Given the date and details of the disappearance, the article writer wasted no time comparing Lash’s disappearance with that of Jessie Hunter. A separate link led to a map of the area, pictures of the location where the car was found.
The website included a link to a video of a comment from Shepard County Sheriff’s Chief Detective Will Braddock, who was leading the investigation. Braddock acknowledged the similarities between the two cases but cautioned, “There are similarities and there are also differences. We are considering all possibilities in the search for Genevieve Lash.” The Lash family was offering a hundred-thousand-dollar reward for any information leading to her return.
“Oh my God,” Tori muttered as she dropped her face into her hands and sat in silence, just breathing with her eyes closed. She sat up, opened her eyes and looked to the door of her spare closet.
In the twenty years since Jessie’s disappearance, Tori had gone back through her sister’s case just once, eight years ago. Thinking with her own FBI training and resources she might be able to discover a lead, see something that had been missed, she dug into the entire case file. She’d laid it out on her desk and up on her apartment walls, living, eating, and breathing it.
However, other than re-searing every minute detail of the case into her mind, she found nothing over an agonizing and fruitless twenty-seven days. With the frustration of failure building and feeling herself beginning to mentally circle the drain, she made herself stop. She scanned all the documents onto a flash drive and then organized and re-boxed everything, dropped the flash-drive in a clear plastic pouch on top and buried it all in the back of her spare closet, turning the box label against the wall and stacking other boxes around it so it wasn’t visible. She’d seen the box just once since, when she moved from Brooklyn.
Nevertheless, the case, her sister’s disappearance, her father’s death, the guilt, all of it was a constant lingering presence in the back of her mind. She often viewed herself like a recovering alcoholic who had to fight for their sobriety every day. In her case, it was a daily struggle to carry it yet keep it all at bay.
She wasn’t going to be able to do that now. The disappearance of Genevieve Lash, the article, all of it, couldn’t be ignored. She knew what she had to do and where she had to go.
Tori slowly pushed herself up out of her desk chair and found her FBI field backpack and took out a pair of rubber gloves. Careful to lightly grasp the newspaper article on the very top, she slipped it back into the envelope, which she then put into a large plastic bag. She closed her laptop and stuffed it into her backpack, along with the plastic bag and then went into her bedroom to quickly shower and then dress. Her last task before leaving was to go to the spare closet. In the back-left corner was the box. She reached inside and took out the flash drive.
Three hours later she was in the FBI field office. Her friend Ruby Gaines, a lab tech, had come in and dusted the paper, sticky note and envelope for fingerprints.
“Negative, Tori, I’m sorry. There are no prints on the document other than your right thumb and index finger along the top,” Ruby reported.
“What about the envelope?”
“We have all kinds of fingerprints there. I suspect from your doorman, the post office, the mailman and anyone else in the postal service that touched it. I have run all those prints, but nothing has pinged so far.”
“I’m not surprised,” Tori replied, a blank look on her face.
Ruby, along with Tracy Sheets, another field office agent, were two of the few people who Tori had ever discussed her past with. Ruby knew the broad details of Tori’s twin sister’s disappearance. “It can’t be a coincidence this happened on the twentieth anniversary.”
“No, it can’t,” Tori replied, shaking her head.
“What are you going to do?”
Tori held up the newspaper article. “This is an invitation. My sister’s killer wants to play a game, so…game on.”
CHAPTER 6
“SHE WAS DEAD BY THE TIME YOU FOUND THE CAR.”
Braddock managed a couple of hours of sleep on the ancient, weathered mustard yellow leather sofa in his office, a couch so old and the cushions so flat that visitors often remarked that it looked like it had sprung a leak and needed to be re-inflated. At five his cell phone alarm blared. With a long weary sigh, he unfurled his long body and set his size fourteens on the floor. After a minute of rubbing his eyes and face and collecting his thoughts, he made his way to the locker room. He spent a few of minutes splashing cold water on his face and switched into some spare clean clothes from his locker. Dressed, he made the one block walk from the government center to the diner while a thin ribbon of dark orange sunlight had started to emerge over the trees in the distant eastern horizon.
The Wavy Cafe was quiet at five-twenty a.m. Just two tables were occupied, the rest empty, awaiting the early morning breakfast crowd which typically started filtering in closer to six.
“Here you go, Will,” Jan, the waitress, said as she slid a plate of two fried eggs, three pieces of bacon, two sliced pieces of wheat toast and a side plate with four slices of melon in front of him. She then quickly refilled his coffee cup.
“Thanks,” he replied through a long yawn while he poured some half-and-half into the coffee and then slowly stirred with his spoon.
“Any luck?” Jan asked.
Braddock shook his head as he spread a thick layer of strawberry jam on his toast.
“Everyone knows you’re doing everything you can,” she replied as she glanced to her right at the sound of the bell above the front door ringing, signifying new customers. Jan sauntered away to greet her newly arrived patrons, leaving him to his breakfast.
His mentor with the NYPD had trained him to be a methodical old school detective. You engage in the basics, a good canvass, conduct thorough witness interviews and from that you should develop a good lead thread. Once you have that you relentlessly apply pressure and resources to the pulling of that thread and the case would, in time, come together. Problem was, two days in he didn’t have a good thread, or any thread to pull. He had no momentum.
Genevieve Lash simply vanished.
No ransom call had been received. Genevieve’s cell phone had gone dormant and could not be traced. A review of her call and text history raised no red flags, although it provided a long list of people to talk to and that would be happening today.
Thus far there was no indication that anything happened during the Manchester Fourth of July celebration or during her trip to Mannion’s that raised alarm. And while Manchester had grown rapidly over the last several years there was not yet a connected network of traffic and surveillance cameras that he could access to see if Lash was tailed after her departure from Mannion’s.
Braddock and his team evaluated Genevieve Lash’s financial records. She worked part-time at a local clothing boutique but spent well beyond her means. While that would have normally been a red flag, the fact of the matter was she was simply spending her parent’s money. Jerry Lash had given his daughter an American Express card and she never left home without it.
Genevieve was a known party girl who dabbled in recreational drugs. Investigators in the sheriff’s department narcotics unit were making the rounds to their informants. Thus far Lash’s name was not on anyone’s radar.
Lash’s car was being investigated by the state crime lab but he’d yet to receive a final report. A tip line was activated but there’d been few calls despite the posted reward.
Braddock dug his fork into one of the fried eggs when Cal sat down next to him. “Get any sleep?”
“A couple hours on my office couch,” Braddock replied after a drink of coffee. “You?”
Cal shrugged. “I tossed and turned and flopped for four or five hours and kept Lucy awake in the process. Who had Quinn?” Quinn was Braddock’s eleven-year old son.
“He stayed at his cousin’s place. It’s summer, so even money he’d been doing that regardless of what I’m doing.”
/> Jan the waitress scurried over and already had Cal’s usual ready to go, which was a bowl of oatmeal with a side of muskmelon. The two of them ate in silence for a few minutes.
“Did you dig out the old files?” Cal asked, dividing a piece of melon in half.
“Yesterday,” Braddock answered before taking a bite of toast.
“And?”
“It’s not the first time I’ve reviewed that case, you know. Remember when I first moved here? You said if I was going to be the lead detective, I had to review the Hunter Girl case, I had to know it.”
“Right, but this is the first time you’ve gone through it when it could be—relevant.”
“Cal, you know I thought the same thing you and Steak did when I saw the car and that flat tire. I see the similarities and note the timing.”
“As do many, many others, my friend,” Lund replied, taking a bite of his oatmeal. “People are making the connection between the cases. You’ve seen the television reporting. And there’s a reporter from the StarTribune poking around, hounding our people, asking questions, planning a big investigative exposé.”
“I know,” Braddock replied with a smirk. “I’ve been avoiding him.”
“He’s doing his job. He smells a story, a big story. Unfortunately, I do, too.”
“It’s been twenty years, Cal. Twenty. Years. That’s a long time for a killer to be dormant and come back to life if that’s what happened. Ask yourself, why now? And why Genevieve Lash? If we’re going down this road, that’s the question I keep asking. Why her? Why Lash?”
“Heck if I know,” Cal replied with a sigh.
“Well, that’s the question I think we need to be asking,” Braddock answered, wiping the corner of his mouth with a napkin and then taking a sip of coffee. “There is something about the way Genevieve was selected, taken, hunted, stalked…whatever words you want to use, that gives me pause to just automatically say it’s Jesse Hunter all over again.”
Cal put his spoon down and turned toward Braddock. “Look. I don’t meddle, in part because I told you I wouldn’t and in part because you’re damn good at this.”
“I sense a but coming.”
“I need something.”
Will sat up from his plate, wiped the corner of his mouth and nodded his head. “You’re getting calls, aren’t you?”
Cal nodded. “I get calls all the time. But on this one I’m getting pressure. Pressure from people vested in this town’s growth and reputation. Those people have worked long and hard to develop this area to what it is now and to change how people perceive and think of Manchester after the Jessie Hunter disappearance. So, whether you want to or not, if something doesn’t pop and soon, you’re going to get the opportunity to determine whether these cases are connected. We’ll have no choice but to go all in on that and fold the Lash and Hunter cases into one investigation.”
Braddock nodded as he rubbed his tired face. Politics was politics and business was business.
“Hey, I know you’re doing everything you can, and actually, so do the folks who are calling me. They all know, like and respect you. But I think you need to know what this means to people and...”
“Since I wasn’t born and raised here, I don’t have the requisite appreciation for the history. I didn’t live through it.”
“I didn’t say that.”
“I get it, Cal. People don’t want to relive The Hunter Girl case all over again. I don’t blame them.”
“So, what’s next?”
“It’s still Genevieve Lash. That trail is not fully exhausted yet. I’ve got Lash’s parents coming in along with a long list of her friends.”
“Do you think you’ll get anything you don’t already have?”
“Sometimes sitting in a police interrogation room under the bright light can motivate people to dig deeper into their memory bank. Someone knows or has seen something useful. We just have to keep digging.”
Tori caught a seat on the first flight out of Newark just before six a.m. and was on the ground at the Minneapolis-St. Paul International just after eight a.m.
It was the first time she’d set foot in Minnesota in nearly twenty years.
That twenty-year absence left her a little unsure of how to drive the two hours north to Manchester. She started up her rental car and punched a familiar address into the GPS and let that guide her first, through the last vestiges of the Twin Cities morning rush hour and then north out of the cities. An hour later she eventually found her way to the H-4.
After Jessie’s disappearance, Tori wanted to get far away from Minnesota. She chose Boston College, a large school in a major city where she could blend in, not see her sister around every corner and start over. And start over she did.
Growing up in Manchester, living in Jessie’s shadow, she was quiet and reserved. But at BC Tori found herself cutting loose and morphing into a self-assured spitfire unafraid of speaking her mind to anyone.
“And to think I was just this shy, quiet little girl growing up,” she said while drinking wine one night her senior year in college with her roommate Chelsea.
“You were shy and quiet? You?” her roommate asked in shock. “Get out of town.”
“Oh yeah.”
“I’ve known you four years. I’ve never heard this and I sure as heck have never seen it,” Chelsea replied, still stunned, but then asked a question, one Tori avoided answering for nearly four years. “You know, you never talk about home, Minnesota, family, friends. You never go back and visit. Heck, now that I think of it, I don’t even know your hometown or what high school you went to. Why?”
Tori had always been a private person, never one to reveal much about herself, and that was before what happened to Jessie. As a result, at Boston College she didn’t talk about home and what happened in Manchester, ever. There were no outward signs of home, no pictures of Jessie, her father, friends, anything. All she ever said was that she was from Minnesota. Any more than that and it was too hard for Tori to talk about. She bottled it all up, making her past a blank slate to everyone she met.
Yet on that night, for some reason she cut open a vein. “I’m going tell you some things, but you have to promise you won’t tell anyone else.”
“About home?”
Tori nodded and let out a long sigh. “My actual story is…complicated and…well, you’ll probably find it…pretty sad.”
“Okay,” Chelsea replied warily.
“Which is why you have to promise,” Tori insisted. “I’m trusting you. I just don’t want anyone else around here to know these things about me. I haven’t talked about these things since they…happened.”
“I promise,” Chelsea committed, crossing her legs while sitting in her soft chair, hugging a small throw pillow.
Tori told Chelsea everything and by the time she’d finished an hour later, the tears were streaming down her face as she let it all out. Chelsea asked a question here and there, but mostly listened patiently before eventually pushing herself up out of the chair, grabbing a box of tissues and then coming back to sit down beside Tori on the couch.
“So, if I have everything, your mom died when you were five?”
“Yes.”
“And you had a twin sister?”
“We were identical twins.”
“She was abducted and never found?
“No, she wasn’t.”
“And your dad died when you were a freshman?”
“Yeah, March of my freshman year, nine months after Jessie disappeared. It was a heart attack.”
“You know, we were living across the hall from each other back then. I remember you being gone for a week, maybe longer and when you got back, you just said there were some things back in Minnesota you had to take care of. But…I had no idea it was…all this. You’ve not told anyone about any of these things, ever?”
“No,” Tori answered, shaking her head. “Only you,” she added as she wiped away the tears before putting the tissue to her nose.
�
��It explains some things,” Chelsea suggested, “probably a lot of things.”
“It’s like all that did something to me. It changed who I am.”
“How could it not? Of course, of course, all of that would impact you, change you,” Chelsea replied assuredly, wrapping her right arm around Tori’s shoulder. “You say growing up and in high school you were quiet, shy, self-conscious?”
“Yeah,” Tori answered, and then dabbed at her eyes. “I came here, and I turned into this fierce, confrontational, opinionated chatterbox. It’s like a switch went off or something. Why did that happen?”
Chelsea, a psychology major, took a sip of the cheap Zinfandel in her dime store wine glass and thought for a moment. “Well, the obvious answer could be that you grew out of it. New environment, new people and no preconceived notions of you. You came to BC and felt free to be someone different. That’s one answer.” She took a slow, deliberate drink of her wine. “There is, I suppose, another possible answer.”
“Which is?”
“You were joined at the hip with your twin sister. Inseparable. You were the left hand, she was the right. Never apart, always together, living each other’s lives. It was as if you were one and the same, right?”
“Yeah, pretty much.”
“That’s not uncommon with twin sisters,” Chelsea replied analytically. “Together, you were kind of one person, but you each had roles. She took some traits, you took others. But now I think what you’re doing is you’re living two lives…yours and Jessie’s. You didn’t consciously decide to do it, you didn’t declare one day that I’m going to be like Jessie, too. But subconsciously you took the best traits of your sister—her confidence, her assuredness, her bigger than life personality, and made it all part of you. In that way, Jessie’s spirit lives on inside you. And you know what? That’s a good thing.”
“Maybe,” Tori answered, sniffling. “Except Jessie was popular, loved and really happy. I’m combative, argumentative and not what you would always call cheery.”
Silenced Girls Page 5
