All the heads turned to look at Sam for the rebuttal, and he responded by sucking hard on his upper lip—maybe to keep from screaming or cursing, maybe just to cover up the fact that he’d been called out by yet another of his junior officers. “I’ll take that under advisement, Taylor, thank you.”
Chuck shrugged a hulking shoulder. “Just saying—if the State investigators are running the Nesbit case, we could concentrate on the others.”
Sam opened his mouth as if to protest but then closed it. He took a deep breath and clutched his hat a bit tighter. “Right now, today, we just have to get a statement together for the press and to make sure the Nesbits hear about Bea from us, not from them. State investigators are on their way here now, and Jimmy, I want you to take them out to Ellie’s house to show them where the remains were discovered.”
Jimmy Tipton answered the chief with a quick nod, but he glanced over at Ellie, and she thought she detected a gleam in his eye. It was her house, but somehow it was still his case.
“Uh, shouldn’t I be there too?” Ellery asked.
Sam shot her a dark look. “I expect they are going to want to talk to you eventually, but in the meantime, I figured you’d want to accompany me to the Nesbits’ place. After all, you’re the one who’s been promising them a thorough investigation for years—well, now you’ve got it.”
The way he phrased this made it sound like she was somehow responsible for Bea’s murder, as if she’d wished this to happen. She remembered how anguished and angry Dave and Annie had been when they had showed up at her place, and she swallowed hard. He was right. She had to go. “Yes, sir.”
The meeting broke up, and she tried to catch Reed’s eye to see what he made of this latest development, but he ducked away from her and pulled out his cell phone, heading for the exit. She wondered briefly if she should chase after him but figured Sam would pop a gasket if she set foot off the property before they had performed notification at the Nesbit place. So she let Reed go and instead chased after Chuck Taylor, who was heading for the back where the locker room was located. “Hey,” she said as she caught up to him, “I just wanted to say thanks for backing me up in there. I appreciate it.”
He opened the locker with a quick punch and cast a dubious eye down at her. “You’re welcome, but you aren’t the one I’m supporting. I’m worried about who’s next.” He took a pressed and clean uniform shirt off its hook and slid it on over his gray T-shirt. “I got three kids and a wife out there, you know?”
“Yeah,” she said. “I understand. I just wanted to say thank you. The chief is tired of hearing the story from me.”
“He’s gonna be hearing it from everyone in about two shakes,” Chuck said as he buttoned the shirt. “There’re vans from all four networks parked outside. People are going to freak when they find out about that hand.”
Good, Ellie thought. The town should have freaked a long time ago. “Listen, while we’re here, there is one thing I wanted to ask you about, that may or may not be related at all: Did you ever book Shannon Blessing for an OUI?”
He rolled his neck around while he considered it. “One time, I answered a neighborhood disturbance call and found her wandering down over by the hardware store, carrying on about how she lost one of her shoes. Her left leg had a pretty bad cut on it and she smelled like a gin factory. I took her to the clinic and waited while they patched her up, and then I brought her back here and let her sleep it off downstairs in holding until morning. Another time, yeah, she was weaving over the double yellow line on Route 2, so I pulled her over and booked her on suspicion of OUI. Turned out she blew a one point eight on the meter.”
Ellie glanced over her shoulder to check that they were alone. “I booked her once too, on Valentine’s Day the year she disappeared. The thing is, if you look at her official file, the only OUI on the books is one from 2012.”
He raised his eyebrows. “For real? That lady got tagged almost anytime she was behind a wheel. Soon as she’d get her license back, boom, there she’d be again, driving down to the liquor store.”
“I know. That’s why it’s weird. Can you think of any reason those other OUIs would be expunged from her record?” Chuck had eight years more experience on the job than she did.
He scratched the back of his head. “Can’t think of one. Prosecutor could throw it out if they didn’t want to pursue the case. Or a judge could do it, I suppose. Should still be on the record, though.”
Ellie thought the same thing, and she wondered when Shannon’s records had been altered, before or after her disappearance, and whether there was any way to find this out. She was still standing there next to Chuck, trying to think if there was a way to force the system to regurgitate its history, when he cleared his throat at her. “Shouldn’t you be going with the chief to talk to the family?”
Ellery had never had to do this kind of notification before, to tell a pair of loving parents that their daughter was almost certainly dead, and that her body had been mutilated in the process. Her thoughts drifted to the other names she carried in her memory, the girls who had been taken before her but did not get out alive. Michelle Holcomb. Gabby Walker. Rebecca O’Hara. Christine Strunk. Someone had had to tell their families, too, that they’d been found in pieces, that they would never be whole again. Ellery wondered if her mother had considered those girls during the days that Ellie was missing, or if she had clung to the stubborn hope that Ellie would be different. “Oh, thank you, God,” she had said when they were reunited at the hospital, holding Ellie, rocking her tight in a way she hadn’t since Ellie was a small girl. “Thank you, God, for this answered prayer.” Ellie had smelled the sweat and fear on her mother’s skin, had let herself be crushed against her hair and breasts, but she could not accept her mother’s sentiment. If God was the one who had saved her, that meant he’d let the others die.
“You ever have to do a notification?” she asked Chuck.
He shuddered, his shoulders rising and falling like mountains in an earthquake. “Not like this one.” A pause as he shook his head. “’Bout six years ago, we had a bad accident over on Church Street. Little tyke playing in his parents’ yard chased some toy out into the road, just as a car came flying along. Robbie Coussens, the boy’s name was. Three years old. He lived long enough to be airlifted to the hospital, but the doctors couldn’t save him. I had the job of finding Robbie’s dad at work and giving him the news. I remember driving over there to his office, thinking the whole time how I was going to be the one to ruin this poor SOB’s life.” He took a deep, heavy breath. “The family moved away less than a year later, but I’ve never forgotten them. Can’t say I blame them for leaving—imagine having to look out at the street every day and see the place your child died.”
Ellie had lived the remainder of her childhood in the same walk-up apartment, two blocks from the spot where Coben had abducted her, and she never made a fuss, not even when the bus stop for her junior year turned out to be within sight of the park where it had happened. Her mother still lived in the same apartment and probably always would. Daniel’s bedroom was there, with the faded great white shark poster from National Geographic and his seventh-grade soccer trophy and the goofy pictures of Daniel with his friends or his classmates—all the evidence left in the world that Daniel Hathaway had once existed. Her mother had made a choice to stay in this place where Daniel last was, where he would always be, and Ellie had accepted this, even if it meant she could never really come home.
* * *
Back in the squad room, Reed had returned and was pacing the narrow aisle next to her desk, apparently waiting for her. “Are you coming with us to the Nesbits’?” she asked him.
He halted and looked at her funny, as though laying eyes on her for the first time. He looked, she thought, the same way he had when he took those tentative steps inside her hospital room fourteen years ago. Like she was a ghost that only he could see. “What?” he said, sounding distracted.
“Dave and Annie Nesbit. We
have to go give them the news.” The man had just sat through the same painful briefing that she had. Surely the task at hand was apparent to him. “Are you coming?”
“No.” He looked behind her at Sam’s office. “I don’t think that would be wise at this stage. Ellery … why did you ask Danielle to stop any analysis on the beer bottle from your yard?”
Heat crept up over her ears, and she started shifting some paper around so she didn’t have to look at him. “Oh, I thought we agreed—there was no point in processing the bottle when we had other more important evidence.”
“No, we very much did not agree on that.”
“Hmm, I thought we had,” she said, hoping her flush didn’t give her away. She looked up and forced herself to meet his gaze. “If you really think it’s that important, by all means, go ahead and have her run it now.”
“She can’t now,” he snapped. “This whole thing blew up with the discovery of the hand, and now she can’t be seen running any favors for an investigator out of Woodbury.”
“Oh,” Ellie replied, relieved. “I’m sorry, then. I guess we got our wires crossed.”
“Guess so,” he said with his hands on his hips, fixing her with a hard glare. He obviously didn’t believe a word of it.
“What are you going to do, then?” she asked him, trying to change the subject. “If you’re not coming with us.”
“I’ve got some records on Francis Coben’s recent correspondence to go over, and I am trying to track down his cousin—the son of your strange patron.”
“Right.” She had repressed the very idea of the cousin’s existence, but Reed had been clear from the start: someone knew her secret. In her pocket, her cell phone seemed to burn through to her skin. I know it’s you. She had not deleted the text from the unknown number. She’d checked enough to learn it was from a burner phone and therefore hard to trace. “Let me know what you find out.”
Reed was still watching her face closely, his posture oddly adversarial. “You’re the one who invited me up here,” he said after a beat. “You wanted me on this case.”
“Yes, and here you are. Thank you.” She couldn’t guess what he was driving at.
“You asked me last night what kind of person might be behind these abductions—now presumed murders. I neglected to mention a very significant part of the perpetrator’s autobiography: essentially all serial offenders experience trauma in childhood that leaves them unable to form normal emotional and psychological connections with other humans.”
Her mouth went dry and her heart thrummed inside her chest. The way he was looking down at her so intently, she felt as though he were talking about her, right there with her colleagues listening in, everyone with their ears out on stems as Special Agent Reed Markham insinuated she was psychologically warped to the point she could be a serial murderer. “Lots of people have troubled childhoods,” she said. “That detail hardly narrows the suspect list, and it certainly won’t help us catch him.”
“Or her.” He seemed to want her to say it too, but she would not grant him the satisfaction. He carried on anyway. “Violent female serial offenders are rare, but they have been documented.”
“We’ll keep that in mind,” she said. Christ, now she sounded like Sam.
At that moment, the chief himself came charging out of his office. “Hathaway, you’re with me. Let’s go.” She was actually grateful for the escape and left Reed standing there as she fell into step beside Sam. He didn’t even look sideways at her. “Keep your head down and say ‘no comment,’ you got that?”
He gave the order just before pushing open the door, so she had no real time to think or reply. Suddenly, there they were, a crowd of perhaps a dozen reporters from various news organizations. Cameras were rolling and the eager bodies clambered in around them as microphones poked near her face. “Chief! Chief Parker, is it true that you have found a severed human hand? Is there any connection to Bea Nesbit, who disappeared almost three years ago to the day?”
Ellie froze. Dimly, she recognized the woman with the expensive manicure and poofy brown hair as Monica Jenkins, the nightly anchor for Fox News. The media smelled blood in the water so they had sent their biggest sharks. Cameras flashed and clicked. People hollered questions, all of them speaking over one another. Have you positively identified the hand? Where was it found? Have you found any other body parts? In her head, the shouts echoed back to fourteen years ago, to the first time she’d tried to leave her apartment after the attack. Abby, did he cut your wrists? Is it true he held you in the same closet where he put the others? Abby, how does it feel to be saved? She froze at the memory, sweat breaking out across the back of her neck as her heart hammered inside her throat. She could not move and the reporters swarmed in, surrounding her as they sensed an opening. “We heard a rumor that the FBI is already involved with the case. Can you confirm?”
She heard Sam calling her name, but she couldn’t see him or free herself from the lights and cameras. “I … I…”
“No comment!” Sam bulldozed his way back through the throng and grabbed her arm. “You’ll have a statement from our office by the end of the day.”
She gasped as he yanked her from the crowd, spiriting her away toward the fenced-off parking lot. The reporters continued to follow them, cawing and flapping about like birds all the way to Sam’s car, where he finally relinquished her with a little shove in the direction of the passenger’s seat. Ellie got in and slammed the door shut against the noise outside. She put her hands under her legs to keep them from shaking. “Can’t let ’em get to you like that,” Sam muttered as he turned over the engine. “This is only the beginning.”
Ellie leaned her head back against the seat and gulped in several breaths of air. Tears blurred her vision, and she turned her face so Sam couldn’t see. You’re okay, you’re okay, she coached herself the same way she had in the closet all those years ago. She pinched her leg hard enough to hurt. The pain grounded her in the moment. It told her she was alive.
“This story might go national,” Sam said, sounding energized by the prospect. “Then they’ll all be here before you can blink an eye: CNN, Dateline, Court TV. You wait and see, Ellie. We’re all going to be famous.”
* * *
There were reporters waiting outside the Nesbit home when Sam and Ellie arrived, those who had either beaten them to the scene or already guessed the ending to the sordid discovery. The neighbors all emerged from their homes as the squad car rolled up, as though they, too, had been anticipating this development. No one said anything, however, as Sam and Ellie exited the vehicle. The air was thick with anticipatory dread. No breeze. The full sun slipped behind the trees as though it, too, wanted no part of this story. Ellie’s nose burned with the scent of hot pavement and scorched grass. There was only the sound of their boots as they trooped up the walkway to the Nesbits’ front door. It flung open suddenly before they could reach it, Dave and Annie appearing together on the threshold.
Ellie could see they had guessed the reason for the visit. Their rigid body language screamed, No, no, go away, but they soldiered on and opened the screen door to face the news anyway. “Evening, Chief,” Dave said, his voice unusually loud. “Ellie.” Annie hung back, twisting her hands in the hem of her blouse. “You, ah, you have some news for us?”
“Evening, Dave. Can we come inside and talk for a bit?” Sam said, not unkindly. He removed his hat, and Annie’s face crumpled at the gesture. “We have some developments to share with you.”
“Sure, sure. Come in.” Dave still seemed overly jocular. Annie had fled the entryway and vanished into the house. Ellie thought again to all the times she’d talked to them before, walking them through the day Bea vanished, mining her personal history for any sort of clues. Dave and Annie were hungry to talk about their daughter and Ellie had used that to her advantage. Now she felt ashamed, even guilty, because they had been so nice and she hadn’t realized they had never seen this coming, this moment, when, like Chuck had predicted, s
he would be the one to ruin their lives.
“Don’t make us wait,” Dave said, although his wife was nowhere to be seen. He gripped the back of a dining room chair so tightly his hand turned white—almost the shade of his daughter’s as it lay inside the box. “What is it you’ve come to say?”
Sam took a deep breath. “It’s about Bea,” he said, and the father began to weep.
* * *
In the end, they stayed almost two hours at the house. Ellie forced down a coffee she didn’t want simply because Annie needed to make it. Dave had a million questions that she and Sam could not answer, mostly because there were no answers to give. But you can’t be one hundred percent sure, was the point Dave kept returning to, you can’t be sure she’s dead. People can live just fine without a hand.
Ellery thought of Coben and how he’d kept the hands and dumped the rest. Initially the cops thought he was trying to obscure identification of the bodies. Only later did they discover what he was really doing with them—a detail that Ellie wasn’t sure made it into most books. It surely wasn’t covered in any of the TV movies. There were simply some depravities no one wanted to contemplate. She had overheard a conversation between a couple of cadets at the Boston Training Center. “I heard Coben had sex with the girls after they were dead,” said one guy. “Naw, it was worse,” said the other. “I read the books about him. He didn’t rape the girls. He jacked himself off with their severed hands.” This last bit was accompanied by a rude gesture to illustrate, and Ellie had bolted the break room before she could hear any more.
As horrible as this moment was for Dave and Annie, they could have uglier ones waiting for them when the full story broke.
Sam drove them back toward the precinct in silence. Ellery figured he, too, was wrung out from the emotional ordeal at the Nesbit place, but it turned out his thoughts were elsewhere. “Julia called to tell me you came by the house,” he said after a stretch. “You and Markham.”
The Vanishing Season Page 14
