’ll have Rick look around again. I suppose that a missing person in addition to the deaths of three teens is possible. The accident happened the night after graduation, so in addition to the hoopla created by the dead teenagers, there was a lot going on in the community in general. The last thing I want to do at this point is spend a lot of time looking at the facts surrounding the accident if that isn’t even the reason Sam is sending us to this small town. I’d really love to wrap all this up this week if possible.”

  I nodded. “This trip has been exhausting.” I glanced out the window at the passing scenery and tried to work out a scenario in my mind in which Sam had intended us to look into the accident after all and the death of the three teenagers on a dark, deserted highway was integral to everything that happened later.

  “Did your mom ever get back to you about a restaurant to meet at this evening?” I asked in an attempt to focus my attention on something other than death and murder.

  “There is a steak house within walking distance of the hotel where I booked a room. My mom didn't seem to care where we met and I wanted something convenient. I hate to leave Kizzy in the room by herself any longer than necessary.”

  “She is a good travel dog and seems to sleep while we are away, but I still hate to leave her unattended for long.” I glanced over my shoulder at the sleeping dog. She really was the perfect companion. “I’m excited to meet Antonio.”

  Jack frowned. “Yes. That will be interesting.”

  I supposed rather than feeling excited, I should be nervous about the evening. Jack and his mother had a complicated relationship and there was no way the addition of a new boyfriend fifteen years younger than Jack was going to do anything other than complicate it further. I guess I sort of got the younger man thing. Jack’s mother is an active woman in exceptional shape who looks and behaves like a woman twenty years younger than her actual age. But dating a man young who was practicall
y young enough to be your grandson seemed just a bit much.

  ******

  I had to admit that the first thing that came to mind when I walked into the steak house and was introduced to Antonio was holy crap. I guess I expected that the man would be good-looking, but Antonio wasn’t just good-looking, he was a god. A gorgeous Greek god. I’m not sure what I was expecting from a twenty-eight-year old having a fling with a sixty-two-year old woman. I suppose I figured the guy would have more of a blond-haired, blued-eyed surfer dude vibe, but Antonio was dark-haired, dark-eyed, mysterious, and gorgeous.

  “Jillian, I am so happy to meet you,” Antonio greeted me, placing his hands on my shoulders, pulling me forward, and kissing me on each of my cheeks in turn.

  “It’s nice to meet you as well,” I managed to utter without stumbling all over myself. The man even had an accent. A fabulous Greek accent. Why had no one mentioned this man was Greek? I decided to ask. “I didn’t realize you were Greek. Have you been in this country long?”

  Jack pulled out my chair and I sat down.

  Jack’s mother, Raquel, answered. “Antonio was born and raised in a small town just outside Athens. He came to the States for graduate school. His student visa is up in August, but that won’t matter because we will be married by then.”

  Uh-oh. I couldn’t help but notice Jack’s jaw harden. “So, what did you study?” I asked before Jack could say something that would cause an argument.

  “I received dual degrees in corporate finance and political economy.”

  Sounded impressive. The conversation paused as the waiter came to the table to take our drink order. I glanced at Jack, whose face was a noticeable shade of red. He’d never had to share his mother’s attention and affection with anyone else. At least not on a long-term basis. But now there was this gorgeous man in the picture who was practically young enough to be his son. I had a feeling things were going to change considerably.