Don't Say a Word (Hometown Antihero)

by Amber Lynn Natusch

  “Best you keep it that way, young lady.”

  I shook my head. “I’ll text you and let you know what the plan is, okay?”

  “All right. You tell Striker I said hello.”

  “I will! Love you, Gramps.”

  “Love you too, girl.”

  I closed the door behind me and tried to shake off the icky feeling I had from talking about sex with Gramps. Some topics should be fully off-limits for grandparents. Sex was definitely at the top of the list.

  The drive to Columbus was uneventful, and an hour and a half later, I found myself parked outside of the mom-and-pop restaurant Striker and I’d met at before. The same one I’d met Dawson in front of a couple weeks earlier. It seemed so long ago.

  I found Striker sitting in his favorite booth near the back, his massive frame taking up the bulk of one side. He waved me over with a bright smile that contrasted his deep umber skin, and I hurried to meet him. I gave him a half hug so he didn’t have to get out, then sat down across from him.

  “How ya doin’, kiddo? Everything all right down there in Hicksville?” he asked before waving the waitress over. We placed our orders (they really made the best grilled cheese ever there), and then got down to business.

  “I’m good. Trying to get back into the swing of things.”

  “That can be hard to do,” he said. “You’ve been through hell.”

  “Hell seems to be my status quo,” I replied. I let out a little laugh, but it was mirthless. The truth was my hell started the second my naked pictures ended up online freshman year and just kept on going through my father’s trial right into the Donovan disaster. I wasn’t sure how much Striker knew about Dawson’s case or if he knew that he was undercover, so I didn’t bring it up. When he didn’t ask, I assumed he didn’t.

  “Well, I sure hope that changes for you.”

  “I’m wondering if this will help,” I said, pulling out the file I’d found and slapping it down on the table. Striker eyed it for a second before picking it up to flip through it.

  “What is it?” he asked, his dark brow furrowed.

  “Dunno. Check out the pictures in the back,” I said, waiting for him to find them. I knew the second he did because his eyebrows shot up in disbelief.

  “That’s Reider.…”

  “Yeah. I wondered if he was one of them. But who’s the other guy and why did my dad have this photo?”

  Striker took a sip of coffee while he continued to stare at the picture.

  “Let me run it through our facial recognition software and see what I can find. If I can figure out who he was meeting with, I might be able to figure out where this was taken and what it means. Where did you find this file?” he asked.

  I leaned forward, wanting to keep my voice low.

  “It was in a file box from the basement. I think my dad stashed it there the night Reider died. He was hiding it. I just don’t know why.”

  Striker’s expression fell. “Because he knew they were coming for him.”

  “But why hide evidence that could help you? And why not give it to his attorney?”

  “Maybe it wouldn’t help him. Maybe it damns him somehow.…”

  I pulled away from Striker in disbelief. “What the hell does that mean?”

  He shook his head. “What I’m trying to say is that maybe this is stuff Reider was using against him and he somehow got his hands on it. There’s no way to know until I figure out what it all means.”

  I relaxed a bit, leaning back in my chair. The waitress returned with our food and I took a huge bite of my sandwich, the hot cheese burning the roof of my mouth.

  “How long will it take to find out?”

  “Not long if this guy’s in the system. If he’s not, longer.”

  “Are we talking hours or days?”

  “Hopefully the former. I’ll let you know as soon as I have something concrete.”

  “What about the rest of it? The papers with all the numbers?”

  “That,” he said with an exhale, “is going to take more work. Maybe if I can ID the guy, the numbers will make much more sense.”

  “You can’t show this to anyone else, Striker. This stays between you and me.”

  His eyebrow quirked. “Does your father know you found this?”

  “Hell no! And you’re not telling him. He’s been super cagey about his case after everything that happened homecoming night. He wants me to give up on it, but you know I can’t do that. You know why, too.”

  He nodded. “Okay. I’ll keep this to myself—for now.”

  “Thank you,” I said, losing the edge my tone had held.

  “So what else is going on with you? School any easier? Got yourself a boyfriend?” I choked on my drink, nearly spitting it out all over our food. “Did I hit a nerve?” he asked, smiling as he leaned forward on his elbows, watching me squirm.

  “Kind of.”

  “Kind of?”

  “It’s complicated.”

  “With kids these days, it always is.”

  We ate the rest of our lunch while we got caught up. He asked me about counseling, and I told him I’d meet with the school psychologist again soon. He seemed satisfied with my response and changed the subject. While he talked about his daughter and her scholarship to Dartmouth and not being sure about having her so far away, my mind drifted off into the forbidden zone. If Luke had succeeded, I wouldn’t have had to worry about college applications and moving away from home. That reality had been so close it was as if it tainted me somehow. Marked me with ink I couldn’t rub off.

  I broke from my stupor when Striker uttered Dawson’s name.

  “Sorry?” I said.

  “I asked if you’ve seen Dawson. He’s still working that case down there. I know it’s a small town, so I wondered if you’d run into him.”

  “Um, yeah. A couple times,” I said, trying to play off my anxiety.

  “You haven’t told anyone how you know him, have you? It’s best if he keeps a low profile.”

  “No. I didn’t have to. I wasn’t with anyone when I saw him.”

  “Good,” Striker said, satisfied with my answer. “I know you helped him get that break in the case. With any luck, he can find the person running the operation soon and help those girls.”

  Those girls … If only Striker knew.

  “I hope he does,” I said, my voice a little thin and empty.

  “Well, I hate to run, kiddo, but I have somewhere I need to be shortly.” He got up and threw some money down on the table. “We should do this again soon, though, okay? I’d be lying if I said I wasn’t worried about you.”

  “I’m hanging in there, Striker. You know me, I’m a fighter.”

  “Damn right you are, and don’t you forget it. But just because you’re tough doesn’t mean you have to take on everything alone. It’s okay to need help, Kylene. After all you’ve been through, I don’t doubt that you do.”

  “Message received,” I said with a nod.

  “Good, now text me when you get home so I know you arrived safely. People drive like idiots these days. Make sure you’re not on your phone while driving, got it?”

  “Yes, Dad.”

  He shook his head and laughed. “Just what I need, another teenage daughter trying to put me in an early grave.”

  I gave Striker a hug and thanked him for lunch, then made my way to my car. I texted Dawson to see if he still wanted me to come right over, but he didn’t reply. His house was sort of on my way home, so I figured it wouldn’t hurt to swing by and check in like he’d suggested.

  Had I known what I was about to walk into, I might have rethought my plan.

  TWENTY

  Dawson didn’t answer when I knocked, so I walked in and called his name. He shouted something unintelligible from the back of the house, and I made my way there. In his office, I found him with marker in mouth, staring at the whiteboard that looked quite different than it had the last time I saw it.

  The columns of information on the
girls had been erased, replaced with Danielle’s name encircled at the center of the board. Another concentric ring containing the names of the four girls Jane gave me was just outside of the bull’s-eye. Beyond that was a much larger ring with the names of all the girls we hadn’t yet been able to tie to the sex ring—the rest of the girls.

  All along the wall were pages of notes, photos of suspects, and string pulled tight between them and the circles of names on the whiteboard. Dawson had gone full-on A Beautiful Mind up in that room. I wasn’t sure if I should be impressed or worried.

  “Well you’ve been busy,” I said. He didn’t even balk at my sarcastic tone. Instead he turned slowly to look at me, and every second that passed as he silently stared was torture. Then he turned back to the board.

  I headed for the door.

  “I’ve dissected the lives of Kit Casey, Rachel Fray, and Danielle Green,” he said, halting me. “I still have more to do with Angela Mercy and Samantha Dunkley. I need you to go through the school records for all five girls. Outline their class schedules. Make note of all teachers they had, any disciplinary measures, extracurriculars, etc. We’ve got to cross-reference all of this with the three I’ve already gone through. I’m digging into police records now, with the help of your favorite small-town sheriff.”

  “I’m on it!” I said, plopping down on the floor. I heaped their files into my lap, thinking Dawson would be less inclined to snatch them away if they were there, and started thumbing through them.

  “Start with Kit and Rachel. They were the same age and at the same school. The other three weren’t.”

  “Sounds good, but shouldn’t we do this kind of search on all the girls that allegedly ran away?”

  Dawson shook his head. “We could, but we’ll start here with the girls Jane mentioned. Anything farther back than five years makes it hard to get school records for. Until we need to broaden our search, we’ll stick with those.”

  It felt wrong not to include the others—like somehow they didn’t matter—but if Dawson thought this was our best bet, then I’d trust his judgment and do what I could with the victims we had. If they weren’t enough, I’d see what I could dig up on the others.

  I hunkered down with the pile of personal files in front of me and started paging through them. I started with the girls Dawson suggested, who were the same age and had attended Ash Haven School together. Kit disappeared in the winter of their junior year and Rachel, the summer following the completion of senior year.

  AHS no longer existed as it did when they attended. Their class was the last to graduate from the K–12 school. After that, grades 9–12 were shipped over to Jasperville. The town of Ash Haven was even smaller than ours and unable to sustain a high school on its own, but over recent years, its population had increased enough for the existing school to be overrun. The state threatened to shut it down for overcrowding, so the two towns and the powers that be hashed out a way for those eighty or so students to attend JHS. Ash Haven would pay taxes to help cover the expense of having them there, and JHS got a nice new addition, partially funded by the state. It turned out to be a win/win for everyone.

  While I was compiling a list of the faculty the girls all shared, I realized pretty quickly that if you were on staff at AHS, the students had you as a teacher at some point. There was just so much overlap. Basically, every teacher and administrator there was on the short list.

  Frustrated, I moved on to Angela and Samantha (aka Sam). They had disappeared after Kit and Rachel, and both had attended JHS. I was starting high school around the time that Angela went missing. She’d just graduated that spring. Sam, I remembered. She had been a junior my freshman year. She was pretty unremarkable. I had no real interaction with her. She’d disappeared after I’d moved to Columbus, so I never heard anything about her having run away. But, then again, I didn’t think I would have even if I’d still been at JHS. None of the girls had made more than the slightest ripple in the world when they went missing.

  I swallowed back the bile rising in my throat and got back to work.

  After about an hour, I’d mapped out and cross-referenced the lists of school staff that the girls all had in common. Some were thinly connected, but I left them in place regardless. Thanks to the JHS victims, the AHS list was whittled down significantly. That said, there were still quite a few names on the list.

  Mr. Callahan, who’d transferred in the spring of Ash Haven’s final year of K–12 operation. He’d left to cover for Ms. Langley, who had to go out early for maternity leave. When she decided not to return the following year, Callahan obtained her full-time position. He’d had both Angela and Sam in his class, though both dropped out at some point. Whether that was because physics or Callahan wasn’t for them remained to be seen.

  Coach Blackthorn had also come over from AHS, though he came the year before the school transferred its high school students. His ability to coach football was rivaled only by his ability to be a complete and utter chauvinistic asshole, so it was no wonder that Jasperville had wanted him the second they’d realized the young coach showed real promise. The state championship would be in sight with someone of his coaching prowess.

  Maybe early graves for ostracized girls would be, too.

  Ms. Davies and Principal Thompson had both come over from AHS as well, but from what I could tell, all of them had started the fall after Angela Mercy had graduated. They would have been at JHS during only Sam’s and Danielle’s time there. They had no connection to Angela at all.

  I breathed a sigh of relief.

  “How you doing over there, Danners?” Dawson asked as he pinned another paper up to the wall. A news clipping I hadn’t seen before.

  “Well, I went through their class schedules and connected at least two teachers to all of the girls. It gets a little hairy with the transfer of students and some teachers from a nearby school the year after Rachel went missing, but I think I got that all sorted out.”

  He shot me a confused look, so I did my best to explain how Jasperville essentially absorbed the high school student body from Ash Haven’s school. Once he’d grilled me on the particulars, he seemed satisfied with what I’d collected.

  “How did you know about Blackthorn and Callahan going over early? Was there something in the files about it?” he asked, a hint of uncertainty in his voice.

  I shot him an incredulous look. “Dawson, let me make something very clear to you. The arrival of Coach Blackthorn at JHS was a town-celebrated event. We held a parade for him. The football team qualified for the state quarterfinals in his first season. I’m surprised there wasn’t a statue erected outside the front steps of the school in his honor.”

  “Point taken,” he said, smirking at me. “What about Callahan?”

  “Ah, now that one was a bit more insidious, given that I wasn’t yet in high school, but rumor of his assholedom and anal-retentiveness spread quickly amongst students. It eventually trickled down to the middle school—a warning for what we’d one day be in for. And let me tell you, he lived up to the hype.”

  “Kinda like you?” he asked with a laugh. I merely scowled at him in response. “You did good, Danners. Now, make sure you go through the rest of their files to be sure none of them had ties to any other teachers you might have ruled out. Could be extracurricular stuff—maybe tutoring or detentions. Something like that. We don’t want to overlook any small detail.”

  I spent the next couple of hours scouring their records for suspensions or other disciplinary actions, of which there were many for all five girls—their attendance records were abysmal. None of them were involved in sports or clubs of any sorts. Notes on their family situations were abundant and grim, and I cringed when I read them. Their circumstances made perfect sense of why they’d agree to something as unthinkable as selling your body for money.

  Right before I was set to give up, I found something in Angela’s file—a transcript for summer school attendance. I looked it over, wondering if I’d find anything of value, but
it was a total bust. Nothing there either exonerated our suspects or implicated anyone new. I stuffed it back in and stood up to stretch.

  “I need to figure out if I can find something with official start dates for Davies and Thompson. They transferred to JHS when Ash Haven closed grades nine through twelve. I just want to make sure it’s safe to cross them off the school staff suspect list.”

  Dawson looked thoughtful for a moment. “I’ll have Sheriff Higgins make a call. He can come up with a story to cover why he’s asking for it. It’s not private information, so it shouldn’t be a big deal. It would be nice to narrow the field a bit,” he said with an exhale. “The list is still pretty long.”

  He pointed to a vertical list along the far edge of the whiteboard. It went all the way from top to bottom. I stood so I could get a closer look at it, and the second I did, my eyes went wide. The names read like a who’s who of Jasperville (and a couple surrounding towns). Some of them were pillars of the community.

  “Tell me these are not all viable suspects,” I said, my eyes still taking in the names.

  “They are until I can narrow down the field.”

  “Mr. Matthew, the ice cream man? And Tim Bailey, the movie theater owner? Dawson, the man is wheelchair bound! I’m pro-ableism all the way, but there is literally no way he could have slit Danielle’s throat the way Jane described!”

  “That means he’s not the murderer, that’s all. He stays.”

  He took his marker and started jotting down the names I’d mentioned from my school records search while I scanned the list.

  “Kru Tyson? Seriously? Dawson, I’ve known him since I was four years old. I grew up in his gym!” I looked over at him while he stared back, unfazed by my outburst. “It’s just so hard to wrap my head around.…”

  “Just because he has ties to some of the girls doesn’t make him guilty. But it doesn’t make him innocent because you think he’s a good guy, either.”