The Last of the Moon Girls

by Barbara Davis

  Roger nodded slowly. “I’d like to say that surprises me, but it doesn’t. The man doesn’t give a damn about public safety. He sees being police chief as a gig, a stepping-stone to bigger things.”

  Andrew caught Lizzy’s eye with a look that said I told you so. “Mayor Cavanaugh just announced his retirement.”

  Roger’s lips thinned. “Then you can bet the VOTE SUMMERS yard signs are being printed as we speak. Not that it was any big secret. We all knew he was angling for mayor, or higher. We could see him working it, milking the high-profile cases to get his name in the paper. He was all about the show. Unless it made him look bad. Then he wanted no part of it.”

  Andrew’s brows knitted. “You think the Gilman murders made him look bad?”

  Roger blew out a long breath. “The Gilman murders made everyone look bad. People in Salem Creek aren’t used to seeing that kind of thing on the local news. So when they do, it doesn’t take long for the finger-pointing to start. And the fingers weren’t just pointing at Summers. Cavanaugh was taking heat too, and Election Day was right around the corner. It was in everyone’s interest to make it go away.”

  “Not everyone’s interest,” Lizzy shot back. “But he did get his way. There was never a resolution. No arrest. No trial. Nothing.”

  Roger looked at her over steepled fingers. “You have to consider the evidence we had. Or, rather, didn’t have. We had the bodies and an anonymous tip, but nothing that linked your grandmother directly to the murders. No motive. No weapon. And no concrete forensics to speak of. Say we go ahead and make an arrest to tamp down the noise. Then we go to court. Only we can’t make the case and your grandmother’s acquitted. The last thing Cavanaugh wants while he’s out stumping for votes is for people to remember that two girls died on his watch, and that his police chief let a killer walk free.” He paused, shrugging heavily. “Sometimes, when you can’t make a case, it’s better to do nothing than to poke the hornet’s nest. Strategy must have worked. He’s still there.”

  Andrew sat up straighter in his chair, as if grasping the full import of Roger’s words. “You think it was Cavanaugh who asked Summers to slow-walk the investigation?”

  “No,” Roger replied flatly. “I think Cavanaugh told him to bury it completely. Summers probably wasn’t too keen at first. A conviction would have made him a hero, a champion of law and order. But when he realized a conviction wasn’t likely, he changed direction quick. I suspect there was some back-scratching involved. Cavanaugh wanted the story to go away so he could win reelection, and Summers wanted a hand when it finally came time for the mayor to head south.”

  Lizzy stared at him, stunned. “So he just dropped a murder investigation?”

  “Starved is more like it, but it amounts to the same thing. He claimed it had to do with budgeting, but none of us bought that. Here’s this huge case, and all of a sudden my guys can’t get the overtime they need to do the legwork, can’t get approval for labs that might help us nail down how long the girls had been in the water, or whether either of them had been poisoned. Nothing but alcohol came up on the tox screens, but that’s not unusual when a significant amount of time has passed before samples are collected. Fermentation skews everything. Toss in a couple weeks of submersion and things get really messy.”

  “What about the Gilmans?” Lizzy asked, eager to change the subject. “Weren’t they demanding answers?”

  “They were—or at least Fred Gilman was. But Summers managed to convince him the investigation had hit a dead end and that was that. Not that Gilman ever changed his mind about your grandmother’s guilt, but that was fine with Summers. He didn’t care what people believed, as long as he and Cavanaugh didn’t get their hands dirty.”

  Lizzy stared at him, astonished. “Didn’t get their hands dirty? My grandmother was getting death threats, Detective. We were terrified every time she left the house.”

  “I know. Things got . . . out of hand. It was bad enough when word leaked that we’d found the vial in Heather’s pocket. Blue glass, just like your grandmother used, but with no label. When she verified that the girls had visited her shop the afternoon they went missing, well, it was inevitable that people would jump to conclusions. As far as anyone knew—including us—Althea was the last person to see the girls alive.”

  “Assurance,” Lizzy told him quietly. “That’s the name of the oil blend she made up for Heather that day. She wanted to make a boy fall in love with her. That’s why she came to the shop, for a love potion. But Althea didn’t believe in love potions. She thought they were manipulative, so she sold Heather the Assurance oil instead, to dab on her wrists. It’s a combination of cedar and carnation oils, used to inspire confidence. Not a sedative, and not remotely poisonous. But my grandmother told you all of that.”

  Roger nodded. “She did.”

  “But you didn’t believe her.”

  “The neck of the vial was cracked when we retrieved it from Heather’s pocket. There was nothing to test, no way to verify its contents. We thought a sedative of some kind might account for how someone your grandmother’s age could have overpowered two young girls. We were doing our jobs, Ms. Moon.”

  “I was there the day you came with your men,” Lizzy said softly. “I let you in.”

  “Yes,” Roger said, the slight inclination of his head an acknowledgment that they’d officially crossed into uncomfortable territory. “I remember.”

  Lizzy stood abruptly and moved to the railing, the combination of anger and memory making her vaguely queasy. Andrew must have sensed her mood because he was suddenly beside her, sliding a hand over hers on the railing. He said nothing, but the question in his eyes was easily read.

  Are you okay?

  When she nodded that she was, Andrew turned back to Roger. “You bring up a point that’s always bothered me, Roger. Althea Moon was five feet two, tops, and I doubt she weighed a hundred pounds soaking wet. Is it likely that she was strong enough to inflict the kinds of head injuries the girls sustained?”

  “Only Darcy, the younger of the two, sustained a head injury,” Roger explained gravely. “Blunt force trauma to the left temporal and parietal areas. Subdural hematoma. Gruesome stuff. But the ME couldn’t be certain as to her definitive cause of death. There appeared to be some pulmonary hemorrhaging, which is sometimes seen in drowning victims. Hard to say, though, after so much time in the pond. Heather was strangled. Crushed trachea, two broken cervical vertebrae. Lungs looked clear, which means she was dead when she went in.”

  Lizzy couldn’t help feeling a grudging respect for Roger Coleman. Eight years had passed since the Gilman girls were murdered and he still remembered their names, referring to them as Darcy and Heather, rather than mere faceless victims.

  Andrew had fallen silent, his brows pinched, as if trying to work out something in his head. “Was there a time lag between the two deaths?” he asked finally.

  Roger shrugged. “The level of decomposition was similar for both girls, but that has more to do with how long they were in the water than with actual time of death. It’s likely they died in close succession, but we can’t know for certain. There’s a lot we can’t know for certain.”

  “I’m just thinking out loud here, but leaving size out of the equation, how likely is it that Althea could have killed them both? I mean, a woman in her sixties against two young girls? You’d think at least one of them would have gotten away. Unless they were tied up. They weren’t, were they?”

  “Not when they went in the water. The divers scoured the pond for rope, tape, anything that could have been used to bind them, but they came up empty.”

  “Then how could she have pulled it off?”

  “That’s the question, isn’t it? In fact, it’s one of the things that kept nagging at me.”

  Lizzy’s head came up sharply. It was the first sign he’d given that he had doubts about Althea’s guilt, and she seized on it. “You don’t think she did it.”

  “I didn’t say that.”

&
nbsp; “But you had doubts. You just said you did.”

  “Not initially. The bodies were discovered in your grandmother’s pond, weighted down with rocks, and if there’s one thing this job teaches you, it’s that there’s generally a reason the obvious suspect is the obvious suspect. But it isn’t my job to decide who’s guilty and who’s not. It’s my job to follow the evidence. And in this case there were some things that just didn’t add up.”

  “Like what?”

  “Like why our tipster didn’t come forward when we asked him to contact us again. Not even when we upped the reward. And then there’s motive. I couldn’t for the life of me figure out why your grandmother would have wanted to harm two young girls, and then dump them in her own pond, where she had to know they’d eventually be found. People have said a lot of things about Althea Moon over the years, but no one ever said she was stupid.”

  “No,” Lizzy said evenly. “She wasn’t. So who?”

  Roger shook his head. “That’s the other problem. It’s much harder to prove someone didn’t do something than to prove they did. For better or worse, big cases tend to take on a momentum of their own. The evidence points in a certain direction, and that’s the direction everyone looks. The media, the public, and, yes, sometimes even the law. It takes something substantial to shift that momentum in a new direction, and we just didn’t have that. We didn’t have anything.”

  “So you were fine with letting everyone believe Althea was guilty?”

  Roger rose stiffly from his chair. “Come with me, Ms. Moon.”

  Lizzy caught Andrew’s eye as they followed Roger into the house. They passed through the kitchen and living room, then down a short hall lined with three doors, two of which stood open. The first was a small guest bath. The second appeared to be Roger’s bedroom, furnished with only a bed, a bureau, and a treadmill stationed in front of the window.

  The last door was closed. Roger said nothing as he pushed it open, stepping aside so Lizzy and Andrew could enter ahead of him. The room was small and dim, the blinds closed against the afternoon sun. There were no furnishings of any kind, just stacks of cardboard storage boxes on the floor in the center of the room.

  Lizzy looked from the boxes to Roger. “What’s all this?”

  “This,” Roger said wistfully, “is my career. Or was. Personal notes on every case I worked as a detective.” He stepped into the room, making a beeline for a pair of boxes set slightly apart from the rest. “And these,” he said, laying a hand on the top box, “are the Gilman files.”

  Lizzy eyed him warily. “Should you even have those?”

  “They’re not official police documents. Just stuff I kept together so I could work the case from home. Notes mostly.” He lifted the lid and pulled out a handful of small black notebooks. “I’ve been accused of being a pack rat, but the truth is, I think better on paper.”

  Lizzy stepped closer, peering into the carton at the jumble of notebooks and file folders.

  “There must be hundreds of pages here. What is it all?”

  “Notes on basically everything I could remember at the end of every day, stray thoughts, offhand remarks I wanted to follow up on. Impressions I jotted down after interviews and daily briefings. Anything I thought might eventually fit somewhere.”

  “How on earth did you find time to do all this?”

  “Like I said, some of us give our lives to the job. My wife and son were killed not long after I made detective. They were on the way back from my son’s tae kwon do match in Manchester. The roads were icy, and the car jumped the median into oncoming traffic. I was supposed to go with them that night, but I was stuck in an interview. Maybe if I’d been driving . . .” His eyes flicked briefly from hers. “My son was eleven.”

  Lizzy’s throat went tight. Apparently her radar was spot on. A wife and a son. How was it possible to even survive such a loss? To keep putting one foot in front of the other when you’ve lost everything that mattered?

  “I’m so sorry.”

  Roger hunched his shoulders, clearly uncomfortable with his grief. “After that, there was just the job. And my notes. Anyway, it’s all here.”

  Andrew moved closer, craning his neck to inspect the contents of the carton. “I can’t believe you saved all this.”

  “My brother’s a criminal attorney. The first thing he told me when I joined the force was never get rid of your notes, because you never know when a case is going to come back to bite you in the ass. I never forgot it. You have no idea how many times some tiny detail has ended up shining new light on a case. Not that this is likely to be one of those cases. God knows I’ve spent hours looking for something I might have missed. Unfortunately, I never found it.”

  Lizzy’s admiration for Roger Coleman ticked up another notch. “You seem to have taken the case very seriously.”

  “I took all my cases seriously, but I admit this one hit me hard. I know what it’s like to lose a child, but I never had to wonder what happened to my son. For better or worse, I knew. The Gilmans didn’t. And they still don’t. I can’t imagine what that must be like, to wake up every day and know my child was gone and have no idea how or why. It’s also why I agreed to talk to you. It struck me when Andrew told me you were thinking about digging all this up again that maybe the Gilmans weren’t the only ones who deserved answers.”

  “Thank you, Detective.”

  “Roger,” he reminded again. “I’ve got seventeen years under my belt as a detective, and in all that time there were only three cases I couldn’t close. This was one of them. I’m telling you this because I need you to understand that my only stake in all of this is getting at the truth, and that anything I may find is in that interest alone. I don’t work for you.”

  “I understand. I’ll wait to hear from you. In the meantime, I was thinking of talking to the Gilmans.”

  Roger’s face darkened. “You’re certainly welcome to try, but I doubt you’ll get very far. The last time I had contact, Fred Gilman nearly tore my head off, and Mrs. Gilman looked like a ghost. Not that I blame either of them. He wanted someone’s head on a pike, and she just wanted it to be over. They needed closure, and I couldn’t give it to them.”

  “Maybe we can still give it to them,” Lizzy said quietly. “If I can just make them see that that’s what I want too, they’ll talk to me.”

  “Maybe so,” Roger said, though he sounded less than convinced. “I was sorry to hear about your grandmother, by the way. She seemed like a good woman, despite what was happening in her world. I wish our paths could have crossed under different circumstances.”

  Lizzy met his gaze squarely. “She didn’t hurt those girls, Roger.”

  “You have no idea how much I’d like to believe that, Ms. Moon.”

  “It’s Lizzy,” she corrected. “And I’m guessing it’s not half as much as I’d like to prove it to you.”

  TEN

  Lizzy was quiet on the ride back. She could feel Andrew’s eyes sliding in her direction now and then, but she was too busy digesting what she’d learned about Randall Summers’s negligent handling of the investigation to make conversation. And yet, in a perverse way, it gave her hope. She’d been operating under the assumption that the police had simply run out of leads, when the truth was the investigation had been quietly and deliberately quashed.

  It was clear now why Roger had walked away from a nearly twenty-year career with the Salem Creek Police Department. She barely knew the man, but she’d seen enough to know he wasn’t the type to stomach collusion and blatant malfeasance, which was what Summers’s actions amounted to. Which was why she believed him when he said he’d comb through his notes in search of some previously missed clue. Not because he wanted to help her, but because he wanted to get to the truth. Because that was how he was built.

  “Here we are,” Andrew said, as they pulled into the drive. “Home again.” He put the truck in park and turned to look at her. “You haven’t said much since we left Roger’s. Are you okay?”

/>   “I’m fine.” She was clutching her purse with one hand, the door handle with the other, ready to be alone with her thoughts. Instead, she sagged back in her seat. “It’s just a lot to take in, you know? To find out the chief of police was willing to let my grandmother take the fall for something she didn’t do because he wanted to run for mayor one day. What kind of man does something like that?”

  “The ambitious kind.”

  Lizzy shook her head, unable to comprehend it. “Someone needs to know.”

  “Who? Summers doesn’t have a boss, unless you count Cavanaugh, and I think it’s safe to say he’s not going to be helpful.”

  “The governor, then. Or the media. Someone.”

  Andrew looked away, his hands still on the wheel. “I get that you’re angry, Lizzy, but how many fights are you willing to jump into?”

  “As many as it takes.”

  He blew out a breath, slow and thoughtful. “Okay. But maybe take them one at a time. Focus on what matters right now.”

  “I want to talk to the Gilmans.”

  Something like a wince crossed Andrew’s face. “You’re probably the last person the Gilmans are going to want to talk to. Why not wait and see what Roger comes up with?”

  “And if he comes up with nothing?”

  “I don’t know. I’m just not sure dragging the Gilmans through it all again is a good idea.”

  “I’m trying to find out what happened to their daughters. You don’t think they’d want to help me do that?”

  “In their minds, they already know what happened, Lizzy. As far as they’re concerned you’ll just be trying to clear Althea. You should also know the Gilmans split up a few years back. Fred’s still around, but I’m pretty sure someone told me Susan moved away.”

  Lizzy was sorry but not surprised. She’d heard about marriages unraveling when a child died. Wives blaming husbands. Husbands shutting down emotionally. It was hard to imagine going on when a piece of your heart had been torn away forever. But then the Gilmans didn’t have to imagine it. It happened.