by L A Dobbs
“You think it’s Thorne?”
“Could be. It’s pretty far from his territory, but I guess it makes sense not to have something like this in his own backyard,” Sam said.
“He might’ve ceased operation when things heated up with the Dupont investigation.” Bev had come to stand between them and was eyeing the debris in the kitchen.
Jo squinted at the thick layer of dust on the scarred counters and the cobwebs that hung in every corner. “I don’t know. That was just a few months ago. This place looks like it hasn’t been touched in years.”
“You think it has something to do with the bodies?” Bev asked.
Sam ventured into the kitchen and started opening the cabinets. “Could be. The timeline could be right. But a serial killer who cooks meth?”
Wyatt had come to stand behind Bev. He let out a low whistle. “Is this what I think it is?”
“Yep. Better get some photos before the feds come in and mess everything up. There could be something here that links to Thorne or to those bodies.” Sam turned around and looked at the room. “We need to do this by the book. There will be all kinds of police units with their fingers in this pie. This will be a high-profile case, but it could finally be our chance to get Thorne, and we don’t want him to get off on a technicality because some evidence wasn’t handled properly.”
Wyatt stepped into the room, squatting to get close-ups of the debris on the floor.
“Be careful, though,” Bev cautioned. “We don’t know what kind of chemical substances are lingering in here.”
Sam glanced at the door. “Good point. Where’s Lucy?”
“She’s outside guarding the front steps,” Wyatt said.
“Good. Let’s make sure she doesn’t come in.”
Jo followed Sam and Bev back to the living room, her eyes scanning the debris.
“The only missing persons we have are runaways. I assume that’s who were in those graves. Runaways often fall victim to drugs and prostitution.” Bev’s gray eyes flashed with anger. “Some sick predator could’ve taken advantage of that.”
“You think we might find some clothing from the victims here?” Jo asked.
“It’s a long shot, but we don’t want to overlook anything that can tie those bodies to the meth lab.”
Jo’s heart squeezed. Thorne had to be behind this. But was he a drug dealer and a serial killer? Somehow it didn’t make sense. Because of the investigation she’d been conducting into her sister’s disappearance, she’d been tuned into serial killer activity for years. Never once had Thorne pinged on her radar. She’d not seen any evidence of it in anything he’d done the five years she’d worked here. Then again, her investigation had brought her to White Rock while following leads the police didn’t deem important enough to follow. Was it possible there was a connection to Thorne?
“We’d better clear out.” Bev took out her phone. “I’m going to notify the state police and get their hazmat unit up here.”
“Wait until Holden Joyce hears about this one.” Sam came in from the kitchen and stripped off his gloves. “We’ll never get rid of him now.”
Bev rolled her eyes and scrolled through her contacts. “This certainly is a unique case. I’m sure the FBI will be interested.”
“Yeah, maybe we can kill two birds with one stone here. Take down one bad guy doing multiple things. What are the odds that a serial killer and a meth lab in the same spot are not connected?” Wyatt asked.
“I suppose it’s possible,” Jo said.
“Possible.” Sam’s face was grim. “But not likely.”
Chapter Twelve
Jo spent the rest of the day in a whirlwind of police activity. Between the state police, the sheriff and her deputies, and the FBI, Jo found herself fading into the background. Fine with her. She hated being in the limelight.
Somehow the White Rock Police Station had become operation central. The squad room as well as Sam’s office were crammed with cops. Jo felt claustrophobic, and Major seemed to like it even less. He hid in Sam’s closet. The only one who didn’t seem to mind was Lucy, and that was probably because the commotion had driven Major into hiding.
She never got a chance to talk to Sam about her sister. Probably just as well; now wasn’t the right time. They should be focusing on bringing justice to the girls in those graves; Jo felt selfish making it about her. She didn’t want her sister’s case to be a distraction. There would be plenty of time for that after.
She did, however manage to text Bridget. She had no idea if her sister was still in possession of the phone she’d given her six months ago. Her last five texts had gone unanswered, so probably not. Still, it was worth a try. If there was no reply she’d have to start a search among the homeless population. Not what she needed right now with this big case, but she was desperate to reassure herself that Bridget was at least alive.
When Jo finally arrived home at nine p.m., she was tired, hungry and drained. The site of her little cottage nestled in a grove of pine trees cheered her. She liked its remote location, no neighbors to be seen for miles. There was plenty of wildlife. Turkeys, foxes, and even the occasional deer frequented her backyard. It was peaceful. Without the hum of traffic and din of people she could even hear the brook chattering at the edge of the property from her porch.
Initially, she’d had no intention of staying in White Rock. She’d rented the cottage just as a place to sleep while she worked at the police department during the day and on her sister’s case nights and weekends. But over the years she’d come to love the town and the cottage, so much so that she’d been trying to convince her elderly landlord to sell it to her.
At first she’d only intended to furnish it with the bare minimum. A bed, a kitchen table, maybe a few chairs. Little by little, she’d found herself hauling home flea market and yard sale finds and fixing them up. Now the interior of the cottage had an eclectic shabby chic feel that rivaled cottages in the decorating magazines her mother used to read.
Even the exterior was magazine-worthy: crisp white paint with red pine-tree cutout shingles. A porch ran along the front, window boxes overflowing with colorful pansies balanced the length of the porch railing. They were getting a little leggy now at the end of the season. This case was going to take up most of her free time now, but if she got a spare minute she’d pull them and plant mums that would last well into fall.
Movement at the edge of the yard caught her eye. The little orange feral cat that Jo had been feeding during the summer. The cat had appeared a few months ago, scrawny and starving. She knew it was a stray and was skittish around people. Jo had been leaving food out every day, trying to coax it onto the porch. It had let her get close a few times, but always ran back to the woods at any sudden movement or loud noise.
She hoped the cat would eventually get used to her and come inside the house. Though her lease stipulated no pets, it was getting rather lonely with just her goldfish, Finn, for company. If she was able to buy the place she’d be able to have any pet she wanted. Maybe even a dog like Lucy.
As Jo unlocked the screen door with its thick layers of green paint, she glanced at the small saucer on the porch. It was empty.
The little cat was at the bottom of the steps eyeing her cautiously.
“So you ate it all? Good kitty!”
The cat let out a soft mew. At least this one was appreciative of her handouts and didn’t subject Jo to the clawing and malevolent, angry glares she got from Major at the police station.
Inside the cottage, the bubbling of the aquarium caught her attention. Finn, her goldfish, hovered at the top of the tank, his orange scales gleaming in the fluorescent light as he waited for his dinner. Earlier that summer, she’d upgraded his home from a fishbowl to a three-foot-long tank complete with gravel, plants, and a bubbling treasure chest. Finn was thriving in his new environment. She’d even been able to train him to take food from her hand.
She unscrewed the top of the yellow plastic fish flake container, pulle
d out a large green flake, and held it just over the surface of the water. Finn zoomed up, his lips breaching the surface of the water as he sucked the flake right out of her fingers before zooming back down under the ceramic bridge with his treasure.
“That’s enough for you. Don’t want you to get fat.”
In the kitchen she pulled a can of cat food out of one of the cabinets and glommed some into a little saucer and placed it on the porch. Normally she would sit a bit away from the saucer, waiting for the cat to venture up, trying to get the cat used to her. But tonight she had something more important to do.
She fixed a cheese sandwich and grabbed a beer from the fridge, then sat at the vintage Formica table, barely tasting the food. Out the kitchen window, she saw the cat trotting back to the woods. It cast one longing glance back at the cottage before disappearing into the thick pines. Ideally, come winter the cat would trust her enough to at least sleep on the porch, if not inside the cabin. Jo hated to think of the little thing trying to survive the harsh New Hampshire winter outdoors.
As she watched the cat disappear her mind returned to the case. Was the old meth lab connected to the skeletons in the shallow graves? The bog birch leaf seemed to prove that the bodies had come from somewhere near the cabin. But the question was when? Just because the two criminal activities were from the same location didn’t mean they had happened at the same time.
They needed to find out who owned the cabin. Reese had performed a property search and discovered the owner was a trust with an obscure name—Sundown Realty Trust. Reese had connections with lots of people from the police academy. People who were free to do things that Sam and Jo might not be able to do officially without wasting time trying to get a warrant. One of those contacts was digging into the trust right now to see if he could uncover the name behind the trust.
Jo put her plate in the sink, tossed her beer bottle in the trash, and headed to the bedroom. She pulled back the corner of the rug at the foot of her bed and grabbed the skeleton key that unlocked the powder-blue armoire she used as a desk.
While most armoires held clothes, hers held notes and photos of the “unofficial” cases she was working. She swung open the doors to reveal scraps of tape and tacks. Earlier that summer photos had lined the insides of the doors. The photos had been from the Tyler Richardson case—a fallen officer whose case she and Sam had been secretly working.
The case was closed now, but she still had one thing of Tyler’s tucked away: an old box that he’d hidden in a locker.
The box held mysterious photos that Tyler had taken presumably while he was performing an unofficial surveillance of Lucas Thorne. Sam and Jo had deemed it unnecessary to officially turn them in. The photos didn’t show anything that could incriminate Thorne, but Sam and Jo were afraid they could be used against Tyler. They didn’t want anything to mar the reputation of their dead colleague, especially since Holden Joyce had shown interest in the case. Jo wouldn’t put it past him to use those photos against them somehow.
But there was something else in those photos, one in particular that had significance for Jo. She dug that photo out of the box and placed it on the vintage chenille bedspread. Then she opened the bottom drawer of the armoire, moving aside layers of faded jeans to uncover the old scrapbooks that held the notes on her sister’s case.
She’d put those notes away not even a month ago, vowing to forget about the case and move on with her life. But this new case had dredged up old feelings and made her wonder if she should continue with her sister’s investigation after all.
Even though she’d been led to White Rock initially with underground tips about a serial killer who had operated in the area, there was too much time between her sister’s disappearance and when the girls in the shallow graves were killed for them to be related.
Decades had passed, so unless this killer had been dormant it was probably a different person.
Jo frowned at the scrapbook. Each page had paragraphs of handwritten notes, the ink now fading. The case had consumed most of her life—an unhealthy obsession? Maybe now, after having made the decision to let it go, she could pick it up again but with a better balance between working on the case and actually living her life.
She stopped at a well-worn page. It held one yellowed photo, curled at the edges. The image was of beech trees with the bottom branches stripped of bark.
The photo had come from a retired cop, Ed O’Reilly, who had been conducting his own investigation chasing after a serial killer. Ed thought this killer buried all his victims near beech trees and subtly marked the graves by stripping the bark from some of the branches on the bottom row. One of his early cases had these markings. The killer had never been caught.
No one had ever given Ed’s theory merit, though, because other graves with these markings had been attributed to killers now incarcerated. Some of those killers denied guilt; a few confessed to the crimes. Ed maintained that those who confessed were either lying or taking the blame for some reason.
Jo wasn’t sure why, but she believed Ed’s theory. Maybe it was because the police stopped investigating her sister’s case when they apprehended a suspect they thought was the culprit. That suspect denied killing anyone, but the police insisted. They had evidence that linked him to several murders of children. The case was closed, but Jo’s sister’s body was never found, and the evidence linking the killer to her sister was circumstantial. She wasn’t convinced he was the one.
She’d been desperate to latch onto something when she’d heard Ed’s story, and when her trail eventually led her to White Rock she’d searched everywhere for beech trees with those markings, but never found any— until she’d seen the photos in Tyler’s box.
She picked Tyler’s photo up off the bed and laid it on the page next to the one she’d gotten from Ed. The markings left by the way the bark was stripped from the branches looked exactly the same.
Why did Tyler have that photo? He had been collecting evidence against Thorne, and the other photos in the box seemed to point to Thorne’s extracurricular activities as a drug distributor. But this one was simply a random photo of the woods. Had Tyler been collecting evidence against Thorne that had to do with more than selling drugs? And where had the photo been taken?
She logged into the police database from the laptop she kept on a shelf in the armoire. Wyatt had uploaded the photos he’d taken at the graves earlier that morning. She zoomed in on them. There were no beech trees anywhere near the site and no trees that had the lower branches stripped of their bark, like the ones in the other photos.
Her old beech tree lead had nothing to do with the killer who had dug the shallow graves they’d discovered that morning. But did the shallow graves have anything to do with her sister?
Chapter Thirteen
The station was blissfully quiet when Sam arrived early the next morning. He was the first one in, and he hoped the other cops would stick to their own stations today. The White Rock P. D. was too small to serve as a war room for a big case like this.
Not only were the feds, Staties, and sheriff’s department investigating, the Colebrook Police chief—the town where the cabin was located—had an interest too. Sam had to wonder how effective the investigation would be with so many people having input, but there was nothing he could do about that.
Sam stuck his dark blue WRPD coffee mug under the spout of the Keurig, pulled an orange Gorilla Organic K-cup out of the rack, and put it in the machine. Lucy stood next to him, surveying the room, her tail swishing uncertainly.
Sam frowned at Lucy. “What’s wrong?” Wait… something was wrong. His gaze drifted to the top of the filing cabinet. No cat. “You’re afraid he’s lying in wait to attack you?”
Lucy swished her tail.
Probably still spooked from yesterday. Sam couldn’t say he blamed her. That cat had razor-sharp claws.
“Okay, let’s go see where he is.”
Lucy looked at him skeptically.
A quick survey of the sq
uad room didn’t reveal any cat, not even curled up under a desk. No sign in Sam’s office either. Ahh, the closet. The door was cracked, and Sam pulled it all the way open. Major was curled in a plush cat bed in the corner. Sam remembered the cat had been spooked by all the commotion the day before. Someone must have put his cat bed in there. Probably Reese.
Major slit one eye open and glared at them.
Lucy poked her nose in, then backed out and nudged the door shut.
“I don’t think we can lock him in there.” Sam cracked the door so the cat wouldn’t be trapped. Reese had put a litter box in the old storage closet. Sam wanted to make sure he could get to it.
“Morning!” Reese poked her head in Sam’s office, and Lucy rushed over to be petted.
“I’m expecting a call from my contact on the land ownership for that cabin this morning. He’s an intern at a law firm that specializes in trusts.”
“Great. Good job.”
Jo appeared in the doorway with a white bakery bag in one hand and a Styrofoam coffee cup in the other. She stopped for the really strong stuff at Brewed Awakening whenever she anticipated a long day, and Sam guessed today was going to be a long one.
Jo held up the bag. “Hey, I brought some doughnuts.”
The crinkling of the bag piqued Lucy’s interest, and she trotted over to sit in front of Jo and stare up at her. Lucy was trained not to beg, so she sat calmly, but she was smart enough to know that no one could resist her soulful pleading eyes. Jo pulled a tiny piece of doughnut out of the bag and tossed it to her.
Jo smiled as she watched Lucy, then her eyes flicked to something behind Sam and her smile evaporated.
Sam turned to see Major standing in the closet doorway. He gave them a bored look and then stretched, humping his back and yawning as if to show off his long sharp teeth.
“Here, kitty.” Reese squatted and put her hand out toward the cat, which ignored her and walked in the other direction. “I guess I should feed you.”
