by Susan Lund
Dear Old Dad Daryl had made lots of money off Eugene when he was a child. Taught him everything he knew. Now, he'd turn that knowledge into cash. Cash he could use to fund his continued career as the Reaper.
He really had to get that name out into the press, but he'd wait until the right time. Once Daryl was dead.
Thing is, they'd all suspect Jason Montgomery for Elena's disappearance. Father to Elena and her sister, former boyfriend to their mother, Jason would be their prime suspect. They might eventually realize there was a killer still on the loose when Eugene took his next victim, but there was more than enough evidence linking Daryl to several kills, and John to several others; and of course, Ron had the evidence in the attic that linked him to several cases.
But Elena would not be on their lists. At first, they might wonder, because of the damn report of a man in the woods watching her, and it would throw them all into a tizzy to know they hadn't found the right man. But they'd all suspect Jason because he was gone. They’d all think he’d taken her from her mother and hightailed it to Montana where he grew up.
Jason was a scumbag. He was also dead.
They'd be told how Jason had taken off a week earlier with no notice, after a fight with Elena's mother over how much money he was giving her. He hadn't been happy about paying child support, so the police would think he'd taken Elena when her mother wouldn’t let him see her. They wouldn't be able to find him, and police would just assume…
Eugene could sit in the diner with Chief Joe and listen to the mayhem, offering a sympathetic shoulder for the old man to cry on about how hard it was to be chief when all these girls went missing.
Eugene smiled to himself as he drove up to the shack. He picked the right girls. He knew what police would be focused on when one of them went missing. Ninety-five percent of children were abducted by family members.
They'd zero right in on poor Jason.
Served the creep right.
Then, one day, when Eugene was tired of being the most prolific serial child killer on record, he'd let them know. He had records of it all, tucked away where they'd only find it when he chose to let them.
He parked the truck and went to the back seat, dragging a still-unconscious Elena out. He hoped he hadn't killed her with that blow, but if so, he could still get some use out of her. There were perverts who loved the idea of using a dead body of a child. But he had planned using Elena for so long, it would be a pity if his fist had done more damage than he anticipated.
He carried her into the shack and placed her on the floor next to the boxes of supplies. Then he went to every window and made sure that the blackout curtains were pulled so that none of the light from inside would leak out and expose him. While the shack was in a dense part of the forest, it might be possible to see the light from a distance.
He switched on a portable lamp and carried it down into the pit where he would keep Elena. There, in one corner, was a single bed with a sheet and blanket. He had video equipment on one side of the room to record his performance for posterity, a compost toilet in the other corner, and some decent lighting equipment. All of it led to a bank of batteries which stored energy from the solar panels on the shack's roof.
He carried Elena down the steps to the pit, laying her on the bed and checking for a pulse.
Good. She was still alive. He tied her to the bed frame, and sat beside her, eager to come back the next night for the real action.
He checked his watch. He'd been gone for forty-five minutes so he had to leave, get back to Easton and drive home to Paradise Hill, sign the truck back in before nine.
What a hard, dedicated worker, working until late on a Friday night.
When he was off work, he'd go to Riley's and play some darts with his buddies, flirt with Doreen and look like an ordinary Joe on a Friday night.
No one would ever suspect what he'd just spent the last two hours doing.
That was the way he intended to keep it.
He lifted up her eyelids and saw that her pupils still responded to light, so she was just unconscious. Still, he was concerned that he'd made her useless. He wanted a response from her, or else she would be just like a dead body. He went to the corner where he had a plastic bottle filled with drinking water and pumped out a cup of it. He splashed it on her face, and she woke up in a sputter, but with the ball-gag in, she couldn't scream.
Finally, her eyes met his and he smiled.
"There you are, Elena. Finally. I don't have time to spend with you now, but I’ll be back to let you sit on the toilet and have a drink. Maybe if you're good, I'll bring you some food. But if you're bad, you'll be punished, and believe me, you won't like my punishments. So be good. Okay?"
She nodded her head, her eyes filled with the kind of fear that made him hard.
He kissed her over the ball gag, roughly, and when he pulled away, he knew that she knew what he planned for her.
She knew about sex, even at ten. Probably the kind of talk ten-year-old kids did in the schoolyard.
She had no idea.
He turned down the portable lamp to its lowest setting, so she wasn't in complete darkness, and climbed back up the ladder to the main floor of the shack. After checking around to make sure he had everything, he locked the place up and went back to the vehicle. He took it slow, not using his headlights for the long winding logging road back to civilization. When he merged onto the secondary road back to Roslyn, he made sure to obey all rules. Finally, he parked the vehicle in its spot, back down an abandoned lot, and took his bike the rest of the way back to Easton and the truck stop where his work truck was still parked.
He put the bike in the back under a tarp and drove off, back to Paradise Hill.
When he arrived, it was just five to nine.
Kent, one of the other drivers, saw him as he was turning in the keys and signing in his vehicle.
"Hey, Gene, you going to Riley's?"
"Wouldn't miss it." Eugene winked at Christine, who took the keys from him and smiled. "You going, too?"
"I just might." She gave him a big smile, bending forward, her ample cleavage on display.
"Good," Eugene said, thinking he needed to keep up appearances. Make it look like he wanted her attention, even though the thought of her disgusted him. "The more the merrier."
"Hey, Gene, since you're going, can I bum a ride?" Kent asked and whacked Eugene on the back. "My truck's in the shop."
"Sure thing," Eugene said, always the good friend, helpful to everyone. "Hop in. Let's play a game of darts. Winner buys the next beer."
"You got it."
As they drove to Riley's, Eugene couldn't keep a huge smile off his face. He had Elena waiting for his return at the shack and he had a paper trail putting him in Easton at the time she went missing. He doubted they'd even know she was gone yet—they would assume she had gone to one of her friend's houses after they’d left the playground. It was Friday night and Elena's mom worked late at the theatre in Roslyn. The last showing was over at nine thirty, and it took her another hour to clean up and cash out. She often stopped at the 7-Eleven for a Slurpee and then drove home, getting in after eleven.
He counted on it.
By the time she got home and realized Elena wasn't there, he'd have been at the bar for an hour, in full view. He'd have been noted as having driven to Easton for a delivery, his credit card used at the truck stop diner, where his vehicle was parked for an hour while he ate.
The first thing she'd do would be call over to Elena's friends' houses, to see if Elena had gone there after they left the playground. Once she'd done that, she'd start to worry.
She'd immediately think of Jason.
She might even call his cell to see if he had her, but of course, Jason wouldn't answer.
It would be at that point that she'd call the police—after eleven, when she couldn't find Elena and couldn't get ahold of Jason. Someone would come out to her mobile home and take a missing person report. They'd check her house, Elena’s bed
room, see if there was anything taken that might suggest Jason had picked her up with the intention of having her live with him.
They'd find nothing.
She'd just vanished into thin air, like all the other girls.
Chapter Twenty-Three
After they'd cleaned up the dishes from dinner and made a cup of coffee, Michael placed the file on the dining room table. As soon as she saw it, Tess knew it was a police file and her interest perked up.
"You brought this from the station?" She glanced at him, her eyes wide.
"Go ahead," he said, trying to hold back a smile at her eagerness. "It's all yours."
"Will you get in trouble for this?" she asked, touching the file gingerly, like it was a valuable item instead of a collection of old paper. She stared at the label, which was marked with a case file number. The manila file had a Department of Justice logo with the Federal Bureau of Investigation emblazoned on the bottom. There was a stamped set of lines where people could sign the file out of the office. There were several names, including the original Special Agents who worked the case and finally, Nash's signature and a date from a few weeks earlier.
"I feel guilty even touching this, Michael," she said and met his eyes. "I don't want to get you in trouble."
"Don't worry about it. Nash is off tomorrow and will probably be driving back to Seattle. I'll go in to the station early and return it. No one will be the wiser—and if they do find me putting it away, I'll say I accidentally took it home."
"And they'll believe such a transparent lie?" she said with a laugh, unable to take her eyes off the file.
"Sure. I'm the former star quarterback. They'll forgive me. I thought you'd like to get a look at the case file."
"Of course, I would." She flipped through the first pages, which included an index of all the relevant documents.
They spent the next hour just going over the various documents in the file—police reports, the missing person report, photographs, and other odd documents on evidence. After the FBI file, they glanced over the local police department file, and finally they began the real work—matching up Eugene's work log with the dates the girls had gone missing.
"So, he couldn’t be guilty for these," Tess said when she saw two dates where Eugene had been somewhere in the opposite direction. "He was here," she said, pointing to the locations Eugene had recorded a delivery.
"That doesn't mean he couldn't have done it," Michael said. "He could have done the delivery and then driven to the location, abducted the girl, taken her somewhere else, then driven back to turn in the delivery vehicle. There's a good hour there where he had the truck signed out.”
"I guess," Tess said, frowning. "But wouldn't someone see the delivery vehicle in the neighborhood and have mentioned it in the police report?"
Michael shrugged. "He could have used a different vehicle."
"That would mean he'd have to leave a second vehicle somewhere," Tess said, imagining it in her mind. "He'd have to park his delivery truck, and then use the second vehicle, do the deed, then return and take the truck back. That's a lot of planning."
"Whoever did these murders did a lot of planning or they would have been caught by now," Michael replied. She had to admit that was true. Perhaps even likely.
“Eugene was never on the list of suspects?"
Michael shook his head. "Not on any list that I saw. Never once."
Tess took in a deep breath, thinking of the two times she'd been alone with him. Once when he’d taken her to the shooting range to practice with Michael's weapon, and once to buy a gun. Both times, he had been the perfect gentleman. It seemed so odd to consider him as a suspected serial child killer.
She shivered and pulled her sweater more tightly around her. "I was alone with him twice," she said to Michael.
"I know. I didn’t like that you were with him, but I didn’t want to be a jealous boyfriend."
She nodded and kissed him quickly. "There was nothing to be jealous about."
“Just don’t go out with him anywhere again.”
“I promise,” she said and held up three fingers in the Girl Scout's salute. "Girl Scout's Honor."
He smiled finally and then they turned back to the files. But before they got back into it, Michael's cell rang.
He checked the call display and frowned.
"Who is it?" she asked.
He exhaled. "It's Julia. I have to take this."
He stood and went into the kitchen, standing at the kitchen island, his back to the dining room.
Tess tried to hear what he said, but all she could make out was a muffled sound as he spoke softly into the cell. As she watched, he tensed, and he ran a hand through his hair.
He ended the call and put his cell in his pocket, then came over to the dining room table, shaking his head.
"I have to go to Tacoma. Julia's in the hospital. She was in an accident; she’s got a broken leg and some internal injuries."
"Oh, Michael," Tess said and slipped her arms around his neck, hugging him tightly. "I'm so sorry."
"It's okay. I'll go up and stay with the boys until she comes out. I was planning on going to Tacoma next weekend anyway—it's my week to take the boys—but I guess I'll go early. I don't like us being apart, but I really have to go, at least until Julia's mom arrives."
"How can you drive with that arm?”
“I’ll call Nash. He said he was driving back tonight.”
He took out his cell and called Nash.
“Hey,” he said when Nash answered. “Sorry to bother you, but I was wondering if I could come with you tonight. My ex was in an accident and I have to stay with the boys until her mother can come and be with them.”
He listened and then nodded, glancing at Tess.
“Great. I’ll be waiting.” He checked his watch. “See you then.”
He ended the call. “That was lucky. Nash will drop me off at Julia’s.”
“I'll miss you," Tess said and kissed him.
"I don't like leaving you alone. You have to remember not to go anywhere alone. Take Mom if you want to go out somewhere."
"I have to go to the house and do some work," Tess said.
"You can wait here until you see the workers arrive. Don't go to the house alone. If you want, I can ask one of the cops if they want to earn some extra money on the side, watching you while I'm gone."
Mrs. Carter came into the room just as Michael finished packing up some of his things—some clothes for his stay, and his laptop in his briefcase.
"Where are you going?" she asked, her eyes wide.
"Julia was in an accident and is in the hospital in Tacoma. I have to stay with the boys until her mom comes on Wednesday."
"Oh my God, is she okay? Were the boys with her?"
Michael shook his head. "They were with a babysitter. She was at a night class, I guess, and was in an accident on the way back. I have to go relieve the sitter. It'll take me an hour and a half to get there, so I have to go now."
“How are you getting there?”
“Special Agent Nash is going to Seattle and agreed to drop me off.”
“Oh, Michael. I hope Julia’s okay.”
“I’ll let you know as soon as I find out.”
He hugged his mother, then Tess walked him out to Nash’s vehicle. After he put his bags in the trunk, he put his arm around Tess.
"I don't like leaving you," he said, holding her gaze firmly, his expression somber. "Promise me you won't go anywhere alone. Okay?"
"Okay," Tess said and nodded. "I promise. Text me when you get there."
He kissed her once more, then got into Nash’s vehicle. Tess watched as the sedan drove off into the night. She didn't like him leaving, but he had to do it. They'd be together on the weekend.
She stared at her house across the street. It was dark and looked very ominous against the dark wood behind it. Two houses down sat the old Tate house, still empty after all those years, dilapidated, plywood covering the front windows.
She went back inside and closed the door, locking it securely.
There was nothing to do now but keep checking the list of dates against the records of Eugene's trips out of town to see if there were any more matches. She did check Michael’s GPS location several times over the next hour and a half just to see where he was, glad that he had bought the two trackers and synced them with their cellphones.
Before Tess fell asleep, Michael texted her, her cell dinging just after she'd lain down and pulled the covers up over her, a book in her hand. She grabbed her cell and read his text.
MICHAEL: Just a quick text to let you know I'm here. I spoke with the ER nurse and Julia has some internal bleeding so they're going to take her into surgery, open her up and see what's wrong. I’ll put the boys to bed. I'll keep you updated. Miss you already.
Tess smiled at his expression of affection and replied.
TESS: I miss you as well. I saw you arrived on my cell using the GPS tracker. I'm so glad you got these for us. Try to get some sleep.
Then she put her cell away and picked up her book, trying to distract herself from the events of the day so she could relax and get a good night's sleep. She'd grown used to sleeping most of the night with Michael. With him out of town, it felt strange to be alone.
The next day, after breakfast, she saw that the painters had arrived and were waiting in the driveway for her to appear. She turned to Mrs. Carter and smiled.
"I'm going to the house to get the painters started on the job. I'll be back as soon as I'm done."
"Okay," Mrs. Carter said. "Michael didn't want you going anywhere alone, so don't you dare. If you need to go somewhere, I'll come with you."
"Okay."
Tess smiled at Mrs. Carter's protectiveness and grabbed her coat. At least she'd have something to do to keep her mind busy while Michael was away.
After giving the painters directions and watching as they set up their tools and supplies, Tess went back to the Carter house, wondering how Julia had fared. She'd received one text from Michael that Julia had her spleen removed and would be staying in hospital for at least a day, if not longer, depending on how she did over the next couple of days. Her mother would arrive on Wednesday, so that meant Michael would be in charge of the boys for four days, staying at the house with them, feeding them, making sure they got to school and went to see Julia.
