by Blake Pierce
The Fuller residence lay about three miles off of the main stretch of town, on one of the secondary roads. It was a simple two-story house in need of new siding and roofing. Its rustic look betrayed the other things that Kate and DeMarco noticed as Kate pulled into the driveway.
There was a news van parked in the driveway. A good-looking female reporter and a cameraman were talking something over by the front of the van. A single police car also sat in the driveway, an officer simply sitting inside. He saw Kate and DeMarco arrive and slowly started to get out of his car.
The reporter looked up as Kate and DeMarco got out of the car. Like some dedicated bloodhound, the reporter instantly came rushing over. The cameraman jostled his equipment, trying to follow behind, but fell a few steps short.
“Are you detectives?” the reporter asked.
“No comment,” Kate barked.
“Do you have the authority to be here?”
“Do you?” Kate asked, biting back fast.
“I have a responsibility to report the news,” the reporter said, giving a canned answer.
Kate knew the reporter would be able to find out the FBI had been called in within an hour or so. Therefore, she was fine with showing the reporter her badge as she and DeMarco walked toward the house.
“We’re with the FBI,” Kate said. “Keep that in mind if you get any ideas about following us inside.”
The reporter stopped in her tracks, the cameraman nearly colliding with her. Behind them, the officer approached. Kate saw by the name tag and badge pinned to his uniform that this was the Deton sheriff. He grinned at the reporter as he passed them.
“See,” he told the reporter rather gruffly. “It’s not just me. No one wants you around.”
He stepped in front of Kate and DeMarco, leading them to the front door. Under his breath, he added: “You know the laws as well as I do. I can’t boot them because they’re technically doing nothing wrong. Damned vultures are hoping a relative or someone will come by.”
“How long have they been parked there?” DeMarco asked.
“There’s been at least one news van parked there every day since this happened two days ago. At one point yesterday, there were three. This whole thing has made pretty big news around here. There have been news vans and crews located all around the county police station, too. It’s pretty infuriating.”
He unlocked the front door and ushered them in. “I’m Sheriff Randall Barnes, by the way. I have the displeasure of being the lead on this thing. The Staties found out the bureau was on the way and decided to step aside. They’re still pursuing the manhunt for the daughter, but are leaving the murder part of the whole thing on my doorstep.”
They stepped inside as Kate and DeMarco also introduced themselves. There was no conversation afterward, though. The sight before them, while not nearly as bad as some murder scenes Kate had seen, was jarring. The dried maroon splotches on the blue carpet were very much in-your-face. There was a stale feel to the place, something Kate had felt at scenes like this before—something she had tried describing countless times but always failed.
Out of nowhere, she thought of Michael. She had tried explaining the feeling to him once before, stating that it was almost as if a house itself could sense loss and that feeling of staleness in the air was the house’s reaction. He had laughed at her and said it sounded almost spiritual in a weird way.
She was fine with that…mainly because it’s exactly what she felt as she took a look around the Fuller home.
“Agents, I’m going to step back out onto the porch,” he said. “Make sure we don’t get any prying eyes. Holler if you need anything. But I’ll tell you right now…anything you want to know that’s not already in the reports we sent over is going to have to come from one of my other officers—a fella named Foster. Here in Deton, we’re not exactly used to cases like this. We’re discovering just how unprepared we are for such things.”
“We’d love to speak with him after this,” DeMarco said.
“I’ll give him a call and make sure he’s at the station, then.”
He left back through the front door quietly, leaving them to the scene. Kate stepped around the initial blood splatters on the carpet. There were some on the couch, too, and splatters on the wall just above the couch. A small coffee table sat in front of the couch and a few things on it seemed scattered—a few bills, an empty but overturned plastic cup, and the television remote. It could indicate signs of a quick struggle, but if so, it was not a particularly fierce one.
“No real signs of struggle,” DeMarco said. “Unless their daughter is very strong and athletic, I don’t see how she could have done this.”
“If it was the daughter, they may not have seen it coming,” Kate argued. “She could have come right into the room, hiding the gun behind her. One of them could have been dead before the other had any clue what was happening.”
They studied the area for a few minutes, finding nothing out of the ordinary. There were a few pictures on the wall, several of which were family pictures. It was the first time she saw the girl she assumed was Mercy Fuller. The pictures showed her in varying stages of age: from around five to her current age. She was a cute girl who would likely become a beautiful girl sometime around college. She had black hair, brown eyes, and a radiant smile.
They then ventured deeper into the house, coming to a room that obviously belonged to a teenage girl. A bedazzled journal sat on a desk that was littered with pens and papers. A ceramic pink pineapple sat at the edge of the desk, a picture holder of sorts with a wire holder at the top. A picture of two teenaged girls, smiling widely for the camera, was held within it.
Kate opened up the journal. The last entry was from eight days ago and was about how a boy named Charlie had kissed her very quickly while they changed classes at school. She scanned a few of the entries before that and found similar scribblings: struggling with a test, wanting Charlie to pay more attention to her, wishing that bitch-face Kelsey Andrews would get hit by a train.
Nowhere within her room were there any indications of homicidal intent. They checked the parents’ bedroom next and found it similarly disinteresting. There were a few adult magazines hidden away in the closet but other than that, the Fullers seemed to be squeaky clean.
When they exited the house after twenty minutes, Barnes was still on the porch. He was sitting in an old tattered lounge chair, smoking a cigarette.
“Find anything?” he asked.
“Nothing,” DeMarco answered.
“Although I do wonder,” Kate added. “Did you or the state police happen to find a laptop or cell phone in the daughter’s room?”
“No. Now, on the laptop…that’s not much of a surprise. Maybe you could tell by the state of the house, but the Fullers weren’t exactly the type of family that could afford a laptop for their daughter. As for a phone, the Fullers’ cell phone plan shows that Mercy Fuller did indeed have her own phone. But no one has been table to trace it just yet.”
“Maybe it’s powered down,” DeMarco said.
“Probably,” Barnes said. “But apparently—and this was news to me—even when a phone is off, it can be tracked back to the place where it was powered down…the last place it was on. And the state guys figured out it was last powered on here, at the house. But, as you pointed out, it’s nowhere to be found.”
“How many men do you have actively working the case?” Kate asked.
“Three at the station right now, just basically running interviews and digging through things like last purchases, last known places they visited and things like that. There’s one guy left behind from the Staties that’s helping, though he’s not too happy about it.”
“And you have one guy on your force that you’d consider the lead on it other than yourself?”
“Correct. As I said, that would be Officer Foster. The man has a mind like a lock box.”
“Could you lead us to the station for a quick debrief meeting?” Kate asked. “But just yo
urself and this Officer Foster. Let’s keep it small.”
Barnes nodded grimly as he got up from the chair and flicked the last of his cigarette into the yard. “You want to talk about Mercy as a suspect without letting too many people know about it. Is that right?”
“I think it’s foolish to rule it out as a possibility without looking into it,” Kate said. “And while we look down that path, yes, you’re right. The fewer people that know about it, the better.”
“I’ll make the call to Foster on our way to the station.”
He walked down the steps, staring down the reporter and her cameraman. It made Kate wonder if he’d had at least one bad altercation with a news crew sometime during the last two days.
As she and DeMarco got into their car, she also gave the news crew a distrustful glance. She knew that in communities like Deton, a murder like this could be earth-shattering. And because of that, she knew that news crews in these areas would usually stop at nothing to get their story.
It made Kate wonder if maybe there was more of a story here than she was seeing—and if so, what she might need to do to get all of the pieces.
CHAPTER THREE
The Deton police station was about what Kate had expected. It was tucked away on the far end of the main stretch along the highway, a plain brick building with an American flag billowing at the top. A few patrol cars sat parked along the side of it, their meager numbers a reflection of the town itself.
Inside, a large bullpen area took up most of the space. A large desk sat at the front, unattended. Actually, the place looked basically deserted. They followed Barnes to the back of the building, down a thin hallway that boasted only five rooms, one of which was labeled by a placard on the door with Sheriff Barnes. Barnes led them to the last room on the hall, a very small room set up as a conference room of sorts. An officer sat at the table inside, rifling through a small stack of documents.
“Agents, meet Officer Foster,” Barnes said.
Officer Foster was young man, probably creeping up on thirty years of age. He wore his hair in a buzzcut and had a scowl on his face. Kate could tell that he was a no-nonsense officer. He would not be cracking jokes to ease any tension and probably wouldn’t bother with small talk to get to know the agents sitting in front of him.
Kate decided that she liked him right away.
“Officer Foster has basically served as the hub for this case ever since we got that call from Pastor Poulson,” Barnes explained. “Any piece of information that has come through here has gone through his ears or eyes and he’s added it to the case files. Any questions you have, he can probably answer.”
“That’s some lofty praise,” Foster said, “but I can certainly do my best.”
“Well, what do we have on information regarding who all three of the Fullers spoke with—aside from one another—before the murders occurred?” Kate asked.
“Alvin Fuller spoke with an old friend of his from high school as he was checking out at the Citgo out on Highway 44,” Foster said. “He was coming home from work, stopped by to grab a six-pack of beer, and they ran into each other. The friend says they simply chatted about work and family. Very surface-level stuff just to seem polite. The friend said Alvin did not seem strange in any way.
“As for Wendy Fuller, the last person to speak to her other than her family was a co-worker. Wendy worked at the little shipping warehouse just outside of town. The co-worker in question said the last thing they spoke about was how Wendy was concerned that Mercy was starting to show a lot of interest in boys. Mercy had apparently had her first kiss recently and Wendy was afraid of what that could mean. But other than that, things seemed pretty much the same as always.”
“And what about Mercy?” DeMarco asked.
“The last person she spoke with was her best friend, a local girl named Anne Pettus. We’ve spoken with Anne twice, just to make sure she told the same story. She said the last conversation they had was about a boy named Charlie. According to Anne, this Charlie kid was not Mercy’s boyfriend. Anne also told us something that sort of bumps up against what her parents might have known about her.”
“Like a lie?” Kate asked.
“Yes. According to Wendy’s co-worker, they spoke about this supposed first kiss. But according to Anne Pettus, that’s not true. Apparently, Mercy had her first kiss a very long time ago.”
“Was she promiscuous?”
“Anne would not say as much. She just said that she knew for a fact that Mercy had done much more than kiss a boy.”
“In regards to her disappearance, where does the evidence lean at this point?” Kate asked. “That she was taken or that she left of her own accord?”
“Unless the two of you found something new in the house, there is no evidence to suggest that Mercy was taken against her will. If anything, we have small pieces of circumstantial evidence that suggests she might have left on her own.”
“What sort of evidence?”
“According to Anne, Mercy had a small amount of cash saved up. She even knew where she kept it: at the bottom of her sock drawer. We checked and there was about three hundred dollars hidden there. That actually goes against her leaving on her own because she would have taken that money, right? However, the last thing put on Mercy’s credit card was a full tank of gas. She got it about two or three hours before her parents’ bodies were found. Before that, two days prior, she purchased a few travel-sized cosmetics at a Target in Harrisonburg: toothbrush, toothpaste, deodorant. We have that in her credit card history as well as confirmation from Anne Pettus, who went shopping with her that day.”
“Did she happen to ask Mercy why she needed travel-sized cosmetics?” Kate asked.
“She did. Mercy said she was just low on stuff at home and hated to feel like a child asking her parents to buy her stuff.”
“And no known boyfriend?” Kate asked.
“Not according to Anne. And she seemed to know just about everything about Mercy.”
“I’d like to speak with Anne,” Kate said. “Do you think she’d be open to it or are we going to get pushback?”
“She’d be very open to it,” Foster said.
“He’s right,” Barnes added. “She’s even called us a few times in between questioning to see if we have any new information. She’s been very helpful. So have her folks, letting us talk to her. If you want, I can call and set something up.”
“That would be fantastic,” Kate said.
“She’s a strong girl,” Foster said. “But between you and me…I think she might be hiding something. Maybe nothing big. I think she just wants to make sure she doesn’t convey anything bad about her missing best friend.”
That’s understandable, Kate thought.
But she also knew that the fact that they were best friends would be more than enough reason to hide something.
***
Anne’s parents had understandably allowed her to stay home from school. When Kate and DeMarco arrived at the Pettus residence—located down a road very similar to the one the Fullers had lived on—the parents were standing at the front door, waiting. Kate could see them both through the glass screen door even as she parked the car in their U-shaped driveway.
Mr. and Mrs. Pettus stepped out onto their porch to meet the agents. The father kept his arms crossed, a sad look on his face. The mother looked tired, her eyes bloodshot and her posture worn down.
After a quick round of introductions, Mr. and Mrs. Pettus cut right to the chase. They were not rude or insisting, but simply concerned parents who did not intend to put their daughter through any unnecessary hell.
“She seems to get better each time she talks about it,” Mrs. Pettus said. “I think as more time passes, she starts to understand that her best friend is not necessarily dead. I think the more the idea that she might simply be missing sinks in, she wants to be of more help.”
“That being said,” Mr. Pettus added, “I would greatly appreciate it if you kept the questions brief and as hopefu
l as possible. Make no mistake…we won’t interfere as you question her, but if we hear anything at all that seems to upset her, your time with our daughter is over.”
“That’s more than fair,” Kate said. “And you have my word that we will tread carefully.”
Mr. Pettus nodded and finally opened the front door for them. When they stepped inside, Kate saw Anne Pettus right away. She was sitting on the couch with her hands clasped between her knees. Like her mother, she looked tired and worn out. It then occurred to Kate that teenage girls tended to bond rather strongly with their best friends. She was unable to imagine the kind of emotions this young girl must be going through.
“Anne,” Mrs. Pettus said. “These are the agents we told you were coming. Are you still okay with speaking to them?”
“Yes, Mom. I’m fine.”
Both parents gave Kate and DeMarco a little nod as they sat down on either side of their daughter. Kate noticed that Anne didn’t start to truly look uncomfortable until her parents flanked her.
“Anne,” Kate said, “we will keep this quick. We’ve been filled in on everything you’ve already told the police, so we won’t ask you to repeat all of those things again. Well, with one exception. I’d like to know about the shopping trip you and Mercy took out to Harrisonburg. Mercy purchased several travel-sized things, right?”
“Yeah. I thought it was weird. She just said she was running out of that stuff at home. Toothpaste, a small toothbrush, deodorant, things like that. I asked why she purchased them and not her parents but she sort of brushed it off.”
“Do you feel she was happy at home?”
“Yeah. But I mean…she’s fifteen. She loves her parents but hates it around here. She’s been talking about moving away from Deton ever since we were ten years old.”
“Any idea why?” DeMarco asked.
“It’s boring,” Anne said. She looked over at her parents apologetically. “I mean, I’m a just a bit older than Mercy; I’m sixteen and have a license and she and I go here and there sometimes. Shopping. The movies. But you have to drive like an hour to do any of that stuff. Deton is dead.”
