Watch Her Vanish: An absolutely gripping mystery thriller (Rockwell and Decker Book 1)

by Ellery A Kane

  Will pointed at the yellow evidence markers near the dirt road and on both sides of the body. “Look, partner. We got tire tracks and footprints.”

  JB grunted, before stomping away and parking himself on a nearby stump. He lit up a cigarette. “You know, I had a plan. Put in two more good years and retire to a condo in Florida with a fat pension. Maybe find myself a little lady. Get married again. Who knows? Then you show up, and women start droppin’ like flies. And now, we’ve got ourselves the s word.”

  “‘The s word’? Seriously?”

  “You don’t say it out loud, City Boy. It’s bad juju. Like seeing your doppelgänger, or opening your umbrella inside the house, or gettin’ busy with your socks on.”

  Will winced. That mental image would be tough to erase. It still boggled his mind that four reasonably sane women had chosen Jimmy Benson, of all the men in the world, to spend forever with. Even if forever had turned out to be seven years max. Meanwhile, Will had an engagement ring packed in a box somewhere. He didn’t have the heart to pawn it. The finger it had been meant for claimed by someone else. “You had me till the last one.”

  JB shrugged. “You’ll learn.”

  As they walked back to the road, Will bristled. An SFTV van had already arrived. The reporter lingered outside, tugging at the bottom of her short skirt suit, and pacing to keep warm. When she spotted them, she tottered up the ditch in their direction, her cameraman in tow. They waved her off, but she kept coming, determined to get a comment or sprain an ankle.

  “What can you tell us, Detectives? Does Fog Harbor have a serial killer?”

  JB unleashed a string of curse words under his breath. “I’ll be in the car.”

  “Are you Decker?”

  Will nodded at the officer leaning on the hood of a patrol car. He’d seen the guy a few times at the Hickory Pit drunk as a fish, but they’d never spoken. He couldn’t take a man with a toothbrush mustache seriously. Especially a man who couldn’t hold his liquor and wore those ridiculous mirrored sunglasses.

  Will pointed to the nameplate on the officer’s uniform. “Bauer, right?”

  “That’s right. Graham Bauer. Doc Clancy said you need an ID on the victim.” A gust of wind swirled through the grass. Not a single blond hair on Bauer’s head moved.

  “Did you know her?”

  “Not personally, no. Her name’s Laura Ricci. She worked over at Crescent Bay as a kitchen supervisor. Before that, she owned a restaurant in town that burned down a couple years back. She lived just down that road. There’s a few old cabins back there.”

  Will jotted the details in his notebook, already feeling uneasy. Unsettled. Like he had an itch he couldn’t scratch. “She worked at the prison, huh?”

  “Yeah, my girl works there. That’s how I know.” Bauer’s chest puffed. Will figured him for the kind of guy who spent a couple hours in the gym, only working the muscles he could flex in the mirror.

  “He means, ex-girlfriend.” The ribbing came from the officer approaching alongside Will. If she hadn’t been in uniform, he would’ve figured her for Bauer’s kid sister. Her nameplate read Milner. Her exasperated face, I need a new partner. “Does Olivia know you’re still laying claim to her like a caveman?”

  Bauer directed a middle finger at his partner. “She’s just been busy.”

  “Yeah. Busy ghosting you. I don’t recall her ever saying you two were official.”

  “Not everything needs to be said out loud, Milner. Ever heard of body language?”

  She shook her head at her partner, exasperated. Her whipping blonde ponytail and vicious scowl all the body language Will needed. He wondered who she’d crossed to wind up riding shotgun to that guy.

  Bauer glared after her. “Must be that time of the month, huh?”

  Will didn’t answer. The name Olivia ringing in his ears.

  “Alright. Thanks for the info.”

  Bauer didn’t even acknowledge his departure. Which was fine by him. No way Dr. Smarty Pants would let that meathead within ten feet of her. And if she had, well, Will would have to face facts. There’s not a shred of justice left in this world.

  Will warmed his hands in front of the heater as JB scarfed down a blueberry muffin.

  Through the windshield, Will watched Bauer, Milner, and the other officers extend the crime scene tape, wrapping it around the trunks of the bordering redwoods to form a perimeter.

  JB took a swig of coffee and wiped the crumbs from his face with the sleeve of his jacket. “Okay. Much better. Now, we’ve gotta talk.”

  “Let’s not overreact,” Will said. “We don’t know exactly what’s going on yet, and—”

  “Not about this.”

  “About what then?”

  “Forensics called this morning. They found something in Bonnie’s car. I guessed they’d missed it in the initial sweep. Morons.” JB took his phone from his pocket and pulled up an image.

  The note had been scrawled in marker on a small strip of paper, one corner ripped. Will enlarged it with his finger to make out the small print. James better do the right thing or somebody dies. We’re watching.

  “Where did they find it?”

  “Between the seat and the console, half-hidden under the metal slide bar. No prints.”

  “Not even Bonnie’s?”

  “Nope. I reckon it must’ve dropped there before she spotted it.”

  Will cracked the door, letting the cold in all over again. “Send me the picture of that note, will ya?”

  “And where do you think you’re going?” JB asked.

  “To my truck. I have to talk to James.”

  JB raised his eyebrows. “I see. What am I supposed to do? Sit here and twiddle my thumbs?”

  “Do you trust me?” Will wanted a take-back. He’d walked himself right into a JB insult.

  “About as far as I can throw you. I shot-putted in college but I reckon you’re about a hundred seventy pounds heavier and I’m about thirty-five years older than I was then. Well, you do the math.”

  Will released an exasperated breath.

  “But I know you’re a good cop, so…” He gestured to the open door.

  “That means a lot, JB. I promise I’ll fill you in back at the station. In the meantime, go see Judge Purcell about a search warrant. We’ll want to take a look inside the victim’s house.”

  “Yeah, yeah, yeah.”

  Will slid out and started walking. He’d only gone a few steps before JB called him back to his open window. “If you repeat that, City Boy, I’ll deny it.”

  “I’d expect nothing less. Hey, did you really shot-put in college?”

  “Junior college record holder. Look it up.”

  Will wondered if he’d been born with it. That niggling feeling at the back of his brain that always seemed to be one step ahead of the rest of him. Cop clairvoyance, his dad used to call it. Just like your old man. When Will ignored it, bad things happened. Catastrophic things. Like that night with Ben. He’d never make a mistake like that again. Not if he could help it.

  Right now, he wanted to fire up his truck, barrel out of the ditch, and find James McMillan. Shake him down. But first he had to scratch the itch. He opened the folder he’d taken with him from Crescent Bay and turned to the most recent of Drake’s rules violations. It hit him like a rock to the face as he read. He couldn’t believe he’d only just realized.

  Yep, Dad. Cop clairvoyance.

  *

  RULES VIOLATION REPORT

  INMATE NUMBER: 78VRT1

  INMATE’S NAME: DRAKE DEVERE

  FACILITY: CBSP

  VIOLATION DATE: 10/3/19

  VIOLATION LOCATION: MAIN KITCHEN

  SPECIFIC ACT: THEFT

  CIRCUMSTANCES OF VIOLATION:

  On October 3, 2019, main kitchen supervisor, Laura Ricci, reported several items went missing from the galley between the hours of 7 and 11 a.m. According to Ms. Ricci, only four inmates had access to the galley at that time. A confidential source identified Drake Devere
as the inmate responsible for the theft. However, a search of his cell yielded negative results. Items missing included two bags of flour, one bag of sugar, a mixing bowl, five spoons, and five rolling pins.

  INMATE STATEMENT:

  “I didn’t steal anything. Ms. Ricci’s just trying to get me in trouble like always. Go ahead and search. You ain’t going to find nothing.” Devere reported seeing the items in question in the galley at the time he left work in the afternoon.

  FINDINGS: NOT GUILTY, INSUFFICIENT EVIDENCE

  Chapter Fourteen

  Olivia closed Bird of Prey and jotted a phrase into her notebook. Anger at women. Though anger didn’t quite cut it. Drake’s antihero, Hawk, had raped and decapitated four women all while awaiting his end on death row and plotting his escape. He’d gotten away with it so far. To be continued, Drake had added at the end of the last chapter.

  Olivia shook her head. Scratched through the first word in her notes and wrote Rage instead. The rage didn’t come as a revelation, though. It didn’t take a shrink to feel the heat of Drake’s fury or to understand its origins. But the intensity of his own blatant acknowledgment of it took her by surprise. She’d been wrong to dismiss the book as a narcissist’s ploy for attention. It made a statement. It proclaimed things Drake wouldn’t say aloud.

  “It ends on a real cliffhanger, doesn’t it?” Maryann meandered through the stacks toward Olivia. “Drake has a way of making you feel like you’re right there in the story. Like you’re rooting for Hawk, even though he’s the devil incarnate.”

  Olivia nodded, gathering her things. She passed the book to Maryann, anxious to be rid of it. Her own copy buried in a drawer at home, not deep enough. “Did it scare you? When you first read it?”

  “A little. But I like those kinds of stories. I own all fourteen seasons of Forensic Files on DVD.”

  “Wow.”

  “Yeah, Melody says I oughta have been a cop or a CO like her. I don’t do well under pressure though. Like today with your detective friend. I think I screwed up. I’ve been playing it over and over in my mind.”

  Olivia understood that. She’d been replaying her own conversation with Mr. Wise Guy. Mostly the part where she’d agreed to meet him at the Hickory Pit. Graham and his cop buddies went there to unwind almost every night. “Why? What did you say?”

  “It’s sort of what I didn’t say. He was asking a lot of questions about Drake’s writing and the research I helped him with. I started telling him about the medical books I’d loaned Drake so he could understand things like rigor mortis and…” Maryann’s eyes teared, and she covered them with her hands.

  “I’m sure it’s fine, Maryann. C’mon, sit down.”

  They walked together, back to the small desk, away from the inmates who had returned in Will’s absence. Olivia fished a tissue from her pocket. “Unused, I promise.”

  Maryann started to laugh but it only made her cry harder. Finally, she lifted her head to Olivia, her cheeks splotched. Her eyes raw beneath her glasses. “I didn’t think it was a big deal at the time. Now, I feel so stupid. Promise me you won’t tell him.”

  “Detective Decker?”

  Maryann nodded, sniffled. “He’d probably arrest me if he knew. Or he’d tell the warden, and then I’d be toast.”

  “Knew what?”

  “That I helped Drake with more than just medical research. He said he was having trouble imagining the sort of implement Hawk would need to cut the heads off his victims. So, I helped him research weapons. Homemade weapons.”

  Olivia hurried from the library in a fog of unease, wondering how Maryann could be so naive. She’d worked as the prison librarian for at least twenty years. Olivia had been at the ceremony where Warden Blevins had given her the service pin she wore every day affixed to the lapel of another awful floral print. But Maryann and her sister had it rough as kids. Olivia had heard the rumors about their mother and her need to open her legs to any man within a thirty-mile radius of Fog Harbor, including their convicted sex offender stepdad, Ken. So, maybe gullibility ran in the family.

  What kind of weapons? she’d asked Maryann.

  Oh, all kinds. Slingshots, bows and arrows, bullwhips. He wasn’t much interested in those, though. He wanted a weapon for the neck.

  A weapon for the neck. Of course. Olivia could still see Bonnie, lifeless in the drainpipe. The ligature pulled so tight against her flesh, it would’ve broken the blood vessels beneath it, compressed the trachea. Squeezed the life from the jugular veins. A hell of a way to go. She’d assisted the Feds with a ligature cold case in San Francisco. That guy had been a lot like Drake. Disturbed, callous. So filled with rage, his hands became his weapons. His instruments of revenge.

  Olivia shook her head at her own ridiculousness. Nobody walked out of Crescent Bay unless they’d earned it. The hard way—by serving the length of their sentence or receiving a coveted grant of parole. Or the harder way—by living out the rest of their days in a cell and leaving in a body bag. The infamous back door parole; Blevins had used it to threaten Riggs. The kind that awaited Drake. Probably her father too, though it ached to think of it.

  “Psst.”

  Olivia stopped walking and listened, certain she’d imagined the sound. When it came again from over her shoulder, she turned to see Morrie Mulvaney shuffling along the wall in his wheelchair.

  “Need a push?” she asked, trying to conjure him as a young man, some fifty years ago. Long before she’d known him, Morrie had ridden a Harley he called Bess and had blond hair down to the center of his back. Or at least that’s what he’d told her and Em when they’d visited their father as girls. He’d also stabbed a man in a bar fight. Four wounds to the upper torso, three of them fatal. That part she’d read for herself in his C-file.

  “What was that all about?” he asked Olivia, as she wheeled him up the runway toward the dining hall. “You talking to the 5-0?”

  “The walls have eyes, apparently. I thought you’d left.”

  “Eyes and ears. Remember that. You know what your daddy would say.”

  Olivia made a face, glad he couldn’t see it. Her father hadn’t been around to say much of anything.

  “He’d say no good comes from talking with the cops.”

  “Well, to a criminal, I suppose that makes sense. But that detective is trying to solve a murder.” She wondered what her father would say if he knew about Graham. That she’d not only talked with a cop but slept with one. Regrettably. “Besides, Dad lost the right to give me advice a long time ago.”

  Morrie shook his head. “Have you written to him lately? Been down to see him? Your mama’s passing was a big wakeup call. He’s making changes. Big changes. And he’s bound to be worried about you with that McMillan lady turned up dead.”

  The line for the dining hall snaked down the corridor toward them. Olivia slowed the wheelchair to a stop, ready to make her getaway. She couldn’t tell Morrie the truth. That it had been a decade since she’d seen her father. That she planned to never see him again. That the day she’d gone hiding in the chapel confessional he’d left a message on her work phone. How he’d gotten her number, she didn’t know. We need to talk about that night, honey. About what you saw.

  As Olivia passed beside the wheelchair, Morrie seized her arm, pinning her into place beside him. She didn’t pull away or cry out. Instead, she gave in, seeing the glint in his eyes. The way they darted sharp and fast as a knife strike. Young Morrie.

  “You’re a smart gal, Olivia. More Reilly than Rockwell. Just remember, us criminals ain’t the only criminals in this joint. Watch your back.”

  She jerked her arm from him and kept moving. Her stride measured and exact. Her heart pounding like a wild stallion trying to outrun the wind.

  Olivia flung open the door to hell. That’s how it felt in the MHU. Hotter than Hades. Or maybe the heat came from inside her. From the ball of fire that rose in her throat, scorching it dry as a bone. She filled a cup at the water cooler and tossed it back like a shot
of vodka.

  “Can you believe it, Doc? That bastard 602’d me.” Hank stared at the complaint form on his desk, barely looking up at her. Just as well, because he might’ve noticed the beads of sweat gathering at her hairline. He might’ve told her she didn’t look well. Might’ve stood up and walked over, wrapping an octopus arm around her. She couldn’t handle a handsy Hank right now. Even this version of Hank would take some effort.

  “Drake, you mean? For what?”

  “He said my unlock policy is, and I quote, ‘not only unfair but potentially harmful to the stability of the patients in the MHU.’ What a crock.”

  Leah emerged from the bathroom, pulling her wool sweater tight to her body. It barely stretched across her belly. Even Hank had covered his bald head with an army green CDCR beanie.

  “Are you cold?” Olivia asked, following Leah back to her office.

  “Freezing.” Leah pushed up one arm of the sweater to show her goosebumps. “Girl, you look like you’ve seen a ghost.”

  Olivia shut the door behind her and leaned against it. Sure enough, the handle felt ice-cold against her back. “I read Drake’s book again.”

  “That explains it,” Leah said, taking a seat at her desk. “I wondered where you ran off to.”

  “And that detective came by too. Not to see me, but we ran into each other anyway.”

  “Oh, did you?”

  “He asked me if I’d meet him tonight to talk about the case.”

  “The case. Mm-hmm.”

  Olivia heard her own high, breathy voice, as if from a distance. “Seriously, Leah. I’m freaking out here. Do you think my patient is a murderer? I mean, I know he’s a murderer. But, do you think he killed Bonnie? Is that even possible?”

  “Whoa. Slow down, hon.” But that was the problem. Olivia couldn’t slow down. Her heart hadn’t stopped its gallop. Now, her thoughts raced too. From Drake to Maryann to Deck to Morrie. To her father and that phone call. It all came to a hard stop right there. “You know the Vulture best. What do you think?”