“Great.” Ellie threw down her pen in disgust. “What a waste of everyone’s time that will be.” She folded her arms and sat back in her chair, regarding the pile of folders on her desk. “You know, back when I was a kid, after it happened, I used to wonder how it took everyone so long to find him. It was on the news all the time. The whole city was looking for this guy—the entire Chicago Police Department on high alert, and yet Coben kept taking girls off the street like he was invisible. Now I think I get it: he was hiding behind all this paperwork.” She shoved at it halfheartedly for good measure, sending a cascade of folders across the desk.
Reed looked at the mess for a moment and then pulled his chair closer to hers. “Back in the early 1970s,” he said in a low voice that was just between the two of them, “detectives in Santa Cruz, California, were confronted by a series of brutal murders. Some victims were college girls, hitchhiking. One was a homeless man beaten to death with a baseball bat. At one particularly gruesome scene, officers found an entire family shot and stabbed in their own home. There seemed to be no pattern, no rhyme or reason to the victims. The killer used different methods, and police could decipher no motive beyond a simple desire to kill. Only in hindsight, when one was caught and the other turned himself in to authorities, did everyone see the truth: Santa Cruz had been the hunting ground for two serial offenders who happened to be active at the same time.”
Ellery sat forward, intrigued. “You think there is more than one killer at work here?”
Reed shook his head. “Odds are against it. My point is that you can be nearly sure that the answer is in that paperwork somewhere, but it may be difficult to see unless you can guess the right angle. Just to add to the stack, I’ve requested all the old files from the Coben case. Some I can review electronically; copies of the rest of them should be couriered over this afternoon.”
“What are you looking for?”
Reed sighed. “I don’t honestly know. I only hope I recognize it when I find it.”
They passed hours this way, with Ellie dutifully writing up the reports on the birthday cards and combing through the missing persons reports for any bit of information that had been overlooked. There was none. Reed hunched over his laptop at one end of her desk, scrolling through old information from the Francis Coben investigation. They took turns getting grilled in Sam’s office by the state investigators, who were frustrated both by their withholding of the Coben connection and by their inability to substantially add to the case.
Reed and Ellie remained chained to the Woodbury station house while the rest of the department churned around them. Ellie could feel the men trying not to stare at her as they trooped in and out from their work attending to the damage done by the storm and minding the crime scene over at the Franklin household. At one point, Chuck Taylor stopped by with bottled water and sandwiches for her and Reed. He dropped off the food and then loomed over her, as if there was more he wanted to say, and Ellie steeled herself for another round of intrusive questions. Chuck waited a beat longer and then he set a small package wrapped in tinfoil on the edge of her desk. “It’s banana bread,” he said, sounding sheepish. “Yolanda made it for you when she saw the news. I tried to tell her this wasn’t ’zactly a bread-baking occasion, but she insisted you have it.”
Ellie looked at it and found herself suddenly blinking back tears. “Tell her thank you,” she managed after a beat.
Chuck nodded at her. “You hang in there,” he said, and then strolled away.
At that moment, Sam stuck his head out of his office. “Ellery, can I see you, please?” The request was reasoned and free from the acid that had characterized all their earlier interactions, so Ellie rose and slowly walked across the room.
“Chief?” she said from the door.
“Come in and shut the door behind you.”
Ellie shut the door as asked but did not sit down. “Before you say anything, I wanted to ask if I could please leave briefly to tend to my dog. I can leave him with a friend, but he needs walking and fresh water.”
Sam nodded wearily and sank into his chair. “Sure, fine.” He didn’t say anything else for a long time, and Ellie shifted uncomfortably from one foot to the other. He looked her over, squinting at the bandage on her arm as if seeing it for the first time. “What happened to you?”
She considered a few replies. “Better ask your wife.”
“What?”
“Never mind. What did you want to see me for?”
“I, uh, I wanted to apologize for jumping all over you like I did this morning. You should’ve told me what was going on, but I lost my temper and I said some things I shouldn’t have.” He cleared his throat and shifted some papers around on his desk, not looking at her. “Agent Markham told me a little bit about what you went through, and I looked up some old reports on the Internet…”
Her face burned and her vision swam as she realized he was feeling sorry for her. She swallowed twice in quick succession. “I don’t really want to talk about it.” Ellie clasped her hands behind her back, hiding her scars from his vision and her own. “Apology accepted, okay? Now if I can just run out—”
“Rosalie Franklin died an hour ago.”
Ellie stopped short. Sam’s eyes were large with sympathy.
“Her mother has come down from New Hampshire to take Anna, and we’ll be filing murder charges against Darryl tomorrow morning.” He took a deep, shuddering breath. “I just thought you ought to know.”
“Thanks,” she said tightly, which seemed like a terrible reply to news of someone’s death, especially a murder, but it was all she could force out before fleeing the office, the station, and pack of frenzied reporters who ran with her to her truck. They surrounded her on all sides, shouting questions, shoving cameras in her windows so that she could move forward only inches at a time for fear of running them over. “Ellery! Ellie! How does it feel to be the only one who survived Francis Coben? How did you know Bea Nesbit was dead?” They were a force that pulled her harder the more she struggled to escape, like quicksand, keeping her stuck in the parking lot and mired in her past. When at last, finally, she hit the road, she peeled away as fast as she could, her head down and her wheels kicking up a wave of water. She knew if she checked her rearview mirror she would still find the reporters there, too close behind.
* * *
Dogs are the cure for whatever ails you, Ellie thought as she pulled into the Angelman Animal Shelter with Speed Bump panting happily at her side. Bump had let her hug him and pet his soft, floppy ears and bury her face in his short, silky fur. He didn’t care what had happened to her in the past or who knew her secrets now. He lived in the moment, and at that moment, he was tail-up, tongue-hanging, delighted to be trotting in to see some of his favorite people. The feeling was obviously mutual as the older woman at the front desk came out from behind the counter to greet them. “Is that Mr. Bump, I see?” She knelt down and rubbed his ears as he pranced around in appreciation.
“Hi, Kiki. It’s been awhile. How are you and Carmen doing these days?” Carmen was the director of the shelter, and Kiki sometimes lent a hand as free labor. The fact that she was on site now, on a Sunday, suggested there was some sort of crisis afoot.
“Oh, we’re good,” the woman said, still focused on lavishing attention on the dog. “If you’re looking for Brady, he’s actually out with Carmen now. They had to go over to Worcester to bail out the Third Street Shelter. The storm knocked their power out and they have an overflow of animals, so we’re taking in a few since we have the room at the moment. Do you mind if I give this handsome devil a cookie?”
At the word “cookie,” Bump offered an enthusiastic woof, and Ellie couldn’t suppress a smile. “I think he’s already made his opinion clear. It’s okay by me.” Kiki went to the counter to fetch a dog biscuit from the jar, Bump wagging after her. “You’re easy,” Ellie called after her dog. “You know that, right?”
The front door swept open on a gust of wind, and Carmen and Bra
dy entered, armed with several animal carriers. Bump immediately went to sniff at the new arrivals, and Ellie had to hold him back as the cats and dogs in the crates hissed and barked through the slats. “Ellery,” Carmen said warmly, “how nice to see you—and the Bump, too, of course. Will you please excuse us while we get these new guys settled in back?”
They wrestled the menagerie through the door, and Ellery waited a few minutes before wandering back in search of Brady. She found him securing a last water bottle in place while the resident black cat lurked in the back, giving him the evil eye. Brady’s hair was wet and his sneakers were covered in mud and wet grass. He looked even younger than usual, which was pretty young in the first place, given that Ellie had a few years on him. “Hey,” he said, grinning at her. “Check out my new shirt.”
He swiveled so she could read his T-shirt. It depicted an old oil painting of some long-haired man from the nineteenth century, and over it sat the words YOU MAY DANCE, IF YOU FANCY IT. YOU MAY ALSO TAKE LEAVE OF YOUR COMPANIONS. FOR IF YOUR COMPANIONS DO NOT DANCE, THEY SHAN’T BE COMPANIONS OF MINE.
Brady spread his arms. “Pretty sweet, eh?”
“You’re the worst,” she said, rolling her eyes.
“You say that, and yet I feel like you’re here to ask me a favor.”
“Yeah, could you watch Bump for me for a while? I have some stuff going on at work.”
Brady sobered and scratched the back of his neck with one hand. “I heard.” There was an awkward silence. “You never said anything.”
She scuffed at the cement floor with one shoe. “I wanted to put it behind me. I didn’t want everyone to look at me and see Francis Coben, to think about what he did. To think about me like I’m a victim.”
“I suppose I can see that. You still could have told me, though.”
“Maybe,” she said, feeling guilty because she didn’t really mean it. To tell even one person was to keep the story alive. “It doesn’t matter now anyway. Everyone knows.”
Brady tugged up his shirt with one hand, and she could see several small, round scars on his abdomen. “My mother did this to me,” he said. “I was three years old.”
“Oh, my God,” Ellery said. “Brady, I’m so—”
“We’re the same, you and me.” There was a fervent, purposeful look in his eye, one she had never seen before. “I knew it when I met you, and now I understand why. We’re survivors. So fuck ’em. Anyone who wants to judge you over this? Fuck. Them.” He blinked several times, and suddenly the grin was back. He gestured at his shirt. “If your friends don’t dance, Ellie, they’re no friends of mine.”
* * *
That night, Reed tried to convince Ellie to stay at the motel with him, but she insisted on returning to her house, where the press sat camped at the end of her long driveway, tangling traffic on Burning Tree Road. Thanks to the trees, she would not be able to see them from her windows. Reed refused to let her stay alone, so he picked up groceries and another change of clothes and joined her back at the house. He took over the kitchen, and soon the air was filled with the scent of sautéed garlic and spicy tomato sauce. Ellie left him to his work and went to her bedroom, where she took up the hammer and the nails and pounded the door back into place. The noise and the violence felt liberating as she used her anger to bang each nail into submission. She was sweating and breathing hard, her hair in her eyes, by the time she was finished.
Reed appeared in the doorway. “Supper’s on,” he said, and they looked at each other. His gaze flickered to the closet and back to her. “Sorry for that.”
There was regret and sorrow in the words, layers of meaning that were almost too much for her to bear. Sorry for trespassing. Sorry for the fact that she still felt the need to nail her demons in the closet. Sorry for what happened to her in another closet, years ago. Ellie let the hammer slip from her hands to the floor. “Let’s eat, then.”
Over pasta puttanesca, she told him that she’d looked up the cases in Santa Cruz that he had referenced earlier. “Herbert Mullin was just plain crazy,” she said. “Killing people to try to prevent an earthquake. It makes no sense.”
“It rarely does. They have their reasons for killing, but they typically aren’t rational reasons. This is why catching them can be so difficult.”
“Yeah, well, that other guy, Edmund Kemper, it seems like he was tortured by his mother until he just snapped. He killed a bunch of people and then after he killed his mother, he pretty much stopped. He called the cops and turned himself in. Makes you think it was his mother who he wanted dead all along—everyone else was just collateral damage.”
“You wouldn’t be the first one to reach that conclusion,” Reed agreed as he reached for his water.
“Which one do you think is our guy? The crazy one or the one who just keeps going until he gets the right victim?”
“We might not know that until we catch him.”
“I had an idea today,” she said slowly, “while I was going through the three missing persons files. The only concrete bit of new information we’ve had in three years is that Shannon Blessing was at the gas station with Bea Nesbit the night she disappeared—meaning she was potentially some sort of witness, but of course we didn’t know that, so no one ever interviewed her.”
“Right.”
“But I was thinking about that, and Shannon might not just be any old witness—she could have been the last person to see Bea alive that night. If you read the file on Shannon’s disappearance, Mark Roy was not only the guy who reported her missing, he was also the last person to see her. She signed for that package, remember? No one is on record of having seen her after that.”
“So Shannon was the last living witness for Bea, and Mark was the last witness for Shannon.” Reed had put down his fork and his brow was wrinkled in concentration. “Interesting, but I’m not sure what it means.”
“I don’t know either, except maybe Julia Parker should watch herself. She was the last person to see Mark Roy before he disappeared last year.”
Reed opened his mouth to say something, but she never found out what it was, because they both heard the sound of a car rolling up outside. Please no reporters, she thought as she rubbed her head. But the frantic banging on her front door a moment later did not sound like it came from the press.
Reed and Ellie’s eyes met in shared recognition and unease. If you worked in law enforcement, you knew trouble when you heard it, especially when it came knock-knocking on your front door. They went to answer it, and Ellie found Sam standing on the other side, looking wild-eyed and panicked. “Julia’s gone,” he said. “Her car’s in the garage but I can’t find her anywhere. She isn’t answering her phone. It’s like … it’s like she just vanished.”
10
Reed rode along with Ellery in her truck to the Parkers’ house, where they parked in the exact spot they had occupied earlier in the day, when Julia had stood in the rain and watched them. They took their industrial-strength flashlights and followed Sam across the darkened yard. The ground beneath their feet was sodden from the storm, redolent of wet earth and grass, and a passing breeze shook water from the trees. The house itself was lit up like a birthday cake, every single window ablaze with light. Reed could envision Sam going room by room in search of Julia, his steps quickening as each flick of the switch failed to turn up any sign of his wife. Reed did not typically participate in the early frantic searches; by the time he showed up at a scene, everyone already feared the worst.
“She usually prepares dinner starting around six,” Sam was saying as he let them in through the front door, “but the salmon is still marinating in the fridge. At first I thought maybe she had run out to the store, but then I saw her purse here in the kitchen, and when I checked the garage, her car was still there.”
Reed put aside the fact that Julia had likely used the car to try to, at best, scare the pants off him and Ellie the other night, and at worst, send them to an early grave. In fact, under typical situations, he would dismi
ss Sam Parker’s concerns as premature. Julia Parker was angry, possibly unstable, and wounded by the knowledge that Sam was cheating on her—again. She could very well have run off to drink herself into oblivion, or have gone to vent to a friend about what a prize jackass her husband turned out to be. Maybe she had wanted to send Sam a message, shake him up a little.
Except the town had already seen three people go missing, and given the current circumstances, it seemed wiser to presume that anyone who disappeared from Woodbury might be returned to the town in pieces. “No sign of forced entry?” Reed asked as they walked through the kitchen. “Nothing out of place?”
“Nothing,” Sam said, spreading his arms helplessly. “It’s like she just walked out the door and didn’t come back.”
“Maybe she did,” Ellie said tartly, echoing Reed’s thoughts.
Reed glanced around at the large kitchen and had to agree it seemed undisturbed. Julia Parker either cared a lot about appearances or she loved to cook, because the space reminded Reed of home. It was done up gourmet style, with an extensive knife block, a wide wooden cutting board, a dual oven, and a deep, farmhouse sink. The pots and pans hung over the expansive granite-topped island. The only sign that Julia had been there at all was an overturned coffee mug with the Daughters of the American Revolution insignia on it sitting in the drying rack by the sink.
“She called me around midday,” Sam said, his voice tight. “I told her I couldn’t talk then and that I’d see her at home for dinner.”
“Does she have friends in the area she might have gone to see?” Reed asked. “Family? Someone could have stopped by to pick her up.”
“I made some calls. No one has seen her. But she barely goes to the mailbox without her purse.”
They walked the house, the three of them, although Ellery hung back and seemed reluctant to touch anything. She trod so lightly that the floorboards made almost no noise under her feet. Sam opened and closed the closets, as though Julia might be playing some cruel children’s trick, and Ellery flinched visibly as he flung open each door. “She’s not here,” Sam said, his expression strained, his voice taking on a note of desperation. “I’ve searched from top to bottom already. We’ve got to figure out what happened to her. If someone … if someone took her, where did they go?”
The Vanishing Season Page 20
