“Where do your kids live?” Detective Godwin asked Carl.
“My ex-wife and I share custody. They’re here maybe three days a week.”
“Any chance Caitlin might be with them?”
“I’ve already checked,” Carl said.
For anyone who knew the people involved, it was an outlandish question anyway. Mimi would never have allowed it.
The detective rubbed her temple. “I have to ask, what about drugs and sex?”
“Caitlin? No way.” This was Jake, finally getting beyond typical.
“I’m sorry,” the detective said. “I know these questions are difficult for you.”
Not half as difficult as having your daughter disappear, Grace thought.
“Does she have a boyfriend?”
“She was seeing a boy at school,” Grace explained. “A senior named Ty Cross. It ended a few weeks ago.”
“Who ended it?” the detective asked.
“I think she did, but . . .” Grace recalled the muffled sobs coming from Caitlin’s room in the days before the breakup, the hollow look in her daughter’s eyes. “I got the feeling it wasn’t easy.”
“You didn’t talk to her about it?” the detective asked.
“I tried but Caitlin wasn’t open to discussing it with me.” Which had hurt Grace more than she’d let on. She and Caitlin had always been close, something Grace had never had with her own mother.
The detective jotted a few lines in her notebook. “Has your daughter ever run away before?”
“No, and she hasn’t run away now,” Grace protested. “I know Caitlin. I’m certain that’s not what happened.”
“How can you be certain?”
Because I know my daughter.
When Caitlin was entering kindergarten, the principal had informed Grace that Caitlin’s test scores were so low she was recommending special education classes. Grace insisted that there had to have been a mistake, that Caitlin was more than capable of holding her own in a class of five-year-olds. She’d argued until she was blue in the face. The principal had finally agreed to retest Caitlin, at which time she admitted there’d been an error. Caitlin had been assigned to the gifted program.
Grace felt the same urge to argue now. She knew her daughter better than some self-righteous police detective, but there was no challenge in Rayna Godwin’s tone. If anything, the detective seemed pained at having to ask.
So Grace gave serious thought to her question. Was there any chance Caitlin had simply run off?
She’d threatened to run away once, when Grace announced she was marrying Carl. It had been just the two of them for so long—mother and daughter—that any change was bound to be upsetting. But they’d talked it out, roughly and painfully at times, and in the end, Caitlin had written Carl a letter, welcoming him into their family. As it turned out, she was probably closer to Carl than to Jake.
But there’d been nothing out of the ordinary this morning. No gripes or threats or indications of displeasure. Caitlin had downed a glass of orange juice, grabbed a granola bar and her backpack, and with a quick hug, told Grace to have a good weekend.
“As certain as I can be,” Grace told the detective.
“How about enemies? Anyone mad at Caitlin, or at any of you? Mr. Whittington, you’re an attorney, right?”
“Tax attorney,” Jake replied. “And no, I can’t think of anyone who’d harm Caitlin to get back at me.”
The detective looked at Grace.
“I work part-time at the college. Administrative assistant, which is a fancy word for secretary. Most of the people I deal with don’t even know who I am. Carl teaches there, but anyone upset with him would go after his daughter, Lucy, not Caitlin.” Grace cringed inwardly, as if by voicing the idea, she was somehow tempting fate to put Lucy in harm’s way.
“If anything comes to mind, be sure to let me know.” The detective closed her notebook. “I’d like to look in Caitlin’s room, if I may.”
“What for?” This was Jake, and it wasn’t even his house.
“It might help locate your daughter.”
Grace wasn’t happy about the idea of a stranger pawing through Caitlin’s things either, but she understood how it might be necessary. “I’ll show you the way.”
“It would be helpful if each of you would agree to a polygraph test,” the detective said, rising from her seat.
“A lie detector test?” Jake asked, incredulous. “Whatever for?”
“Family is always suspect. We’d like to be able to rule you out right away.”
“Oh, brother,” Jake said, shaking his head. “It’s no wonder you guys can’t find the real criminals.”
~~~~
Grace wasn’t sure she trusted her legs to hold her, but she got out of her seat and led the detective upstairs to Caitlin’s bedroom. They’d bought this house when she and Carl were first married, not because they’d fallen in love with it, as Grace had the small cottage where she and Caitlin had lived after the divorce, but because it was large enough that each of the children could have a bedroom. Caitlin’s room was the largest, but Carl’s kids had agreed that was only fair since Caitlin lived here full-time while Adam and Lucy spent half their time at their mother’s.
Caitlin’s room was also the neatest. Whereas Lucy and Adam tossed their clothes, clean and dirty, onto the floor along with their books, binders, and dirty dishes, Caitlin was obsessed with order. She’d bought plastic drawer dividers and bins for her closet, and tucked everything away in its proper place. Her posters were framed rather than simply tacked to the wall, her dresser was topped with an artful array of lacquered jewelry boxes, and the books on her wall unit were arranged by size.
Now, as the detective opened drawers, glanced at the titles on the bookshelf, the awards pinned to the bulletin board on the wall, the carefully made bed with its sage green coverlet and trio of patchwork pillows, Grace felt nothing but the emptiness of the room, as if every nook and cranny cried out for Caitlin’s return.
“Does she have an Internet connection in her room?” the detective asked.
Grace nodded. “The whole house is on a wireless network.”
“We’ll probably want to take the computer, or at least copy the hard drive.”
“I don’t think you’ll find anything.”
“You never know.”
The innuendo annoyed Grace. She knew her daughter and resented the implication that she didn’t. She followed the detective out of the room. At the top of the stairs, she paused.
“What’s happened with the Karen Holiday investigation?” Grace asked, her voice little more than a whisper. It had been all over the papers last fall when Karen disappeared but Grace couldn’t recall hearing anything in the last few months. “Do you think there’s a chance she’s still alive?”
“That’s our fervent hope.” The detective’s tone was anything but hopeful.
“Do you have any idea who took her?”
Detective Godwin’s expression darkened. “Not yet.”
“But you have leads, right?”
“A few.”
“And you’re following up on them? There’s progress being made?”
The detective looked at her feet, then raised her gaze to meet Grace’s. “Mrs. Whittington, you need to remember that every case is different. The Karen Holiday investigation has dragged on longer than any of us would like. That doesn’t mean we won’t find Caitlin.”
But it was an ominous sign.
The only real crime the town had seen in five years and the cops had nothing. Grace felt desperation descend on her like heavy, thick smoke. She struggled to fill her lungs with air.
Caitlin was gone. Grace might never see her daughter again. Every parent’s worst nightmare, and here it was staring her in the face.
Chapter 4
At the station house, Rayna Godwin locked the door to the women’s lavatory, leaned back against it, arms clutching her chest, and bit back a sob. She couldn’t do this.
; Correction, she didn’t want to do this.
Not again.
In the five months since Karen Holiday disappeared, not an hour went by that Rayna didn’t think about the missing girl and mentally comb through the details of what little they knew about her final hours.
For all the good it did.
Despite her assurances to Grace Whittington, they’d made pathetically little progress in finding Karen. By now, the chances of finding her alive were so slim to be almost nonexistent.
Rayna had been attracted to the job in Paradise Falls precisely because it was the sort of small, safe community where violent crimes were rare. Nestled in the forested hills of northern Oregon at a bend in the river, it was far enough from Portland that the town’s character was distinctly its own—an interesting blend of lumbering and agricultural interests overlaid with the cultural crosscurrents of a college environment and the tourists who visited for fishing and boating.
Oh, there were plenty of altercations and burglaries, an occasional sexual assault, and even an armed robbery at the bank the year after she arrived. But the last homicide in town had happened before Rayna’s time, when Billy Granger shot the man his wife was having an affair with.
Until Karen Holiday, that is. And Karen wasn’t officially a homicide since they didn’t have a body. But Rayna knew it was only a matter of time. One of these days, some hiker or fisherman or high school kid with a hot date and a six-pack would stumble on a jumble of scattered bones and alert the authorities. They’d have their body then, but still no viable suspect.
That’s what had been gnawing at Rayna these past few months. She was begrudgingly willing to accept that Karen Holiday had been murdered, but it galled her to know that the person responsible would get away with it.
That wasn’t right. And it wasn’t why she’d gone into police work when she could have just as easily found a nine-to-five job in a plush office with carpeting. Rayna had taken the job in Paradise Falls because she’d burned out on the urban violence of San Jose and her own personal tragedy, but she hadn’t lost her passion for ridding the world of bad guys. Which was part of why her failure to close the Karen Holiday case weighed so heavily.
And now, Caitlin Whittington.
Rayna pulled the girl’s photo from her pocket. It was a wallet-sized school photo—the kind that came in a packet containing more copies than most parents knew what to do with. Probably none ever imagined one of those copies coming in handy when their child disappeared.
There was a knock on the door. “Hey, Rayna. You fall in or something?”
Leave it to Hank to overlook the possibility that a lady might actually require some extra time in the bathroom. “I’ll be out in a minute.”
Hank ignored her and pounded again. “It’s important. We got the press on the line.”
“Already?”
“They monitor the scanners.”
“Who is it?”
“Seth Robbins.”
Just what she didn’t need. “Tell him I’m not available.”
“You want me to tell him you’re in the can?”
Jesus, there were times Hank was a little too rough around the edges. “Forget it. I’ll be right there.”
Rayna ran the water and splashed it on her face. You can do this, she told her reflection. Focus on the facts. Don’t let the rest of it get to you.
But the face that looked back at her wasn’t her own. It belonged to Karen Holiday. Caitlin Whittington. And, always, her own daughter, Kimberly.
There was no shortage of girls to grieve for.
~~~~
Media coverage could be an asset, particularly in missing persons’ cases. The more word got out, the better the chances of finding a witness who’d actually seen something important. But Seth Robbins was the last person Rayna felt like talking to right then. He’d led the charge against her with his editorials questioning her competence in the Karen Holiday investigation. And he’d kept it up long after most of the town had moved on to other things.
Still, as she talked to him now on the phone, Rayna was careful to be polite, taking her time to give him as much information as she could about Caitlin Whittington’s disappearance.
“You think we’ve got a serial killer on the loose?” he asked the minute she finished.
She leaned back and the chair squeaked beneath her. Time for another squirt of oil. “Nothing says the two cases are connected.”
“The girls went to the same school,” he pointed out. “I can’t remember the last time we had a teenage girl disappear, and now we’ve got two. Seems to me like they’ve got to be connected.”
“We’ll certainly be looking at the possibility,” Rayna conceded. “But we’re not jumping to any conclusions.”
“It would be nice to get a conclusion of any sort.”
“Right.” Did he think she liked leaving a case unsolved? The man was so busy stirring up dissension, he didn’t stop to think.
When she hung up, she turned to Hank, who’d been on another line with the supervisor of the bus depot. “Anything?” she asked.
“Nope.”
Rayna hadn’t expected there would be. Caitlin had been waiting at school shortly after five-thirty, expecting her dad to pick her up. It didn’t make sense that she’d have suddenly decided to take off by bus. And if someone took her, well, he wasn’t likely to hightail it out of town on public transportation.
“See what you can dig up on the parents,” she told Hank. “The mom and stepdad were out of town, so I’m hard pressed to see how they’d be involved. But it’s a divorce and remarriage situation—always sticky—and anything is possible. I’d like to get a better feel for the girl’s relationship with each of them.”
“Okay.”
“And alert the bank. We want to know if there’s any activity on her ATM card.”
“Will do.” Hank’s long, angular frame was hunched over his desk. When she’d first met him, Rayna assumed his gawky awkwardness was an act, but she’d since decided he simply had more bone than he knew what to do with. And while the country bumpkin side of him irritated her at times, it amused her at others. Bottom line was that she couldn’t think of many people she’d rather work with.
“I’m heading over to the school,” she said.
“It’s nighttime.”
“I know.”
“Won’t be anyone there.”
“I want to look around anyway. See if just maybe there’s something that will point us in the right direction.”
“You want me to come along?”
“No. Finish up your calls, then go home and get some sleep. We’ve got a busy weekend ahead of us.”
Rayna scanned Caitlin’s photograph into the computer and sent it to Seth Robbins at the newspaper. She called the television and radio news stations in Portland and the surrounding towns, and repeated the information she’d given Seth. She sent them all copies of the photo, as well. Then she drove out to the school.
~~~~
The Paradise Falls high school and junior high operated independently, but they shared a campus, much to the dismay of many junior high parents who considered the older students a bad influence.
Located about half a mile inland from the eastern bank of the river, the high school was a sprawling, single-story facility with open hallways and patios. A large parking lot faced the street. The athletic facilities and sports fields were to one side and the rear. Rayna had spent weeks on campus following Karen Holiday’s disappearance, meeting with students and teachers, hoping against hope she’d learn something that would help them find Karen.
Now, as she got out of the car and pulled her jacket tight against the cold March wind, she felt her earlier failure like a weight on her shoulders.
The parking lot and hallways were well-lit—for safety reasons and to deter vandalism. Rayna walked around the area at the front of the school where students waited to be picked up at the end of the school day. She noted the usual litter, but nothing that struck her
as telling. She wandered the hallways, as well. A group of students drifted toward her from the direction of the auditorium.
“You’re all here late on a Friday night,” she said, both a friendly greeting and an unspoken question.
“Rehearsal,” said one of the boys. “And we’ve got to be back again first thing tomorrow morning.”
As if on cue, they all groaned in unison, but none of them seemed particularly unhappy about the prospect.
Rayna asked about Caitlin. Only a couple of the kids actually knew her and neither of them had seen her that afternoon. Nor had they noticed anyone suspicious around the campus.
Rayna made a sweep of the other block of hallways, where she found Truman, the after-hours custodian, sitting on the edge of his cart enjoying a cigarette. When he saw Rayna, he jumped to his feet and ground the cigarette out under his heel.
Rayna eyed the edge of the butt near his shoe.
“Busted,” he said, with a toothless grin. “I promise I won’t do it again, okay?”
“Just not on school grounds. You know the rule.” And as far as Rayna could tell, he made a habit of ignoring it.
He nodded. “Yes, ma’am.”
“Were you by any chance here this evening around five or six?”
“Yeah.” Truman sounded cautious. “I woulda been here then.”
Rayna showed him Caitlin’s picture, asked if he’d seen her.
He shook his head. “I’ve seen her around, but not today.”
“Did you see any strangers on campus? Anything suspicious?”
“No ma’am, I sure didn’t.”
“Keep an eye out, okay?”
“Sure thing.” He shook his head, weary with the weight of the world. “Another one missing,” he said with a low whistle. “That ain’t good.”
~~~~
It was well after midnight when Rayna crawled into bed. She was exhausted but keyed up at the same time. She knew sleep would be a long time coming.
Karen Holiday. Caitlin Whittington. Were the two disappearances related? The girls attended the same school, but were two grades apart. According to Caitlin’s parents, they hadn’t known one another. But that didn’t rule out the possibility that their paths had crossed at school.
Paradise Falls Page 2
