Autumn Secrets (Seasons Pass Book 4)

by Susan C. Muller

  Damn. Sometimes the things Connor came up with were positively profound.

  If they didn’t come up with a lead to work on soon, he’d have to tell Conner and the Lieu about the possibility that Felicia Vickers was one of their victims. Then he’d have to explain how he knew and why he’d kept that piece of information to himself. And he really didn’t want to admit that.

  Noah flipped on his computer and scrolled through five mundane messages before hitting one from Lincoln Montgomery. They’d found a DNA match for another victim.

  He swiveled his chair toward Conner. “Saddle up, partner. We’re headed for Huntsville.”

  Once past The Woodlands and Conroe, Lola ate up the miles to Huntsville. Noah and Conner were parked and inside the prison by 10:30.

  Getting permission to visit one of the inmates took a little longer.

  God, Noah hated that place. If the Harris County Jail was bad, the prison was ten times worse.

  Rancid food fought with body order for the worst smell. Filth seemed ground into the cement.

  The constant noise was unbearable. Barred doors clanged shut while electric motors opened others. Unseen voices echoed from one end to the other.

  Harsh lighting glared in spots and left others in shadow.

  The only color was gray. Gray floors. Gray walls. Gray faces.

  Even the air felt heavy with desperation and dashed hopes

  If the place affected him so deeply, what must it do to those who spent decades inside? How could they ever hope to live a normal life when released?

  Roscoe “Burning Man” Madison wasn’t a big man. Maybe five seven or eight. An ugly scar down one arm. Face like a boxer who’d never won a round.

  But one look at his eyes and Noah had no desire to meet him in a dark alley.

  “I’m not supposed to talk to you without my lawyer.”

  “Then why did you agree to?” Noah found he really wanted to know the answer.

  “Ahh. I’m not even sure I still have a lawyer. Haven’t set eyes on one in probably five years. Nah. This here’s a chance to get out of my cell. Talk to someone different. See a new face.” He leaned closer. “A face I won’t forget if you try to screw with me.”

  Conner cleared his throat and Madison sat back in his metal chair. “We didn’t come about your case, Mr. Madison. This is a personal matter.”

  “What, a rich uncle died and left me money? Whoop-de-doo. Lotta good it’ll do me in here.”

  Noah took a deep breath and wished he hadn’t. He refused to cough in front of the prisoner. Any sign of weakness and the guy would clam up. “We’re looking for information about a murder, but let me say right at the start. We don’t suspect you or anyone you know. This murder took place within the last two months. You’d been incarcerated for twenty years by then.”

  Madison laughed and the sound went straight down Noah’s spine. “How the fuck do you expect me to help you with a murder from two months ago? I think my alibi’s pretty solid.”

  Conner opened the folder he’d been holding. “We need assistance identifying the victim. She’s approximately eighteen years old, has brown hair, and green eyes. DNA tests tell us she’s your daughter.”

  “The fuck you say.” Madison slammed his hand on the table and the sound of the chains on his wrists rattled through the tiny room with an echo that bounced from wall to wall filling every corner. “Where’s she been the last twenty years? She sure as hell never visited me.”

  Probably best to avoid that question.

  “If she’s eighteen, that means you had relations with her mother shortly before you were arrested. Did you have a specific girlfriend at that time?” Conner’s voice was smooth, calm, but listening to him ask this thug about his sex life left Noah biting back laughter.

  “I wasn’t much older than that myself. I liked to play the field. Try a little taste of this and that. Ya know what I mean?”

  “I can certainly understand that.” Conner didn’t blink. Just kept going like this was the most natural thing in the world. “What about during your trial. Was there anyone special who came to court? Visited you in jail?”

  Madison’s eyes dropped. The first time he’d shown any hint of regret. “Didn’t nobody come to my trial. Hell, my lawyer barely showed up and then he slept through half of it.”

  Noah’d had enough of this. Conner’s gentlemanly manner wasn’t getting them anywhere. Time to crawl down to the inmate’s level. “If I was sent to this place and knew I wouldn’t touch another woman for twenty or thirty years, I’d remember every minute of the times I had. I might lie in my cell at night and relive every second. Remember what she tasted like, smelled like. What her skin felt like under my hand. How she tossed her hair. The sounds she made. The things she did to me. Are you telling me you didn’t do that? Don’t still do that?”

  Madison glared at him but didn’t answer so Noah reached over, pulled out the drawing the forensic artist had made, and pushed it across the table. “Does she remind you of any of that multitude of women you slept with?”

  “I maybe exaggerated a little.” Madison glanced around as if making sure no one else could hear him. “I was only with a couple of girls. Thing is, I don’t necessarily know their names.”

  Ah fuck. Why did I expect anything different?

  Noah sagged against the uncomfortable chair. “Can you tell us anything? What’d they look like? Where’d you meet them? Where’d they live? What’d you call them? Honey, Sweetie, a pet name?”

  “Dancing Queen.”

  Now they were getting somewhere. Maybe.

  “The one girl was black, so it wasn’t her. The other, she liked to go to this joint on Shepherd. Called Night Magic or something like that. Had live music on weekends. She liked to dance. She had the moves, I’m telling you. She drove a dark blue Honda. We did it in the back seat two, three weekends in a row.” He smiled at the memory and Noah’s hands tingled with the urge to throttle him.

  “One thing. She wore this necklace. Like a pair of pompoms.” He crossed his wrists as best he could with the restraints. “Don’t know if she was telling the truth, but she said she was a cheerleader. I mean, damn. A fucking cheerleader.”

  Madison studied his fingernails before looking at the picture again. “What happened to this girl? My daughter.”

  Noah let Conner answer. He was better at that sort of thing. “She was strangled.”

  “Raped?”

  “Yes.” Probably best not to tell him about the abuse she went though as a child.

  Madison slid the drawing back across the table. “Do me a favor. If you catch the guy, make sure you put him in here with me.”

  Noah left Lola’s windows down and the AC on as they flew down I-45. The air tasted sweet and he wasn’t worried about messing his hair.

  It took ten minutes to clear his lungs of the prison stink.

  “Think we can find this alleged cheerleader?” Conner asked.

  The street noise made talking difficult and Noah pushed a button to close the windows before answering. “I’d say chances are fifty-fifty. First let’s find this Night Magic dance club. Then we can figure out which high school is nearest. After that, check their yearbooks for cheerleaders.”

  “That sounds like a good plan. Let’s see if I can find an address.”

  Noah let Conner work on locating the twenty-year-old nightclub while he concentrated on driving. He didn’t sympathize with Madison—the man was exactly where he deserved to be—but the thought of spending the majority of your life in a place like that gave Noah a claustrophobic chill.

  He’d lost a lot in life, and he’d allowed his world to shrink smaller and smaller. If he wasn’t careful, he’d be living in a prison of his own making.

  “Got it.”

  Conner’s exclamation snapped him away from the pull of depression.

  “What’d you find?”

  “The place burned down fifteen year ago. Looks like Lamar High School on Westheimer is our best bet.”
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br />   The October sun felt warm but not hot, traffic was light, and despite her misadventures, Lola was pure power under his hands. He hadn’t set foot in Lamar High School since a choir contest more years ago than he wanted to think about.

  The assistant principal made noises about a warrant but Conner set her straight by mentioning that the yearbooks didn’t contain any privileged information.

  She led them to the library, showed them the yearbook for the correct date, and left them, but not before whispering instructions to the librarian. Those instructions must have included the phrase, “Watch them like a hawk. They’re not to be trusted.”

  This must be how a bug under a microscope felt.

  Two pages of the yearbook were devoted to the cheerleading squad. One page showed pictures of the girls in a pyramid, cheering a touchdown, and selling mums for homecoming. The other page featured individual photos.

  Two of the cheerleaders were male, so Noah ignored them. That left six girls. One was blonde and wore a pompom necklace. Her name was Darlene Quinlen—Dancing Queen?—but he used his phone to snap pictures of each one, just to be thorough.

  Fifteen minutes spent editing the photos so that only their faces showed—he didn’t want an identification based on the necklace alone—and he emailed them to Huntsville.

  The warden could show the pictures to Madison and get an ID. Noah wasn’t going back to that prison unless dragged.

  Conner clicked his seatbelt and settled against the leather seats, anxious to get away before the bell rang and waves of students enveloped them, trapping them in teenage hell.

  Noah switched on his blinker and pulled out of the parking lot. “Let’s get back to the office and see what we can find. We can start a search on this Darlene Quinlen and be ready when we get the ID.”

  “I’m all for it, but there’s something I’d like to do first. Benny Schroeder asked us to check the killing field for cattails. It’s only a couple of miles out of the way and if we can figure out where he parked his vehicle, maybe we can find some store—even if it’s a couple of blocks away—that has video surveillance. If we can identify the cheerleader’s daughter, maybe we can come up with a date to check.”

  “That’s a lot of ifs, but you’re right. We can hardly complain about Trace not sending us anything when they asked for our help. Besides, every time we’ve been there, the place was crawling with personnel. I’d like to stand in the center of that field in silence. See if I can get a feel for it. I still have too many questions.”

  That might sound ridiculous to anyone else, but Conner knew exactly what he meant. If you stood perfectly still in the middle of a crime scene, you learned things. How far did sound carry? How much traffic passed? How much warning would you have if someone was coming? How fast could you hide? “We’d have to come back at night to answer some of the questions, but this would be a start.”

  Conner leaned his head back and relaxed, letting Noah take care of the driving. Betsy had been doing better the last few nights, but he wasn’t fooled. The crying jags could start up again at any time. He’d learned to rest when he could.

  What would happen if Jeannie went back to teaching in January? He’d told her over and over that she didn’t need to, but she knew the money situation as well as he did. They had two choices: He could get a part time job, be exhausted and never see Jeannie or Betsy, or she could go back to teaching. Then they’d both be tired and never see Betsy.

  Would things be better if he’d stayed in seminary? No. Except for a few mega-churches, pastors didn’t make any more than civil servants. He should have been a lawyer or a doctor. Then he’d have student loans to pay off. Lincoln Montgomery wore expensive looking suits. Did the FBI pay better than HPD?

  “We’re here.”

  “What?”

  “The field. I hate to wake you, but we’re here.”

  He hadn’t fallen asleep, had he?

  “This was all your idea. Where do you want to start?”

  Not his idea. Benny Schroeder’s. “How about that corner. If I were a murdering psychopath, that’s where I’d want to be. Farthest from the freeway and feeder street. Hardest to see.”

  “Your wish is my command.” Noah drove Lola around the corner and parked. Climbing onto the truck bed, he opened the lockbox and took out a pair of knee-high boots.

  Well damn. Why hadn’t he thought of that? There was one place he could save money. Start buying less expensive clothes. Maybe pants could be washed instead of dry-cleaned.

  Conner held out his phone with a photo of a cattail. “This is what we’re supposed to be looking for. It grows near water. I don’t see any ditch, but some of the spots were low. Maybe that’s enough for them.”

  Noah held out his arm, stopping Conner. “I don’t see any ditches, but I see something else.”

  “What?’ He glanced up from his phone.

  “Look ahead of us. What do you see?”

  At 3:00 the sun was low in the sky, casting its rays in a slant across the field. A faint but definite trail of bent grass led across the vacant lot. Conner used the camera on his phone to take a photo, but clouds drifted across the sun and he wasn’t sure how well it showed up.

  Noah put a hand on his shoulder. “Good call, partner. If I even need someone to slip into the mind of a psychopath, I’ll call on you. I think we definitely found his path.”

  “Why didn’t we see it before?”

  “We were never here this time of day before, or from this angle. He must have driven down this street. I think I saw a few shops a couple of blocks to the west. Let’s head that way. See if we can find any surveillance footage.”

  “Not so fast. We’re here. I’m not facing Benny without spending at least fifteen minutes searching for cattails.”

  Noah followed a few feet behind Conner as they wandered around the field, skirting the now empty graves, in their search for cattails. This was his partner’s idea, let him take the lead.

  Walking over the uneven ground covered in weeds and bushes was tough and Noah broke out is a sweat.

  After five minutes, they split up to save time.

  Conner scoured the east side of the field while Noah combed the west. Not a hint of a cattail anywhere. He’d call the whole thing a fool’s errand if they hadn’t spotted the trail indicating where the perp parked. And even that could have been made by an animal. Or one of their own investigators.

  He was almost finished when his foot sunk into a patch of soft dirt.

  Dammit. Good thing he’d put on the boots from his cargo box. That didn’t help his pants, but it saved his shoes.

  Last time he’d pulled his foot straight up. That hadn’t worked out so well. In a number of ways.

  No crime scene techs were around with their handy shovels and he’d be damned if he planned to stand there like a bear in a trap waiting for Conner to come rescue him. Maybe if he wiggled his foot from side to side.

  Just when he was about to give up, his boot broke free with a solid sluurpp. But a section of dirt and several stalks of tall weeds came with it.

  Something wasn’t right.

  He did a slow pivot. The lot contained all types of weeds, some tall, some short, some with flowers, but with the recent rains, they all looked strong, healthy.

  The weeds by his foot were dry and droopy.

  He lifted one sprig and it slid straight out of the dirt, its root long and clean. As if it had just been planted. He reached behind him and pulled on a healthy weed. It broke off at ground level.

  Someone had been planting weeds. And there was only one reason to do that. He did a slow pivot to count the graves.

  Ten.

  “Conner,” he called to his partner on the other end of the field.

  “I hope you found some cattails,” he said, tromping through the weeds Noah’s direction. “I’m ready to ditch this place and get back to the office while we still have time to start searching for that cheerleader.”

  Noah’s heart sagged in his chest, as
if it weighted forty pounds. “I don’t think we’re going to make it back to the office any time soon.”

  It wasn’t supposed to work this way.

  His job was to solve the crime. He came in after and picked up the pieces. Asked questions. Took notes.

  He wasn’t supposed to discover the bodies. But he had. Twice now. And he didn’t like it.

  Noah kicked at a clod of dirt while he waited for crime scene to uncover the grave. Or was it re-uncover? They’d dug this one up once before.

  Whose was it originally? He ought to know out of respect to the dead woman. All the dead women. The ones already in the morgue and the one being unearthed now.

  This was one screwed up case.

  What did all the wisecrackers say? Be careful what you wish for? He’d started the day sure he’d find something to move the case forward.

  He just hadn’t planned on another body. How many more would there be before they locked this sucker away?

  Dr. Mackie stood beside him as the last of the dirt was swept away from the woman’s face. “I hate to be picky, but could you give me a couple of weeks before you find any more bodies. We’re full up at the morgue these days.”

  “Fuck off.’ Had he really said that to Doc M? Out loud?

  Doc put a hand on his shoulder and he shrugged it off. What was that, sympathy? To hell with it. Time to get off the pity train.

  Conner was standing beside the grave, taking notes. Noah waved him over. “Want to get out of here and see if we can catch this guy?”

  “About time we did something constructive. I’ve had it with twelve-year-old techies ordering me around. Don’t’ stand in my light. Don’t step there. Don’t touch that.

  “I don’t care if we have to search five blocks in every direction. We’re still in the middle of Houston. There’s got to be a security camera someplace he drove past. Now that we know a time frame, we can start searching.”