Lott shook his head. “I honestly don’t know. Annie didn’t say anything about that, but that kind of information would have been withheld.”
“I’ll call Andor and see if he has managed to dig up the entire file on that case.” Julia said. “Every damn hidden detail of it.”
Lott nodded and she was on the phone when Lott took the bucket from the woman in the take-out window and the wonderful smell of fresh KFC filled the car.
Andor said he got it all, including all the autopsies of all the girls and the father. Then he asked, “Got the bucket of chicken yet?”
“Sitting between us as I speak,” Julia said.
“I knew I could smell something,” Andor said and hung up.
She laughed, then glanced at Lott as he turned them toward his home about a half mile away.
“He’s got all the files there are on the first case,” Julia said. “And he sounds hungry.”
Lott laughed. “Haven’t you noticed he’s always hungry?”
“This time I think we should have gotten a bigger bucket,” Julia said.
Lott indicated the bucket of chicken between them. “I figured as much, so I got the largest one.”
“Smart man,” she said, laughing.
Damn that chicken smelled good. She was hungry as well. And it was everything she could do to watch the road ahead instead of digging into the bucket.
Everything.
And if the drive had been even a half-mile longer, her self-control would have collapsed.
CHAPTER NINE
August 7th, 2015
5:30 P.M.
Las Vegas
LOTT SAT THE large and very warm bucket of KFC on the table and turned to help Julia dig out napkins and paper plates. The wonderful scent from the chicken filled the kitchen like a soft padding, making it feel even more like a home.
He had also gotten some mashed potatoes and some corn for all of them, so he also got out forks.
Julia got them both a bottle of water from the fridge, then poured them both a glass of iced tea as well from a pitcher of tea he had made the day before.
This remodeled kitchen felt wonderful to Lott. It made him feel almost rich with the granite counters and new cabinets and brand new fridge and stove. Carol would have loved what he had done with the place.
They had the table set when Annie came in carrying a small file and headed for the fridge to get a bottle of water. She grabbed a second one and held it up as Andor followed her in the back door.
He took it from her without a word, dropped a large file on the table out of the way of the chicken, and took his normal place with his back to the front door.
Andor had sat in that same chair when Annie was a baby in a high chair and Lott and Carol had first bought this place. Now the kitchen was remodeled, Annie was an adult, Carol was gone, and Julia sat in Carol’s spot. All the while Andor remained in his same place and Lott remained in his same chair. Strange how things changed, and yet remained the same in so many ways.
They made small talk about the heat and the smell of the chicken as they dug in and got through their first pieces. For some reason, that first piece of KFC just calmed him down, made him feel like he was on track, no matter what was going on in the world. That response had only happened since Carol’s death, and he had no intention of trying to change it or cut back on the chicken.
After finishing the first leg, Lott decided it was time to tell Andor and his daughter about Kirk.
He and Julia explained what Mitchell’s home looked like and what she was like, then told them that Kirk was dead.
“Seriously?” Andor asked, stopping halfway through a bite of his second piece of chicken. “Can we be sure of that?”
“He’s dead,” Annie said, nodding. “Fleet and his people discovered that about two hours ago and double-checked everything. Ruled a suicide. Photos of his body and everything in there if you want to check them out.”
She pointed to the folder she had brought, but didn’t pull it closer. Lott sure didn’t care to look and no one else asked for the file either.
Kirk was just a tragic kid, swept up by a horrible accident. It was amazing he lived as long as he did after the events in the cave and on the bus.
Lott also wasn’t surprised that Annie had come up with the same information he and Julia had found. Doc and Fleet and their crew were really amazingly efficient.
“So our one suspect was dead before someone murdered the women we found in the cave,” Andor said, shaking his head. “This damn case is something.”
Lott had to agree with that.
“The kid has no relatives that we could find in any record,” Annie said, “so that side of things is a complete dead-end.”
“What about all the abductions?” Julia asked. “Anything coming together from all of them?”
“Fleet and his people are eliminating numbers of the ones we found in the first pass,” Annie said.
“That’s good,” Julia said.
Lott could only agree with that.
“Down to just under two hundred black-haired women who have gone missing over the last seventeen years in the western part of the United States.”
Two hundred! That number still felt like a kick in the stomach to Lott. An impossible number of women vanished and families destroyed.
Annie went on. “The only detail that is standing out as slightly similar on a number of missing person’s cases is a brown panel van seen near where some of the women were before their disappearances. No license plate was ever taken, or description of any driver.”
“And the news just gets better,” Andor said, wiping off his hands from the chicken grease. “So why, if Kirk is dead, were you wanting every detail of the school bus tragedy?”
Julia took another piece of chicken and nodded for Lott to tell his former partner his idea.
“The underwear off those girls,” Lott said. “I’m betting Kirk claimed he didn’t do that.”
Andor nodded. “He continuously claimed that, over and over in the records I got here.” Andor pointed to the thick file.
“So the eleven abducted women in our mine were not wearing underwear either,” Lott said.
“Because the meat on their butts and legs had been trimmed away,” Andor said. “But I see where you are going with this. Someone else got into that cave with those girls and Kirk, more than likely before the rescue, but after he was passed out.”
“Maybe after the girls were already dead,” Lott said. “So do any of those reports from the detectives or doctors have Kirk claiming he had visions of ghosts in that cave?”
“Visions that would have been discounted as heat stroke,” Julia said.
“Exactly,” Lott said. “And since that was just a massive tragedy with no crime involved, no one would be thinking someone else might have been in there and not reported it at once.”
“Never looked for that,” Andor said, pulling the file closer and opening it. He quickly divided the large stack of papers into four piles and they all went to reading, trying not to get too much chicken grease on the papers as they went.
Finally, Lott decided he just didn’t have the room and stood and picked up the bucket of chicken and moved it to the countertop. He didn’t feel like he was finished eating yet, but they could finish later.
Julia and Annie handed him their plates and he took Andor’s and dumped them all in the garbage.
Then he sat back down and kept reading, letting the silence fill the kitchen.
“Got it!” Annie said after just a minute. “Kirk told one doctor he was sure he had seen someone in the mine as well. He says the kid gave him a sip of water, said help was on the way, and then left.”
“So that’s why Kirk survived and the girls didn’t,” Andor said. “Did Kirk identify the kid?”
Annie shook her head. “Kirk said here he didn’t know who it was. The doctors didn’t believe Kirk. Chalked it up to the heat since no one came forward and reported being in there.”
>
Suddenly, Lott had a horrid thought. “We need to find out if Kirk went back to the same high school while staying with the Mitchells. And we need to really look at the file on Kirk’s death. What time of the day and was he alone?”
“Oh, shit,” Andor said. “You think?”
All Lott could do was shrug. “If the guy that took those girl’s underwear off suddenly realized Kirk would recognize him, I wouldn’t put anything past him.”
Annie grabbed the file on Kirk’s suicide by bus that had been ignored and opened it.
“Ten at night,” she read. “A dark stretch of Tropicana. Bus driver was a woman who said she never even saw Kirk until he was suddenly in front of her bus and she hit him.”
Lott watched as Annie read on silently, then shook her head. “No one else was with him, supposedly. And there were no witnesses at all.”
“Which means our perp might have been there,” Andor said, “and just took care of the only surviving witness to the first panty raid.”
“Very possible,” Lott said.
And he had a hunch they had just gotten a lead. Not much of one, but a start.
And right about this point, they needed a start.
CHAPTER TEN
August 8th, 2015
6:30 P.M.
Las Vegas
JULIA SAT ACROSS the wooden table in Lott’s kitchen and watched as Annie called Fleet and Doc in Idaho.
“We need the class list of anyone in the same high school as Kirk. His year and the two years ahead.”
“Thanks,” she said after a moment. “Kick them through to my computer and Dad’s computer. We’ll get back to you on some search parameters as we figure it out, but in the meantime, could you also send through if each person from the classes is still alive and what they do for a living and where they live? And also a list of the other girls in the Catholic girl’s school where the victims went?”
Again, Julia watched as Annie nodded and then said, “Thanks.”
Annie looked at the table. “They are going to also search to see if any of them have a panel van.”
Julia was impressed. “Great thinking.”
Annie shook her head. “Fleet and Doc are both so upset by all this, they are going at this full tilt. That many women being missing has them both upset beyond anything I have seen in a year or more.”
“Not exactly making us all happy,” Andor said.
Julia laughed. “Got that right.”
The silence filled the kitchen and Julia was about to stand to get the chicken so they could all have more when a thought crossed her mind.
“Black hair,” she said.
The other three turned and looked at her.
“How long was that school bus missing?”
“Two days,” Lott said, looking at her puzzled. “The file I read had everyone searching for it, but in the wrong area of desert.”
Andor nodded. “The governor thought of pulling in the guard to help in the search at one point.”
“That’s what the newspapers said as well that I read,” Annie said. “Headlines for days.”
“What about black hair?” Lott asked, looking puzzled.
Julia looked intensely at Annie. “What grade were the girls in?”
“All of them, including Kirk, were sophomores at Saint Mary’s School for Girls,” Annie said.
“They still had that kind of dress code for kids around here in 1988?” Andor asked.
Julia was surprised at the same thing.
“The girls all went to a small Catholic girl’s school,” Annie said. “Kirk went to just a regular public school.”
“So what’s the connection?” Lott asked Julia, his dark eyes trying to see what she was thinking. And at times she was convinced he managed just that.
She smiled. “Black hair. The women in your mine all had black hair. Which one of the girls in that first tragedy had black hair?”
“And did she have a boyfriend?” Andor asked, smiling.
“Exactly,” Julia said and watched Lott nod.
“The bus and girls were missing for two days,” Annie said. “Everyone in the city would have been out searching for them, and if this ghost that Kirk saw found them first and the girls were dead, including his girlfriend, that would twist any kid up real bad.”
Julia nodded to that. “We need to check the file on the first tragedy. How many girls’ underwear were found in Kirk’s pocket?”
They all quickly went back to the pages on the table in front of them and it was Lott who found the reference first in his part of the report.
“There were ten pairs there,” Lott said.
“Eleven girls,” Annie said.
“So our killer keeps the women’s underwear as trophies,” Andor said. “And I’m betting he was in that mine with Kirk.”
“Sure looking that way,” Julia said. “Now all we have to do is figure out which kid in three classes of high school kids was dating a black-haired Catholic girl who died in the tragedy.”
“Andor laughed. “No footwork there at all.”
“That’s what they pay us the big bucks to do,” Lott said.
“Yeah, I wish,” Andor said, as everyone laughed and Julia got back up to bring the bucket of chicken back to the table with more plates. They still had a dinner to finish.
PART TWO
The First Hand
CHAPTER ELEVEN
August 13th, 2015
10:30 P.M.
Las Vegas
LOTT WAS NOT pleased at all that yet another poker night had come and gone and they hadn’t made much progress on the mine murders. It had been one of the longest seven days that he could remember, and he had nightmares every night, sometimes waking up Julia.
She looked tired as well, and he offered to stay at home some night to allow her to get some sleep and all she had said was, “Don’t you dare.”
It seemed she was having as rough a time with this horrid case as he was.
Over the week, Doc and Fleet had narrowed down the list of missing to about eleven women with black hair per year that had gone missing since 1998. And they had found out the identities of the two unknown women in the mine that the Las Vegas police could never identify.
He and Julia and Annie had spread out all over the entire area, interviewing anyone who might have known the two girls in the mine with black hair. But there were some classmates that were dead, others just had no memory from school in 1988.
Now they were all headed once again after the poker game for the café at the Bellagio Casino, just as they had done a week before.
Over the game, the five attending retired detectives all brainstormed on various ways to come at this case.
Nothing at all came out of that.
Just more questions.
Why eleven per year?
Why the black hair?
And the question that bothered Lott the most was where were the missing women and why in fifteen years had no others been found?
As the leads with the students seemed to be fading, Doc and Fleet were digging deeper into the mines involved, both the one above the broken down school bus and the one they had found the women in. There was no connection at all between the two mines, but the one with the murdered women seemed to have a somewhat shady past.
Of course, for mines in Nevada, that was not at all unusual. But it was taking time even for Fleet’s miracle computer people to dig through the layers of ownership on that mine.
Lott and Julia dropped his car in valet parking and stepped quickly through the heat and into the coolness of the casino. The sounds of machines and bells and people laughing and talking seemed almost comfortingly normal as Lott and Julia took their spot in a back booth at the cafe, neither saying a word.
A minute later, Annie joined them, followed by a sweating and red-faced Andor. He had clearly parked out in the lot. Even though it was after ten and the sun had just gone down an hour before, the temperature outside still topped one hundred and twelve d
egrees.
“I had an idea on the way over here,” Andor said as he slid into the booth and took a cloth napkin to wipe the sweat off his face. Then he dipped the napkin in a glass of ice water and put it on his neck.
“So what’s the idea?” Lott asked.
“We’re going about this wrong,” Andor said.
Julia laughed. “No kidding.”
“We need to focus on why those women were cut up like they were,” Andor said, the red flush in his face slowly fading.
“We are pretty convinced it started in the bus tragedy,” Annie said. “But nothing in that tragedy leads to harvesting flesh.”
“Exactly,” Andor said.
“We think the ghost that Kirk saw in the mine is our perp, right?” Andor asked. “The one that gave Kirk a little water, took off the women’s underwear, and then left.”
All three of them nodded. Lott had learned a long time ago that when Andor had an idea, it was just better to not say anything and let him run with it.
“So what did our perp learn to do that forces him to cut off the meat from his victims after he roasts them?”
Lott understood where his partner was going. “And how does he bake them?”
“Exactly,” Andor said, pointing at Lott as he often did when Lott had something right. “We looked into that some back in the day, but this baking has, in theory, been going on now for another fifteen years. Which one of Kirk’s classmates owns either mines or something that could bake a person?”
“Or both,” Annie said.
Annie grabbed the phone and a moment later was explaining to Fleet what they wanted. Doc had stayed in Boise to help out and had been calling in favors all over the West investigating some of the women’s disappearances to try to get any little detail that would help. So far he had come up empty, but he was still going at it.
The petite brown-haired waitress took their drink order and their food order at the same time just after Annie finished.
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