The Only Girl Left Alive: The McClintock-Carter Crime Thriller Series: Book Three

by Susan Lund

  "Who knows what evil lurks, right?" Eugene said, his eyes wide like it shocked him as well. "I guess you can never tell what's going on in someone’s mind or heart just by looking at them."

  "Isn't that the truth?" she replied. "If only you could, we wouldn’t need the police. We could stop people before they did anything so terrible."

  His mother dipped another French fry into her gravy, her brow furrowed. She was such a simple woman. The only thing in her life was Chief Joe, him and the boys, and her sisters and their large families. Family was all that mattered to her.

  She'd lived with Chief Joe all their married lives, yet still couldn't accept that the people she knew or saw on a regular basis could be guilty of crimes.

  Most of all, she couldn't imagine that her own adopted son could be—and he relied on that.

  He aimed to keep it that way.

  That night, he rode his bike to the trailer park on the outskirts of Roslyn where Elena's father lived and waited.

  He'd been hatching a plan to make it look like Jason, Elena's non-custodial father, had abducted her. The man was a lowlife who balked at paying child support. Eugene didn't really blame him. Jason was scraping by as a low-skilled construction worker, doing worksite cleanup instead of anything higher-paying, but all he cared about was getting enough for his booze and drugs.

  Supporting Elena, and her mom and sister, was the last thing on his mind.

  Jason lived in a run-down mobile home and spent every Saturday night at the local bar, a shack of a building that looked like so many other places Eugene had seen on his travels around the state—a small rectangular box with weathered paneling, and neon lights blinking on and off in the window. Jason left the bar sometime after midnight, taking his half-ton pickup back to his mobile home. Eugene waited in the bushes until Jason arrived home from the bar. While the man stood fumbling in his pocket for his house key, Eugene shot him clean through with his crossbow, the arrow slicing through the dark night and piercing him in the middle of the chest.

  Jason fell to the ground without making a sound, his expression almost comical as he gripped the arrow, shocked at its sudden appearance.

  All that was left was to grab the man's keys, hoist his now-dead body into the back of the half-ton, cover it with a tarp, and lash down to the truck bed so the body would stay put. Then he drove the vehicle up to the old quarry near Cooper Lake, where he pushed it over the cliff and into the water that had filled in the old quarry site. There it would stay for who knew how long.

  Decades, maybe, until there was some reason to empty the quarry.

  Eugene took his bike back to the shack, where he dropped off his crossbow, before riding the rest of the way home. It was a long ride—it took him a full two hours—but he arrived back at his house close to four in the morning, his deed done for the night and the stage set for taking little Elena.

  Everyone would think Jason had taken her and left for Montana, where his kin lived, because Elena's mother refused to let him see her until he paid his child support.

  Now, as soon as the damn FBI finished their job and provided prosecutors with enough evidence to charge Dear Old Dad Daryl with murder, Eugene could take Elena.

  It was just a matter of time.

  Chapter Seven

  Michael arrived back from Lake Hayden just in time for a late lunch. Mrs. Carter had gone out to do some shopping and have lunch with one of her friends, so when Michael came inside, Tess went to the door to greet him.

  "You're back," she said and gave him a kiss. "Do you feel like going out for lunch?"

  "Chief Joe's meeting his wife and Eugene at the diner, so we won't be going there," Michael said.

  "No, but we could go to Riley’s. You could fill me in on the trip."

  "Sure," Michael said. "I could use a beer after that."

  "That bad?" Tess put on her coat. "I could say something about you getting involved in the case, but I won't."

  "Thank you for that," Michael said with a laugh.

  They drove to Riley’s and found a booth near a window, away from any other patrons so they could talk in private, then checked out the menu while they waited for the waitress.

  "So, tell me how it went," Tess said, eager to hear the news. "What did you find of interest?"

  Across from her, Michael read the menu, then closed it and placed it on the tabletop. He sat back, his expression serious.

  "Well,” he said and lowered his voice. “We found a crime scene and a couple of skeletons."

  "Oh, God," Tess said. She'd figured they had found something of interest at the cabin, but not what. “Children?"

  "The forensic tech said the victims were children, and whoever did it did a very bad job of cleaning up afterward. There was still trace blood in cracks in the linoleum floor in the bathroom and in the drain. We're not sure how long ago the murders took place but if it was Daryl himself, it was over a decade ago so it’s hard to know.”

  "You'd think the other people who used the cabin would notice the blood."

  Michael shook his head. "Doesn't look like it was used much in the past few years. In my experience, people who use fishing cabins are there for the drinking and partying and aren’t much concerned about how clean the place is. Besides, old dried blood looks like dirt and after a while, it gets degraded. Only someone with forensic knowledge would recognize it as blood. Even then you need Luminol to check it it’s blood.”

  Tess shook her head, feeling creeped out at the thought of staying in a cabin where a girl—or several—had been murdered. "

  "What's even worse, the tech said it looks like the victims had been dismembered before being buried”

  Tess frowned. "If he was going to bury them, why would he dismember them first?"

  Michael shrugged. "Because he's a creep who likes to dismember bodies? According to your dad's story, he cut up Janine, too."

  "So, you think he cut them up and then buried them?"

  "There were knives in the drawer that still had trace blood on them. They could have been used on fish, but there was a big cleaver and axe that are potential murder weapons. I didn't see the bones up close, but the technician said it looked like some of them had been cut.”

  "Do you have any idea how many people used the cabin since Daryl was sent to prison?"

  "No," Michael replied. "Chief Joe's going to contact the Kincaids and see who used it since Daryl went to Coyote Ridge. The place seemed pretty dusty, like it hadn't been used in a long time. We'll see who had keys. Didn't look like the place had been broken into."

  They ordered their meals and talked about the cabin while they waited.

  "So, the body was buried next to the cabin?"

  "Just a couple of feet into the woods beside the house. According to the forensic tech, the site had been recently dug up by animals. Maybe coyotes. Bones were scattered deeper into the forest. They found a second skull a dozen feet away, deeper in the woods."

  Tess grimaced, imagining coyotes fighting over bodies in a freshly-dug shallow grave.

  "Any idea how long the bones were buried?"

  "No, but if Daryl did it, he's been in prison for a decade, so it was before he was put away."

  "Could John Hammond have used it since then? He and Kincaid were partners in crime," Tess offered. "He could have used the cabin after Daryl went to Coyote Ridge."

  "He could," Michael replied. "Once we have an ID on the victim, we'll have an idea how long ago it was. The evidence techs collected some material that will be used to identify the victim. There were a few items of clothing that were taken as evidence, some jewelry that looked like it would be worn by a younger girl. We'll know soon enough."

  "They think the victims were female?"

  "The bones looked like a child, but at that age, it's difficult to tell a girl from a boy. They'll have to wait for DNA evidence to come back."

  "I guess we’ll have to check out the missing girls from that area.”

  Michael nodded. "There are two m
issing girls from around the Spokane area. One is a bit older, thirteen, and one is nine. Could be either one."

  "Not Lisa?" Tess asked. She was still holding out hope that Lisa was alive.

  "Why would he take her all the way up there? He had a cabin here he could have taken her to. We haven't found anything of hers yet, in all the evidence collected so far."

  Tess nodded, felling a little better. Perhaps Lisa had escaped the fate that the other missing girls suffered. No news was good news, after all.

  If they’d found any evidence that Lisa had been in the Hammond service station porn room, or in the cabin at the end of the lake, she would have been less hopeful.

  If Lisa was one of the Hammond-Kincaid duo's victims, Tess suspected she was one of many. Janine had been almost forty years ago; Lisa, eighteen. How many had they killed in between?

  They ordered and ate their lunch, moving on to the older cases and what the FBI had told Michael so far. It wasn't much more than they already knew, but now they could add two or maybe even three girls to the count.

  Back home at the Carter house, Tess went straight to the dining room table and opened her laptop. She went to the National Missing and Unidentified Persons System website and extended her search back to the 1980s, including both Idaho and Oregon in it, since John Hammond and Daryl Kincaid had both been long-distance truckers who sometimes went outside of Washington State on their trips.

  According to NamUs, there were a total of twenty-two girls who had gone missing between 1978 when Janine died and the current year, and who were sixteen years of age or younger. Tess crossed off a couple who were younger than two, but that still meant there were eighteen girls in total who could match the victim profile of the existing cases. Given that the FBI thought several of the children used in Kincaid and Hammond's pornography had been younger than ten, she couldn't rule out children even as young as four or five. Hell, she probably should have included infants—as painful as it was to imagine, she knew that some pedophiles wanted them as young as possible.

  Daryl Kincaid didn't strike Tess as someone who had much preference when it came to the age of his victims. He seemed to be one of those opportunistic pedophiles who would abuse anyone vulnerable, whether family members or young children he abducted and molested for the videos.

  She wondered if he and John Hammond had involved any of the local children in their porn, and then, of course, she thought about Eugene, Garth, and Serena. Eugene had lived with his parents, Daryl and Allison, for several years before Chief Hammond adopted him as his own. Had Daryl abused Eugene? There was no sign of young boys in the porn the FBI had reviewed so far, but there were years and years of material to comb through. It made Tess sick to imagine Eugene or Garth—or Serena—being abused by the duo. And what had happened to Serena after she discovered the underground porno room?

  Had the men involved her in their perversion?

  Had Garth protected his daughter, not allowing her to spend time with John and Daryl?

  Garth didn't seem to have known about the porn room, or he wouldn't have let Serena go down there, so perhaps he hadn't been involved in the pornography. Tess knew that some pedophiles were opportunists who didn't care about blood ties. All they cared about was the age and access. She hoped that none of them had been involved, but only time would tell.

  Michael finished making a fresh pot of coffee, then sat beside Tess and glanced over her shoulder at the computer screen.

  "What are you looking at?"

  "Just going back over potential victims in the tri-state area. Sometimes John and Daryl went on longer trips, into Oregon and Idaho, so I thought we should extend the range."

  "And?" Michael asked, raising his eyebrows.

  "And we can add another eighteen girls to the list."

  "God," Michael said and shook his head. "This could be bigger than I initially thought."

  "Bigger than anyone imagined possible. You'd think it would be more likely to find a serial killer duo in a bigger city, like Seattle or Spokane, not little old Paradise Hill."

  "I guess not," Michael said. "They're everywhere and anywhere. Perversion knows no geographic bounds."

  Tess wrote down the names of the girls she thought could be part of the case.

  "There were three girls from Idaho on the list, and one was close to Spokane," Tess said, pointing to the images of the girls on the website. "In Oregon, there were eight girls in the right age group. Two close to Kennewick, and several closer to Portland."

  She printed the photos off and files for each girl, then tacked the pictures up on the poster board across from the dining room table. She was glad Mrs. Carter was so willing to let Michael take over the dining room for their investigation.

  "John Hammond went to Portland several times, according to the records."

  Tess nodded. "Both men took the I-90 route from Spokane to Helena, Montana, a couple of times, according to their records from Hammond Cartage." Tess pulled out a map she'd printed of showing all the routes taken by Hammond Cartage over the years.

  "Do we have to add in missing girls from Montana as well?"

  Tess shrugged, a sense of gloom descending over her at the prospect that there might be even more victims. She did a quick search on NamUs for Montana, and sure enough, there were three potential victims who matched the age and gender of their victims.

  "Three more we can add," Tess said with a sigh. "They didn't go to California, did they?"

  Michael shook his head. "No. Just the four closest states."

  "What about Canada? Did they go to British Columbia or Alberta?"

  Michael flipped through the promotional materials on Hammond Cartage, checking to see what routes they boasted about.

  "Yes, they did. British Columbia for sure. Vancouver would be a good bet if they did. Over a two million people in the Greater Vancouver area."

  "Does Canada have a missing persons database like NamUs?" Tess asked, quickly doing a search. She found the national database and searched by province.

  "Here's one for British Columbia." The search only turned up a couple of possible victims, both of which looked like they may have been family abductions. "Not many children," she said, relieved.

  "I guess we'll have to wait to see what the evidence techs turn up," Michael said and opened a file.

  "How soon will they have any DNA evidence from the crime scene?”

  "Couple of days, if they put the samples as a priority. We should have the DNA results of the bones in the attic soon, though. It won't necessarily mean we'll have the identity of the victim."

  "I hope we don't wait much longer."

  Michael exhaled. "Waiting is always the hardest part, but that's fast, compared to years ago before we had PCA technology. "

  "I know. We have to be patient.” She turned to Michael and forced a smile. "What else do I have to do but wait?"

  Chapter Eight

  While they waited for the forensic results to come back from Seattle, Michael and Tess spent the next few days at her father's house, cleaning and overseeing the painting while a local handyman fixed the drywall in the attic. She protested that Michael couldn't help because of his shoulder, but he was stubborn.

  "I have one good shoulder," he said, his voice firm. "I can wash countertops or walls. Don't make me totally useless."

  "You're not totally useless," Tess said with a grin, giving him a quick kiss.

  He smiled back. "That's good to know. I still want to do something. Give me a sponge or a cloth. I can wash."

  Tess relented and had him finish dusting the cupboards in the kitchen. The forensic team had kicked up a lot of dust, and all the surfaces needed to be cleaned.

  "No one's going to want to buy the place once word gets out that there was a dead body in the walls," Tess said, resigned to the fact that the place would never sell.

  Beside her, Michael nodded while he wiped off the cupboards with a cloth.

  “Not likely, but you never know. You might be able to r
ent it out, even if you can't sell it."

  "Not when it's known as a murder house. It'll be like Lisa's place."

  Michael's cell rang. He looked at the screen and saw it was Special Agent Nash.

  "Hey, Nash," he said, leaning against the counter as he put the phone on speaker. "What's up? Got any news for us?"

  Beside him, Tess stopped what she was doing, her face expectant.

  "We got some images of a girl we think is Lisa Tate."

  That sent a shock through Michael. He turned to face Tess, knowing the news would upset her.

  "Lisa? Why do you think you've found Lisa?"

  "We have some images of a girl with a tattoo that matches the one she had when she went missing. My Little Pony."

  Beside him, Tess covered her mouth with a hand.

  "Oh God," Michael said, his gut clenching. "That's not good. Hold on a sec."

  He took the cell off speaker and held the phone to his ear. When Tess frowned, he shook his head. "You don't need to hear the gory details."

  "I'm a grown-up now, Michael," Tess said. "I've read case files. I know what goes on in this world."

  Michael exhaled and put the phone back on speaker.

  “I’ve got the phone on the speaker, so Tess can hear what you say,” he said, wanting Nash to know.

  “That’s fine,” Nash replied. “It’s all off the record. Lisa was posed for a number of photos naked, but there's nothing showing she was murdered. She's just one of dozens of girls so far."

  "Were the photos taken in the service bay room?"

  "Yes," Nash said. "From the looks of it. That means they've been making porn there for at least eighteen years. Maybe longer. Amazing no one found out in all that time."

  "The station was abandoned more than twenty years ago, when the Texaco came to town," Michael said, thinking back to when the new station had been constructed. "Hammond owned the old station and used it to service his fleet before he built the new one on the edge of town. It was pretty much used as a junk yard after that."

  "And a porn production hub," Nash replied. "John ran his local delivery business out of it, but in the main office at the back of the building. I'll be shocked to find out that Garth Hammond wasn't involved in some way. We're still going through the images and video. Who knows who we'll find?"