Missing - Mark Kane Mysteries - Book Five: A Private Investigator Crime Series of Murder, Mystery, Suspense & Thriller Stories...with a dash of Romance. A Murder Mystery & Suspense Thriller

by John Hemmings

  Lucy put the phone back on the dash. “It’s something important; he said it wasn’t directly bad news, whatever that means, but he wants us there now.”

  Luckily, we hadn’t gotten far. We’d left later than intended because we’d been poring over the maps Peters had given us to work out an itinerary.

  “Well if it’s something that’s going to move this investigation forward I’ll be all ears. Maybe somebody’s come forward with some information. Those posters of the Regenerators are all over the city. There was even one in the restaurant where we ate last night.”

  “Just so long as it’s something positive,” Lucy said. “I was real hopeful we were going to get a lead today.”

  Lieutenant Sam Richards, one of two lieutenants in the Greene County CID, was in the room with Peters when we arrived. He introduced himself and Peters invited us to sit down.

  “It’s nice to meet you,” Richards said. “I expect you’re wondering what all this is about. You want to tell them Matt or shall I?”

  “Well maybe I’ll just put them in the picture, and then you can take over,” he said. “We had a young lady come forward about the group in the picture you gave us. She says she recognizes some of the people in the group – two of the guys and one of the women. She’s not sure about the other two.”

  “When did she see them,” Lucy said.

  “You better let me tell you the whole story,” Peters said. “The young lady’s named Pauline Blye. About ten months ago her room-mate at the college went missing. Her room-mate’s name was Cindy Stamper. She was found five months later near a village called Hope Creek in Henry County. A couple out walking their dog found her remains. They weren’t particularly well concealed – they’d been placed in a shallow grave, but the body was exposed when it was found. I guess the dog picked up the scent. It’s in a pretty remote area though, so it could’ve lain there for a lot longer if they hadn’t happened by. As it was the medical examiner reckoned she’d been dead about four months. That was a pretty rough estimate I imagine, but they have their ways of working these things out. I don’t have much information about it I’m afraid, but Sam here will probably need to follow up on it now. Why don’t you take over Sam?”

  “We weren’t directly involved in the investigation,” Richards said, “even though they were subsequently able to identify the body as Cindy’s. It was way out of our jurisdiction; but I know the investigation didn’t turn up anything useful. However, Miss Blye was informed, naturally, and the unfortunate victim was taken off the active missing persons list. There was no question of Miss Blye being asked to identify the body – the decomposition would have made that impossible. You can imagine; she’d been dead since about May and her body had lain there through the summer. It gets pretty hot and humid during the summer months. Identification was established by DNA. However, just to connect the dots, Miss Blye saw one of the posters Matt has had put up around town – you’ve probably seen them.”

  “Here,” Matt said, passing one over to me.

  “Well as you can see it says that the two teenage girls at the rear are missing and the police are trying to identify the others in the group,” Sam said. “There’s nothing to say they’re considered to be responsible of course, just that we’re trying to trace them to see if they have any useful information. Anyhow, to make a long story short, Miss Blye is sure that she saw Cindy with at least some of the members of that group shortly before her disappearance – maybe a day or two before. She didn’t make the connection with Cindy’s disappearance at that time, but she’s come forward now so I’m in the process of interviewing her. I’ve only taken a preliminary statement from her so far, but I’ll be continuing after this meeting.”

  Lucy had visibly paled and her voice cracked as she asked, “How did she die?”

  “The medical examiner wasn’t able to determine the cause of death. I don’t think there’s much doubt that it was a homicide, given the place and manner of her burial, but the coroner found that he could say no more than that she’d apparently had an unlawful burial. That’s strongly indicative of homicide, but you know how cautious these coroners are. The body had been unearthed, probably by wild animals. Some of the internal organs were missing – the kidneys – probably eaten by scavengers. She could possibly have died accidentally I guess and someone panicked and hid her body. Without a cause of death, it’s a matter of speculation. It’s one of those cases where what we know in our gut can’t be proved; but it seems that the persons in the photograph may have some answers – if we can locate them.”

  “It isn’t just the identification of some of the members of the group by Miss Blye,” Matt said. “It won’t have escaped you that the location where the body was found is in the same general area where we believe Marisa and Vicky were taken. It seems to me that you might find it helpful to drive over there on Monday and we’ll see if we can arrange for you to see the location where the remains were found. There may also be details of the investigation into that case that we’re not aware of. In any case I think you should go look at where the body was found – if the girl was killed by members of the group then it may have been buried quite near to where they were living. If I had a body to dispose of I’d want to get rid of it quickly.”

  “I’m sure you’re right. In the circumstances I think we’d better drive up there today,” I said. “If I’m going to be questioning people in that area I’d like to have a picture of Cindy with me too. It seems like I’ve got two cases to investigate now.”

  “Yeah,” Sam said. “I don’t think you’re going to find the investigation into Cindy’s death will be active any more, but the file will still be open and you may be able to breathe some new life into the investigation; I’m sure the sheriff up there won’t have any problem with that. But if you wait until Monday it’ll give me time to complete my interview with Miss Blye and make arrangements for you to see the right people. Miss Blye may be able to remember other details with a bit of prompting, especially since now we have a photograph of these animals,” he said. Richards excused himself but Peters’ motioned us to stay behind.

  “The big question now,” I said, “is what to do next. The most obvious thing would be to ask other law enforcement departments to distribute a picture of the suspects in their areas; the problem I see with that is the risk of the group being alerted to the fact that they’re being sought in relation to the death of Cindy and the disappearance of Marisa and Vicky. This is a big country, and we don’t have sufficient information about this group to track them down if they flee. Not only that, if Marisa and Vicky are still alive I think that it might put them at grave risk. Of course I have a particular reason for wanting whoever they are to remain put and hopefully oblivious of the fact that we may be getting near them, so I think it would be a mistake to raise a general hue and cry at this point.”

  “Well you needn’t have any concerns about that on my account,” Philips said. “I have enough on my plate here. We’ve got a rising crime rate in Springfield and right now we’re number five on a list you don’t want to be on at all. To be frank, while I sympathize with the plight of these two young girls my duty is principally to the citizens who live and work within the Greene County jurisdiction, and while I’m happy to give you all the assistance I can I’m content to leave the ball in your court as far as your investigation is concerned. As for Sam, I guess he’ll simply be passing the record of interview with Miss Blye to the sheriff’s office in Clinton. Of course, if anyone else comes forward with information that might be of interest to you I’ll let you know.”

  “The only glimmer of light at the end of the tunnel at the moment,” I said to Lucy as we drove the short distance back to the hotel, “is that the autopsy of poor Cindy suggests that she lived for some time after her abduction. That gives us a little hope that our girls may still be alive too.”

  “But there’s nothing we can really do now until Monday, is there?” she said.

  “I don�
�t think that’s such a bad thing. I suggest we take the rest of today off, and tomorrow too. If nothing else comes up over the weekend we’ll take a drive up into the mountains tomorrow, perhaps into Arkansas. We’ll give our brains a rest and try not to think about the case too much; that way we’ll work better next week. You mustn’t lose sight of the fact that this is a job, after all; and everyone needs to give their little gray cells a rest now and then.”

  I called Roberts during the afternoon and told him we’d be shifting the focus of the investigation to the north east of Springfield the following week. We’d had some promising leads, I told him truthfully, and as yet we had no evidence to suggest that any harm had come to Marisa. That was truthful too, although I didn’t say we had no reason to suspect that some harm may have befallen her, nor did I tell him about the finding of Cindy’s body or the sighting of the group of suspected kidnappers by Cindy’s former room-mate. These were all things we needed to know, but there was no reason to share information with him that would cause him even greater concern than what he felt already. We didn’t call Jillian or Jacky, Shakes or Tommy either. Lucy and I needed some time to ourselves. After I put the phone down I took my own advice and switched off for the weekend.

  Lucy decided to have her hair done, which took several hours. I could never figure how it could take three hours to have your hair cut, but I guess they have to justify those prices somehow. While she was having it washed and cut and washed again and styled and dried and so on I went for a walk downtown. I found a bookshop and bought all three volumes of Stieg Larsson’s novel about the girl with the dragon tattoo. I’d been meaning to read them for years and maybe Jacky’s tattoos had reignited the idea deep in the recesses of my brain. I was sitting on the bed, my head propped up by pillows with a partly consumed glass of whiskey. We’d just finished some Chinese food we’d ordered in; or rather I’d just finished my half. Lucy had left much of it untouched after declaring that it wasn’t authentic enough. She did that occasionally since she’d got into Asian cooking; it was mildly annoying.

  “It’s not meant to be authentic,” I said. “It’s supposed to taste good. It’s been adapted for the American palate. I spent a month in India once and I can tell you they never even heard of most of the stuff we eat in Indian restaurants here.”

  “I was skimming through that book you’re reading when you were in the bathroom,” she said. “It’s full of characters with unpronounceable names.”

  “They’re Scandinavian names,” I said, putting the book face down on the bedside table with a sigh. Her intervention was a deliberate attempt to distract me. “It’s a Swedish book about Swedish people.”

  “What’s it about then?”

  “As a matter of fact it’s about a missing person,” I said. “A woman. Only in this case she’s been missing for a very long time. I’m surprised you haven’t seen the movie.”

  “I’d like to go there sometime,” Lucy said, dreamily. “You know, Europe; the cradle of civilization. Search for my roots.”

  “That might not be such a good idea,” I said. “I heard your grandfather left under something of a cloud.”

  “Who told you that?” she said, with more than a tinge of outrage in her voice.

  “Buzz Skeets,” I said. “Soon after I first met you. I suspect as a means of trying to put me off.”

  “Buzz Skeets was a creep,” she said. “He probably invented that because I wouldn’t let him make out with me when he took me to the prom.”

  “If he was such a creep why did you go to the prom with him?”

  “Nobody else asked me. Geez, I was fifteen with no date.”

  “And why do you think nobody else asked you?” I said.

  “I was kind of a gawky-looking kid in those days,” she said.

  “You looked pretty hot when I first met you.”

  “That’s because I was an ugly duckling,” she said. “And then I transformed into the beautiful swan you see before you now,” she added, preening herself in front of the mirror. “And I’ve maintained my looks by adopting sensible eating habits, exercising regularly and largely avoiding alcohol,” she said, giving me a look that was supposed to mean something.

  “So it’s not true then; about your grandfather?”

  “What did he tell you?”

  “That he breached some kind of honor code in the Cosa Nostra and had to flee.”

  Lucy put her hands on her hips and stared at me. “My grandfather was a hard-working devoted family man.”

  “But he was from Sicily,” I goaded her.

  “He was from Naples, not Sicily.”

  “Pretty close,” I said.

  Lucy threw herself on top of me and tried to suffocate me with a pillow. “Well your ancestors probably raped and pillaged,” she said.

  “Not recently I hope,” I said, as I wrestled the pillow away from her. She lay on her back staring up at the ceiling.

  “What is pillaging, anyway?” she said.

  “I think it’s what we refer to as robbery these days. But it was considered acceptable in those days, I believe. If you won the battle you were entitled to take the other guy’s stuff.”

  “And I guess they didn’t have cops in those days,” she said.

  “It was a simpler life all round, so I believe.”

  “Buzz Skeets,” she said. “God, I didn’t think I’d ever hear that name again. Did he really tell you that?” she said, propping herself up on her elbow and looking at me earnestly. I grinned at her wickedly, making my eyebrows dance a jig, and she grabbed the pillow again.

  Chapter Fourteen

  Clinton

  “I hope you managed to relax a bit over the weekend,” Peters said.

  “Yes,” Lucy said, “we drove up into the mountains and had lunch in Branson. It’s beautiful up there.”

  “Even better in the summer,” Peters said. “I’m afraid Miss Blye wasn’t able to provide any further information about the group. Cindy never mentioned any of them to her − she said she wouldn’t have made the connection if she hadn’t seen the poster. But it’s too much of a coincidence to ignore obviously.”

  “So who do we look for in Clinton?” I said.

  “The sheriff is Kent Benson. I haven’t contacted him yet, but I’ll do it now and try to arrange for you to be taken to where the body was found and if possible talk to the medical examiner who examined the remains, although I don’t know where that examination would have taken place. It wouldn’t have been conducted locally – they don’t have those facilities in Clinton. I’d guess the autopsy was conducted in Jackson County. If so, it’s about an hour’s drive from Clinton, although you may prefer to talk to the examiner on the phone. Anyway they’ll have the report in Clinton; that may be sufficient for you. Seems to me it’s the location where the body was found that may be most useful, since nobody’s able to say how the victim died.”

  “Okay, we’re good to go,” I said. “I guess they’ll have some pictures of Cindy there.”

  “I’m sure they will, but I’ve got some prints that Miss Blye provided us with last year. Here,” he said, handing them to me.

  I looked at one of the photographs and saw a girl wearing brown tortoise-shell glasses and a rather earnest expression. She was staring at a computer monitor and the taker of the picture, perhaps Miss Blye, had apparently taken the photograph without alerting her subject to it.

  “Okay, well we’d better make a move,” I said.

  *

  The Henry County sheriff’s office was on Main Street and we arrived well before lunchtime, after an uneventful ninety-minute drive. We were shown into the office of Sheriff Kent Benson, introduced ourselves and were invited to ‘take a pew’. Benson looked us up and down with his slate-grey eyes. He was a large man in his forties, about six two and solidly built. His hair, cut short, was the color and consistency of steel wool. After a moment he said:

  “The dynamic duo. That’s what Matt Peter
s has nicknamed the pair of you.”

  Lucy smiled. “We do our best,” she said.

  “Okay, well Matt filled me in on the details of your case. Let me just run through it to make sure I haven’t missed anything.”

  He pulled over a pad on which he’d written a few notes and glanced at it for a moment before continuing.

  “You’ve been retained by a Mr. Dean Roberts to try and locate his missing daughter, Marisa. She’s nineteen, single and was on a road trip. She stopped off in Springfield in late January together with another young lady by the name of Vicky Boraski. They stayed for a few days with a friend and then left for a few days, probably with a group of individuals who called themselves ‘Regenerators’. Matt faxed me over the picture.”

  “Yeah,” I said. “That’s about it, except that Matt did a trace for us on Marisa’s cell phone. The phone company was able to track her movements on the day she vanished to an area northeast of Springfield; an area that’s bordered to the northwest by Clinton. We have a circle of approximately two-and-a-half thousand square miles – it’s not much to go on. However, we’re certain it was an abduction, and the location where Cindy Stamper’s body was found should enable us to narrow down the area of search – assuming that there’s a connection. The last contact with Marisa was through a message she left on the answering machine at the house where she’d been staying in Springfield. We traced the payphone from where that call was made – a gas station near a small town called Cooper Springs. It’s fairly clear from the message that she was being held by someone against her will. We assume that Vicky and Marisa were both abducted. We have no details of Vicky other than her picture and her name.”

  “And her present whereabouts,” Benson said, looking across at us enigmatically, raising one eyebrow – a feat I would struggle to accomplish.

  “Excuse me?” I said. “We don’t…”

  Benson leaned across the desk toward us. “She’s right here in Clinton,” he said.