“Help you out how?” Alfred was still plenty suspicious.
“We want to know if you have any other video from that night—other cameras, other times. Anything that isn’t covered in your usual product.”
He gave an expansive shrug. “The cops took everything the first time around. You guys already got everything we had from when that girl went missing.”
Reed exchanged a look with Ellery. There was nothing in the files about additional video. “But you have copies,” he said to Alfred. “Right?”
“Dunno. Maybe. It was years ago and that girl was only on the one camera, I know that much. She didn’t come inside the store.”
“We’re interested in another woman. The woman next to Bea Nesbit at the gas pump that night.”
For the first time, Alfred looked interested rather than cagey. “Yeah? You think she had something to do with that girl going missing?”
“She’s missing now too,” Ellie said. “We’re trying to determine if there was any connection between the two women, something that might have happened here that night.”
Alfred’s eyebrows knitted together in doubt. “I don’t recall nothin’ on the video that night that was interesting, other than Bea getting gas, so I don’t even know I saved the other stuff. It was plain-ass boring. I’d have to go check my files to be sure.”
“Please do that as soon as possible,” Reed told him. “And send the information to me at this e-mail address, okay?” Reed handed a business card to Alfred.
“I got no promises,” he told them as he looked it over.
Ellery sighed with the resignation of a woman who had been chasing ghosts for three years now. “Just look,” she said. “That’s all we ask.”
As they bid Alfred good-bye and returned to Reed’s car, he gave her a sideways glance. “That was astutely deduced,” he said. “I confess I didn’t have you pegged as a sports fan.”
“The Red Sox are a local dialect around here. You have to speak it to fit in.”
“So Oil Can was not some local mechanic or fire starter,” he said.
Her mouth twitched in a smile. “No, Oil Can Boyd was a star pitcher for the 1986 Red Sox.”
“Hmm. Seems I heard something about them—their season didn’t work out so well, as I recall. A rather disgraceful ending in the World Series in which they managed to snatch defeat from the jaws of victory?”
“Yeah, that would be them. Turns out, though, if you wait long enough, the story has a happy ending.”
* * *
Back in Woodbury, they traced Mark Roy’s mail route, and the only benefit Reed could see was that he now had a complete visual picture of the town. “This is it,” Ellery said as they rolled to a stop outside a pretty colonial house with a wildflower garden in the front and great, green trees hanging over it on either side. The cheery painted mailbox featured a pair of cardinals, and there was a late-model Lexus SUV parked in the driveway. “This is the last house on his route. Chief Parker lives here with his wife—no kids.”
“Did anyone talk to them about the day that Mark Roy disappeared?”
“Yes.” Ellie’s eyes went to the folder on her lap, but she didn’t open it. She knew the answer by heart. “Julia says she signed for a package at around two thirty that afternoon, and that Mark seemed fine to her, but they didn’t linger to chat.”
Reed stretched over into her personal space so he could get a closer look at the house. The front door seemed to be open, leaving only a screen in its place, so he presumed Julia was at home. “We could go talk to her now, since we’re here,” he said as he drew back to his own seat.
Ellery made a choking sound that she covered with a cough. “I don’t think so. I mean, why should we? She didn’t see anything.”
“Didn’t she? The investigators who interviewed her asked questions to determine if Mark Roy might have committed suicide, not whether he might have been abducted. We’ve agreed that he probably went missing soon after he finished his rounds, so that makes her among the last to have seen him. If the perpetrator was stalking Mark that day, Julia might have seen something unusual, something no one thought to ask her about before.”
“I doubt it,” Ellery muttered. “She’s not really the observant sort.”
“Well, we won’t know unless we ask.” He removed his seat belt and got out of the car, but Ellery remained seated, staring straight ahead. He tapped on the window, startling her. “Aren’t you coming?”
She rolled down the window. “Sam isn’t going to like this. He won’t like us questioning her without his say-so.”
“Since when have you been bothered by what Chief Parker likes and doesn’t like?”
She still didn’t get out of the car.
“Suit yourself,” he said, stalking off toward the front door, and he heard her scramble out behind him.
“Don’t say I didn’t warn you,” she said under her breath as they reached the steps.
“I’ve been sufficiently warned,” he replied, hitting the doorbell. It chimed from inside, and a few moments later, a dark-haired woman appeared.
Reed admitted to a certain curiosity about the woman who was married to Woodbury’s bellicose sheriff. Julia Parker was slender and well put together, the kind of woman who was born on the right side of beautiful and blessed with the means to keep it up, at least for now. He didn’t know if she worked for a living, but she clearly brought her own money to the marriage. Her summer outfit consisted of tailored khaki shorts and a navy button-down blouse with tiny pink polka dots. She wore a large diamond ring on her left hand and a dismayed expression on her pale face at the sight of Reed and Ellie standing on her front porch. She halted behind the screen door and looked them over, back and forth a few times, but did not open it when she asked, “Yes? What is it?”
“Hello, Mrs. Parker,” Ellie said. “I hope we’re not intruding. Please let me introduce Reed Markham from the FBI. We were hoping to ask you a few questions about Mark Roy.”
“Mark,” she repeated, plainly surprised. “Yes, it’s a shame what happened to him. He was a lovely man. However, I’m afraid don’t know anything other than what I’ve already told my husband.” Reed noticed she still had not opened the door for them.
“We are exploring a new angle in the case, ma’am,” Reed said with his best Southern charm smile. “We’d be deeply obliged if you could indulge us just for a few moments. I promise it won’t take up more than a few minutes of your time.”
The woman looked long and hard at Ellery as she made up her mind. “Sam said your fussing had somehow convinced the FBI to come up here. He didn’t seem too pleased by it.”
“Did he also tell you he was out at my place last night?” Ellery said boldly. “Did he tell you why?”
Irritation practically sparked off her skin. “No—suppose you enlighten me.”
“I’ll let the chief fill you in,” Ellie said. “Best you hear it from him.”
Reed figured they had at most a couple of hours left before Julia and the rest of the world could hear about it on the news. “May we come in?” He almost batted his eyelashes as he said it. “Please?”
Julia’s posture softened as she relented. “All right, just for a minute. I have a pie in the oven.”
He could smell it as they stepped into the foyer—berries and sugar and browning crust. Julia didn’t let them past the tiled entryway. “Go ahead, then: What is it you wanted to ask me?”
“The afternoon last year when you took the package from Mark Roy,” Reed said, “did you notice anyone else in the area at the time? Anyone who wouldn’t usually be here?”
She did actually appear to think about the question, at least for ten seconds or so. “No, no one.”
“Maybe earlier or later in the day,” Reed pressed. “It could be a delivery person, a jogger, a strange car in the neighborhood?”
“I’m telling you, no. We get bicyclists down the path all the time, so I don’t pay attention to them much anymore. Maybe there was som
eone there. Otherwise, it was the usual assortment of characters: the Grossmans’ loudmouthed dog, Maureen Mayer doing her power walking with the weights, and the Ryder boys playing hoops in their driveway. I didn’t notice anyone skulking about.”
“Okay,” Reed relented, feeling another slim lead slipping away. “Thank you for your time.”
They turned to leave and were almost out the door when Julia Parker spoke again. “You people have asked me three times about Mark, but funnily enough, no one’s ever come to ask me what I know about Shannon.”
Reed and Ellie turned almost in unison to face her again. “I beg your pardon?” he said.
“What about Shannon?” Ellie asked her.
Julia gave a high, brittle laugh. “You should know, Ellie. You should know better than anyone.”
“I’m afraid I don’t follow you.”
“You mean you don’t want to follow me. There’s a difference.”
Reed could see from Ellie’s expression that she was genuinely befuddled. Julia made a huffing noise and turned her attention solely to Reed. “Shannon Blessing was the town drunk,” she said bluntly. “But she has only one OUI.”
“Ma’am,” Reed said, “excuse me, but I don’t understand your point. Are you saying that you know what happened to Shannon? That you have information that could help us find her?”
“I don’t know what happened to her or where she went,” Julia replied. “But as far as I’m concerned, she need not ever be found.”
She shut the door on them this time—the heavy one. Reed looked at Ellie. “What the hell was that about?”
“I don’t know. She’s right that Shannon has only one citation for OUI on her record, and I guess that would be unusual with Shannon’s history.” Her cell phone rang as they were walking down the path toward car, and she dug it out to answer. “Hathaway,” she said, and then came to a sudden stop as the voice replied from the other end. “We’ll be right there,” she said tersely. Then she hung up and looked at Reed, her eyes dazed. “They have a fingerprint ID on the severed hand from last night,” she told him. “It’s Bea Nesbit. Sam wants us to come to the station for an all-hands meeting. That’s what he said, ‘all-hands.’”
They got into the car, but before Reed could put it into gear, his cell phone trilled from his pocket. He fished it free, but his greeting was distracted, given the circumstances. “Yeah?”
“Reed? It’s Danielle.”
“Oh,” he said mildly, glancing at Ellery to see if she was listening in, but she seemed preoccupied by the latest bit of news. “How’s it going?”
“I’m not sure what to say here, but you might have given me a heads-up—this wasn’t just some little favor you asked, now was it?”
“What do you mean?”
“You show up here with an officer from Woodbury and eight hours later, the ME’s office is calling, saying they’ve got a severed hand found in Woodbury, and could we please help them with the identification process? A severed hand, Reed!”
He winced as he navigated around a corner. “We didn’t know about that part when we talked to you. I’m sorry if I’ve caused you any trouble.”
She blew out a frustrated breath. “Just so we’re clear. I can’t do any more favors for you on this one. Everything has to be by the book or not at all.”
“Understood. Were you, uh, were you able to get anything?”
“I didn’t process the beer bottle. Officer Hathaway wrote this morning with instructions not to bother, that it was no longer germane to your case.”
“What?”
“She e-mailed,” Danielle said with a trace of impatience. “And frankly, it’s just as well. About thirty minutes later, my boss called with the news about the hand, and I realized why you’d been in here asking for these tests.”
Reed squeezed his eyes shut briefly. “Okay, okay. Anything else?”
“I sampled the birthday cards as you asked, just looking for anything under the envelope flaps and nothing else. I retrieved usable samples from two of the envelopes, and there is a high degree of statistical probability that they originated from the same donor.”
“How high?”
“Think one in five billion.”
“All right, that’s helpful, thank you.”
“There’s one other thing. You asked me to run the samples against the DNA from the soda can you gave me.”
He looked over at Ellery again. Her face was pale and drawn. “Yes,” he told Danielle. “Go on.”
“It’s a match.”
7
“I am sorry to have to stand here and give you this news,” Sam said to the unit as they all crammed together in the undersized squad room. “The hand we discovered last night has been positively identified as belonging to Bea Nesbit.”
For Ellery, the truth had been three years coming, but it did not make the words easier to bear. Her brother, Daniel, had taken four years to die but the end was agony just the same. He died in the winter, the mourners huddled against each other again the biting wind, their teeth chattering as they waited for the grave to finish being dug. It was as if the earth did not want to take him. Daniel had known only some of what had happened to her at Coben’s hands, and at first when she’d returned to the apartment, he had tried to talk to her about it. Tell me, he’d say gently when she crawled into bed with him. His body was winnowing away, disappearing inside his bones, so that he’d shivered even though summer blazed away outside behind the perpetually drawn shades. She had shivered for other reasons she could not say. She refused to add to his troubles by heaping on her own. Besides, how could she explain that the real reason she put on the same ugly purple sweatpants and T-shirt every day, the ones borrowed from the hospital? The truth was that she didn’t know how to wear her own clothes anymore. Before, she had enjoyed searching out fun and funky attire at the little secondhand shops. After, she’d just looked in the closet and stared. The skirts and pants and bright pretty blouses belonged to some carefree bird of a girl, and that girl had flown away.
“Bea Nesbit’s parents had her fingerprints taken when Bea was in fourth grade as part of a statewide Safe Child campaign,” Sam was explaining, his head tilted downward, curly hair matted with sweat in the hot, airless room. “The medical examiner’s office was able to use those prints to make a positive identification on the remains we found yesterday. Most of you were here three years ago when Bea went missing, and so you’ll remember that State investigators took control of the case. With this new development, the case has been reactivated, and they’ll continue to run point on the investigation, with our office providing support in any way they decide is useful. They are now officially treating this as a homicide.”
About time, Ellery thought, but she kept those words to herself. Aloud, she said, “What about Shannon Blessing and Mark Roy?”
That she was still the only woman in the room was a fact she didn’t think much about until situations like these, when eight pairs of male eyes turned their attention straight at her. Sam shifted his weight from one foot to the other, looking uncomfortable and a bit deflated as he considered her question. He was in full dress uniform, highly unusual for a Sunday afternoon, and the humidity made his thick hair curl around his ears. “Shannon Blessing and Mark Roy remain open missing persons investigations,” he said at length. “It would be appropriate to take another look at both cases, but we don’t have any new information to go on right now. There is nothing concrete to connect Bea Nesbit to either of the other two investigations.”
“That’s not entirely true,” Ellery said, conscious that everyone was still watching. “Shannon Blessing was at the gas station with Bea the night Bea disappeared. She was filling up her car right at the same time Bea was.”
Sam narrowed his eyes at her. “How do you know this?”
“It’s on the surveillance video. No one ever noticed before.”
At least a dozen officers must have looked at that tape over the years, but Sam clearly heard Ellie’s wo
rds to mean you never noticed before because two red spots appeared on his cheeks and his eyes darkened to almost black. “I see,” he said curtly. “Thank you for that bit of information. It’s a peculiar coincidence, but for right now, that’s all it is.”
“But, Chief—”
“I said we’ll look into the other cases, Ellie. Right now we have actual new evidence in the Bea Nesbit investigation, not to mention someone has to go notify Dave and Annie of what we’ve found. On top of that, you might have noticed the news vans are circling like vultures out there. If you’ve got some definitive proof that Shannon Blessing and Mark Roy are connected to Bea Nesbit, then by all means, please enlighten us.” He paused meaningfully, knowing full well she wouldn’t reply, and the room was so quiet she could hear the force of his angry breathing. The men around her were no longer staring; no, they were studying their feet in sympathy for her embarrassment. “That’s what I thought,” Sam concluded when Ellie had no proof to offer. “Now, as I was saying—”
“Chief, before we move on, maybe Ellie has a point.” This unexpected voice of support came from Officer Charles Taylor—Call me Chuck, like the shoes, he liked to say—a barrel-chested, soft-spoken guy with arms like cannons. Ellie didn’t hang out or go to lunch with him or anything like that, but she did feel a certain kinship with Chuck since he was the only minority in their tiny unit. Black like the coffee, is how he put it, and coincidentally, it was how he drank it too. Ellie had tried out her theory of the missing persons cases on Chuck before, and he’d listened, heavy lidded, but he had never thrown any of his considerable weight her way until now. So everyone pretty much had to listen as Chuck Taylor, a man who modeled his usual conversational style after Trappist monks, made something of a speech. “Chief, the way I see it, we do have a pattern here—people gone missing from this town during the first part of July. If Bea Nesbit is dead, then it seems to me the others probably are too. I s’pose we could wait until the guy starts wrapping up pieces of their bodies and leaving them on our doorstep to declare an official connection between the cases, but maybe instead we could try to get out in front of this thing. ’Cause if Ellie’s right, the most important thing is that it’s July fifth—and we could be looking at another victim any time now.”
The Vanishing Season Page 13
