The Vanishing Season

by Joanna Schaffhausen

  He spread his hands apart and forced a smile. “It’s forgotten.”

  He served them breakfast in silence and then watched, appreciation warming him again, as she wolfed it down. “This is really good,” she said as she shoveled forkfuls of the flaky, buttery toast into her mouth. Reed admitted to himself that the dish had turned out rather nicely. A delightful aspect to New England was that one could find real maple syrup, even at the corner store.

  “Mother would probably give me a B-plus for my efforts,” he answered. “But it beats the hell out of a granola bar.”

  For a moment, there was only the sound of forks scraping against the plates, punctuated every so often by Bump’s impatient whine. He seemed fairly certain the leftovers would surpass granola crumbs too. “Did you hear back from Danielle yet about the test results?” Ellie asked him eventually. She was trying to sound casual, but her eyes were trained on her plate.

  “Not a word. Why?”

  She squirmed. “I was thinking maybe she shouldn’t bother with the beer bottle.”

  Reed put down his fork and regarded her. “Why would you say that? It seems more relevant than ever, given that someone snooping around your property left you a human body part yesterday. Stands to reason that he or she could have made a practice run.”

  “I know, it’s just that Sam told me … he told me he was pretty sure it was just the Bashir boys from next door. He’s busted them for drinking beer in the woods a couple of times in the past, so it seems likely it’s just them screwing around again. I wouldn’t want Danielle to waste her time.”

  She was selling the story better this time, making eye contact with him and keeping her voice neutral, but something unnatural gleamed in her gaze, as though her irises held too much liquid or light. He reminded himself that circumstances had made her a liar, and a good one. “Ellery,” he said carefully, “is there some reason you don’t want to have that bottle tested?”

  She held his gaze, her eyes guileless. “No. I just think it’d be a waste of time and resources, and as you point out, we have new, more pressing evidence that needs to be examined.”

  They sat there looking at each other, the tension rising as he tried to figure out whether to call bullshit now or let the lie play out a little longer. Before he could decide, there was a frantic knocking on her front door, and Bump scrambled toward it, pell-mell and barking at the top of his lungs. Reed trailed behind Ellie as she went to answer the door, and he was surprised along with her to find Annie and Dave Nesbit standing on the porch, drawn tight like a pair of strings ready to snap. “Ellie, thank God you’re home,” Annie said, grabbing for Ellery’s hand. “We’re sorry to just show up like this, but Chief Parker wasn’t giving us any information down at the station.”

  “We heard … there’s a body,” Dave added, his thin lips having trouble with the shape of the word. “Parker will only tell us that the department is investigating the possible discovery of human remains.”

  To Reed, the severed hand had looked like the real deal, but he supposed there was still the outside possibility that it was a brilliant fake. Ellery looked shocked and out of her depth as she stood there in the grips of the anguished parents. “I … I’m sorry,” she said at length. “I really can’t say anything more right now.”

  “But you promised!” Tears brimmed around Annie’s eyes. “You promised us you would always keep us updated on any new developments in the case.”

  “And I will. We just don’t have anything certain to report right now. I’m sorry. I know this is hard for you.”

  “No,” Annie replied, shrinking back. “You haven’t got the first idea how hard this is. Three years! We’ve been waiting three years for any kind of news at all. Now there’s a body and you won’t even tell us who it is.”

  “There’s no body.” Reed stepped in, hoping they would get the hint. This wasn’t going to play out like one of those TV shows where the family gets to ID a beautiful corpse draped tastefully in a white sheet.

  Dave went pale, making the beads of sweat stand out on his bald head and thick upper lip. “No body, or no body you can identify?”

  “Please,” Ellie said. “I will tell you everything the moment we have a concrete development. Right now, we have more questions than answers, and I wouldn’t want to say anything that misled you or raised false hope.”

  “Hope? You think news of a body gives us hope?” Dave’s face had twisted into a mask of anger. “What kind of sick reasoning is that?”

  “Let’s go,” Annie cut in, tugging on his arm. “She’s not going to tell us anything.”

  “I’m sorry,” Ellie called after them as they retreated, leaving an emotional black hole in their wake. Their car engine roared to life, and Dave gunned it hard a few times, tires spinning in the dirt, before they shot down the driveway and disappeared into the trees. Uneasy quiet settled over the house again. Reed could hear Ellie’s unsteady breaths, saw the twinge in her shoulder.

  “That was intense,” he observed.

  “Yeah.” She was still watching the distant spot where the Nesbits had disappeared. “I’ve figured for a while now that Bea was dead,” she said, not looking at him. “I thought they had figured that too—you know, that when we talked about bringing Bea home, it was with the understanding that they’d be visiting a gravesite from now on.” She shook her head slightly. “They don’t know yet that it doesn’t matter who the hand belongs to. Bea’s already gone.”

  * * *

  They left Bump happily slurping the leftover French toast and bacon from the breakfast plates and took Reed’s car back toward Worcester to the gas station where Bea had made her final purchase alongside Shannon Blessing. Ellery asked Reed to drive so she could look at the files Sam had left them the night before. She started with Mark Roy because he was the most recent victim, but she was disappointed in what she found. “There isn’t anything here I didn’t already know. They interviewed a few more people in an effort to figure out where Mark might have gone off to kill himself—his ex-wife, his coworkers, and the bartender down at the Black Cat where Mark liked to drink sometimes—but no one had a clue to offer, and so Jimmy Tipton just stopped asking, I guess.”

  “What about Shannon Blessing? Have you discovered anything in there that might link her to Bea?”

  She juggled the folders on her lap so that Shannon’s came out on top. “It’s hard to imagine they had any sort of connection,” she said as she started going through the witness statements. “Bea was a nineteen-year-old college student and Shannon was a thirty-four-year-old unemployed alcoholic.” Reed navigated his way onto the Mass Pike while Ellie scanned one page after another. “Huh,” she said after a moment.

  “What, you’ve got something?”

  “No connection to Bea,” she replied. “I can’t believe I didn’t figure this bit out earlier, but I guess I never saw the original incident report.” She held it up for him, but he couldn’t exactly slow down from 65 mph to study it. “Mark Roy was the one who first reported Shannon was missing. Or rather, he called up the station to say he was worried about her because her mail was piling up. He says the last time he saw her was July sixth, when she happened to be coming out of her apartment building just as he was putting the mail into all the slots. He gave her the mail personally, and she took it back to her apartment. Six days later, he phoned the station to say she hadn’t retrieved her mail since.”

  The odd interconnections seemed to Reed like a deranged logic puzzle from a standardized test: Bea knows Shannon and Shannon knows Mark. Ellie knows Shannon and Mark but not Bea. If someone abducts Bea but not Shannon from a gas station one night, why is Ellie the only one left standing?

  “Do you think it’s important?” Ellie asked him.

  “Yes,” he replied, although he couldn’t say why at this point. “What else have you got in there?”

  “Nothing much,” she said as she sifted through the contents. “A record of her arrest for operating under the influence back in 201
2. There are a few witness statements from people in her apartment building who said they hadn’t noticed anyone suspicious hanging around. No one in particular going in or out of Shannon’s place. There was nothing, Jimmy notes, to convince them that Shannon met with foul play. They did serve a warrant to her bank to get her account information—the latest check on that was just three months ago—but Shannon has made no deposits or withdrawals in the past two years.”

  “From what you’ve told me, Shannon does not sound like someone with either the motivation or the acumen to suddenly go off the grid.”

  “No,” Ellery replied flatly, and turned her face toward the window. “She’s dead. They all are. The only thing that’s different now is that folks are starting to pay attention.”

  He wondered if she had any idea of the kind of attention that would be coming their way, the kind of powder keg they were sitting on now. The fuse had been lit last night when the hand was shipped to Boston, and now they were all just waiting for the boom. The Boston area hadn’t seen a serial killer of any consequence since Albert DeSalvo strangled thirteen women in the early 1960s, long before the advent of the twenty-four-hour news cycle and various social media. Everyone had a camera now. Everyone wanted to be part of the story.

  His tenuous involvement was its own kind of time bomb. McGreevy would pull him out of Woodbury in a heartbeat if he knew what Reed was up to, and it was only a matter of time before he caught on. Reed had heard the skepticism in Mike Driscoll’s voice this morning when he called the warden in Terre Haute to ask for visitor logs and correspondence records pertaining to Francis Coben. “You have to requisition that information through the proper channels,” Mike had told him. “You know that better than anyone.”

  “I don’t have time to go through the proper channels,” Reed had replied. “Don’t send me copies if it’s too much—just a list of names would be fine.”

  Mike had gone silent for so long that Reed thought the phone connection might have cut off. “First the bed check on Coben and now you want a look at his visitor log,” he’d said at last. “Just what do you think he’s up to?”

  “I don’t think Coben himself is up to anything. I’m concerned he has a friend—an admirer—who is keen to take up where Coben left off.”

  Mike Driscoll knew the details of Coben’s crimes better than most; he was the one who had to babysit the animal until the Feds decided to pull Coben’s plug once and for all. “That,” he replied in a massive understatement, “would be real bad news.”

  They had agreed on a compromise: Mike would look over the logs himself and flag anything that looked odd or suspicious, and then he would send the details of those interactions to Reed. Reed hated to rely on anyone else’s judgment of what was “odd” in this instance, even someone as savvy as Mike, but he had no standing to object. This wasn’t technically his investigation.

  “Turn up here,” Ellie said as they reached the fateful exit Bea had taken years ago. Reed drove them into the bustling rest stop, which was packed with holiday travelers. They waited in line at the gas pumps so that they could have number six, the one Bea had used. Reed swiped his card and put the nozzle in the tank, although the car couldn’t possibly need more than two gallons at this point. Mostly, he wanted an excuse to look around.

  “Shannon was at pump number seven over there,” he said, pointing, and Ellie’s gaze followed. “The two women definitely would have been able to see each other.”

  “But the video doesn’t show them talking or having any sort of interaction,” Ellie reminded him. She squinted at a clean-cut man with his silver Beemer, who now stood where Shannon had been the night of Bea’s disappearance. “Maybe … maybe Shannon saw the killer that night as he was stalking Bea, and that’s why he killed her too.”

  “Maybe. Why would he wait a full year before targeting her, though?” Reed turned in a circle as he took in the fast-food restaurant, the mini-mart, a Dunkin’ Donuts, and the expansive parking lot. They were right off the highway—the Pike traffic rushed by at roaring speed—with any sideline trees set well back from the asphalt wonderland. At a peak time like this, the rest stop boasted more than one hundred cars, but it was central enough that it probably did a reasonably brisk business even at ten o’clock on a Sunday night. The short-term parking spaces close to the mini-mart would provide an excellent vantage point from which to watch the patrons at the gas pumps. “The video suggests that Bea got into her car and drove off unmolested, and yet we know she did not reach her parents’ home in Woodbury. Somewhere in between her abductor intervened.” He looked out at the passing traffic and tried to envision what might have occurred. “It would be hard to run her off the road without attracting any attention. Perhaps he flagged her down somehow, or maybe even sabotaged her car while it was here at the station.”

  “The video doesn’t show anyone approaching her car,” Ellery pointed out.

  “Maybe then she made it all the way back to Woodbury. That would make sense, in a way, given that our other missing persons are connected to the same area. A young woman, traveling alone after dark—she might be willing to stop for a familiar face.”

  Ellery scuffed at the cement with her toe. “I don’t know. I think maybe sometimes that’s true, but I also think that people make assumptions. If there’s no sign of forced entry, then the victim must have let him in—right? She must have known him. But I think people forget that folks are basically trusting, or maybe you can call it naïve. Whatever. If a stranger knocks on your door or flags you down because he says he has car trouble, you’re inclined to believe him. You don’t think anything bad is going to happen to you, right up until you’re being stuffed into his trunk. Everyone expects the bogeyman to look like some sort of freak, but these guys, half of them could pass for Mr. Rogers.”

  Reed had to concede her point. The Green River Killer, Gary Ridgway, had managed to murder as many as ninety women, perhaps more than any other serial offender in U.S. history, in part because he was so ordinary in every other respect. The Bible taught that the Devil would be marked with a special brand upon his forehead, but in Reed’s experience, too often the Devil was a middle-aged, soft-bellied wage worker with a receding hairline, two ex-wives, and a pair of bloody shackles in his basement.

  “It would be useful to see the rest of the video from the night Bea disappeared,” he said to Ellery. “Just in case Shannon Blessing appears elsewhere or there is anything else of note—someone loitering before Bea arrived, for example. But I don’t suppose Oil Can Boy has any more recordings on offer.”

  Ellery shrugged. “We could ask.”

  Reed scrunched his face at her. “I haven’t traced the correspondence. We would probably need to get a warrant for the Internet provider in any case to disclose his real identity.”

  “Yeah, I don’t think that’s going to be necessary. Follow me.”

  She went into the mini-mart and waited in line until she could talk to the full-bodied woman with frizzy hair who was minding the register. “Hi,” Ellery said brightly, but she did not introduce herself or show any form identification. “I’m looking for someone who works here—someone with access to the video surveillance and a big-time thing for the 1986 Red Sox.”

  The frizzy-haired woman wrinkled her whole face. “You mean Alfred?”

  “Alfred, yes,” Ellie replied with satisfaction, as if she had known it all along. “Now where can I find him?”

  “He’s loading inventory in the back.” Ellery turned without another word, but the woman hefted herself half over the counter to call out, “Hey, you’re not allowed back there. Employees only!”

  Reed smoothly withdrew his official credentials. “FBI business, ma’am. We appreciate your confidentiality and cooperation.” Then he half walked, half hopped after the striding Ellie, who was already pushing her way through the swinging doors.

  They found a skinny African American man who was lifting pallets of soda and dropping them onto the shelves in what appeared to be in rh
ythm to some beat inside his head. He was nodding along as if to music, and as they got closer, Reed could see the man had earbuds connected to a cell phone in his pocket. As might have been expected, he also wore a Red Sox baseball cap that was faded on top from the sun. Ellie walked right up behind him and announced loudly, “Oil Can Boy, I presume.”

  The man dropped the pallet he was holding and grabbed the buds from his ears. “Jesus, you scared me, creeping up like that.”

  “You’re Alfred?” Ellie asked, and the man nodded.

  “Yeah, I’m Alfred. What’s it to you?”

  “And do you also go by the online handle Oil Can Boy?” she asked.

  The whites of Alfred’s eyes got bigger and he took a step back. “Who wants to know?”

  “Officer Ellery Hathaway,” Ellie replied, showing her ID at last. Reed followed suit with his own credentials.

  “I believe I’m one of your satisfied customers,” Reed told him solemnly.

  “FBI—what do you want with me? I ain’t done nothing illegal, I swear.” Reed could tell by the sudden sweat on the man’s brow that he wasn’t too sure of this.

  “Relax, we’re not here to bust you,” Ellie said. “We want your help.”

  “The FBI wants my help?” Reed could see he wasn’t convinced of this either.

  “You’re the one who’s been selling the surveillance video of the night Bea Nesbit disappeared, aren’t you?”

  Alfred folded his arms across his chest. “I ain’t saying anything one way or another.”

  “We know it’s you,” Ellie told him. “We can get the IP trace to prove it—get a warrant, search your home … or you could just agree to help us out.”