Shadowkiller

by Wendy Corsi Staub

  Wait—not every house.

  As the large brick Colonial next door to the MacKennas’ comes into view beyond the dense border of shrubbery, Carrie sees that it’s completely dark.

  This, she knows, is the house where a woman named Phyllis Lewis was murdered on Halloween night by a serial killer known as the Nightwatcher. It was the widespread media attention to that case—and Mack and Allison’s connection to it—that placed them squarely on Carrie’s radar again last fall.

  The Lewis house isn’t just dark, she realizes now, seeing the red and black “For Rent” sign posted near the door.

  It’s vacant.

  Well, what do you know.

  Carrie can’t help but smile again. Yes, things are falling into place very nicely indeed.

  Chapter Eleven

  Miami, Florida

  After fifteen years with the Miami-Dade Police Department’s Domestic Crimes Bureau and five more on her own as a private investigator, LaJuanda Estrada has been working with the families of missing persons long enough to anticipate the likely reaction to certain stages in the investigation.

  That’s why she made sure there was a box of tissues on her desk before she started playing the surveillance tape footage for Nancy Temple, whose daughter Molly went missing after getting off a cruise ship here in Miami last month.

  The woman had found her way to this rented office on West Flagler Street the same way many people do; she’d gotten fed up with the way the police detectives were handling her case.

  “I feel like they’re not trying hard enough to find Molly,” she told LaJuanda earlier this week, when they first met.

  It wasn’t for LaJuanda to decide whether that was the case. Her job was to find out what had happened to Molly Temple, a Cleveland accountant who’d vanished back in May.

  That was when LaJuanda had first heard about her, as the media was actively publicizing her disappearance. She’d even seen footage of a tearful Nancy at a press conference, pleading for her daughter’s safe return.

  Same old sad story, LaJuanda thought when she saw it, and wondered how long it would be before a body turned up somewhere, fitting the missing woman’s description. But she didn’t give the case more than a passing thought until it landed in her lap.

  “I called you because your ad said that you leave no stone unturned,” Molly’s mother told her. “Promise me you’ll do everything you can to find her.”

  LaJuanda promised, and true to her word, she’s left no stone unturned.

  She knew the MDPD detectives would have examined the surveillance video showing Molly’s movements in the week before she disappeared. She also knew that they were perpetually overburdened and only human; in other words, they might have missed something.

  It wasn’t easy for her to get her hands on the tapes, but when you’re acquainted with the right people and you know your way around the city—and the system—you can make things happen.

  It had taken a couple of days, but this morning, she was finally able to download the video into her laptop.

  Now, moments after it begins playing, Nancy Temple gasps. But instead of bursting into tears at the sight of her lost daughter, she covers her mouth with her hands and gapes at the screen.

  Caught off guard, LaJuanda sees that her gray eyes behind her wire-rimmed bifocals are not—as anticipated—flooded with tears. They’re wide with shock.

  “What is it, Nancy? What’s wrong?”

  “That isn’t Molly!”

  “What?”

  “That woman—it’s not her!”

  “As I said, this is the tape from the Marriott where—”

  “I know what you said, but it’s not her.” She shakes her gray head rapidly. “I know my own daughter. That isn’t her.”

  Folding her arms across her ample bosom, LaJuanda shifts her gaze from Nancy Temple back to the computer screen, where a female figure is making its way through the crowded lobby of the Marriott.

  She herself has watched this footage from the hotel security cameras countless times in the last twenty-four hours, searching for signs of impending foul play as Molly Temple arrived at the hotel shortly before her disappearance. Now—unlike her police counterparts—she’s asked Molly’s mother to take a look, just in case something jumps out at her.

  Something has.

  But Nancy Temple—whose husband died of a heart attack on Easter Sunday, just over a month before their firstborn fell off the face of the earth—is obviously still reeling from the double blow. How can she possibly be thinking clearly?

  LaJuanda herself is happily married with two teenagers. She can’t imagine that she’d be in her right mind if anything ever happened to her own loved ones.

  Not only that, but children—even adult children—are often different people when they escape their parents’ watchful gazes. Particularly daughters of mothers who are as primly conservative as Nancy has proven to be.

  So, while she won’t come right out and dismiss Nancy’s bizarre claim, LaJuanda is inclined to tread carefully around it.

  “What makes you say it’s not Molly, Mrs. Temple?”

  “What makes me say that? It isn’t her! That’s what makes me say it!”

  The retort is so out of character for the Ohio librarian, who has been reserved and unfailingly polite from the moment they met, that LaJuanda raises a dark eyebrow.

  “I understand that, Mrs. Temple, but what is it about her? Because to me, that looks like Molly. But I’ve never met her in person. I don’t know her the way you do. Tell me what you’re seeing.”

  “It’s . . . it’s the way she’s walking. That’s not Molly’s walk.” Her voice quavers. “She doesn’t move that fast.”

  She might if she were on her way to a secret rendezvous.

  Aloud, LaJuanda says only, “I’ll back this up so that you can take another look.”

  “I don’t need another look. I’m positive. That’s not Molly; it’s someone who’s wearing her clothes and pretending to be her.”

  LaJuanda allows those powerful words to sink in for a moment, her thoughts spinning off in an ominous new direction.

  Keeping her tone and expression carefully neutral, she says, “Okay, let’s go back a bit for a minute. Those are Molly’s clothes?”

  “Yes. Oh my God . . .”

  “You’re sure of it?”

  “Positive!” The word is a wail.

  LaJuanda’s gold bracelets jangle as she reaches out to lay her tanned, manicured hand over Nancy’s frail, trembling white one.

  The contact seems to steady her, and she takes a deep breath before she goes on talking. “I was with Molly when she bought that top at Sears right before the cruise. She didn’t want to get it, but I talked her into it. I told her the bright color was perfect for the tropics. I was the one who talked her into going on the cruise, too.”

  “She didn’t want to go?” LaJuanda has heard this story before, but in light of what Nancy just said about the woman on tape being an impostor, every detail has taken on possible new meaning.

  “She never wants to go anywhere. She doesn’t even have a social life. Part of the problem is that she works so hard—her company has been downsizing, and she’s been picking up the slack. I told her she was going to burn out if she didn’t take a break. But she still wasn’t crazy about leaving. She’s such a good girl—out of my three children, Molly is the one who stays close to home and keeps an eye on me and Ed. I mean, she kept an eye on me and Ed,” she amends, and her eyes are filled with a fresh flood of tears.

  “Yet she decided to go on a cruise by herself, and she bought the ticket with money you gave her for Christmas,” LaJuanda reminds her, to keep her on track.

  “Yes, because she finally realized she needed a break from her job, and that she’d better start living her life, instead of waiting around to find a husband to do things with. I kept reminding her what a good time she was going to have, and how proud I was of her, going off on such an adventurous vacation all alone.”
The woman’s voice breaks. “Why would someone else be wearing her clothes? Where is she?”

  Nancy has repeatedly asked that last question of LaJuanda since their first telephone conversation.

  It had taken her a few days, she said then, for her to realize that her daughter was missing.

  Back at home in Ohio, Molly rents an apartment just a few blocks from her mother and they speak every day, but . . .

  “I was trying to give her some space,” she told LaJuanda. “We lost my husband a few months ago, and she’d already bought her cruise ticket. She’d been through so much—she was the one who found Ed lying on the floor—and I wanted her to get away and put it behind her. She was worried about leaving me, and I told her I’d be fine while she was gone. I didn’t want to bother her with phone calls.”

  Molly, she said, had been planning to spend the weekend sightseeing in Miami before flying home to Ohio. Nancy was worried when her daughter didn’t call on Friday to let her know she was off the ship, and even more worried when she didn’t answer the messages her mother left on her cell phone over the weekend. But her worry became full-blown panic when Molly failed to confirm the plan for Nancy to pick her up at the airport in Cleveland.

  “And when she didn’t get off that plane,” she said, “I knew something awful had happened to her.”

  The officers who were handling the missing persons report weren’t so sure—and neither was LaJuanda when she first took the case.

  From the start, she had reminded herself—and the worried mother—that unexpected things can happen when a single woman, no matter how respectable, goes on a decadent vacation for the first time in her life. Molly might have met someone and impulsively decided to run away with him—or her—and start a new life. LaJuanda has seen it before here in Miami.

  Nancy’s reaction to that theory was, of course: “Not my daughter. She’d never just take off and let me worry like this.”

  That’s always the parent’s knee-jerk response, whether the missing person in question is a respectable grown woman or a fourteen-year-old runaway suspected of turning tricks on Biscayne Boulevard.

  Sadly, though, in Nancy Temple’s case, it’s probably true. Her daughter wouldn’t have just taken off. The more LaJuanda has learned about the missing woman over the past week, the more convinced she’s become that Molly fell victim to a predator.

  It might have been someone she’d met at sea and agreed to see again in Miami, or—more likely, LaJuanda guessed—someone whose path she’d had the misfortune of randomly crossing after she left the hotel on foot less than an hour after checking in.

  If, indeed, she had checked in.

  Someone certainly did.

  LaJuanda reaches out to click the mouse, freezing the image onscreen. She stares at the woman she’s had no reason to believe, until this moment, isn’t Molly Temple. She’s wearing a hat and sunglasses, but that’s not unusual in Florida.

  Still . . .

  LaJuanda rewinds the footage a bit, then lets it play again, checking out the other people in the lobby. Some have sunglasses pushed up on their heads, or dangling from cords around their necks, but none is wearing them.

  Was the sun shining at the hour when Molly Temple walked into the hotel?

  LaJuanda makes a mental note to check that out as she watches Molly talk to Pamela, the desk clerk who’d checked her in using her ID and credit card. It’s not a good angle; she can’t get a good look at Molly’s face, but she can see that the interaction appears to be routine.

  When LaJuanda interviewed Pamela, she said she hadn’t noticed anything amiss. She confessed that she barely remembered Molly, though.

  “I check hundreds of people in and out of this hotel every day, you know. A lot of them are coming and going on cruises. I’m sorry . . . like I told the police, I just don’t remember much about her.”

  Maybe because she didn’t want you to, LaJuanda thinks now, suppressing a shudder. If that’s not Molly—what happened to her between the cruise dock and the hotel? Or—was it even sooner?

  The surveillance tape is nearing its end. In silence, LaJuanda and Nancy watch Molly emerge from her hotel room shortly after she first entered it, hanging the “Do Not Disturb” sign on the knob. She’s carrying one of the bags she brought into the hotel, and it looks fairly heavy, judging by the way she shifts it from shoulder to shoulder while waiting for the elevator.

  There’s a cut back to the lobby, where she goes from the elevator to the exit. Through the glass, she’s visible having a conversation with one of the doormen before she exits the picture, never to be heard from again.

  Yesterday morning, LaJuanda spoke to the doorman, a sharp-eyed grad student in his early twenties.

  “You mean that woman the cops were here asking about a few weeks ago?” He looked her up and down, taking in her curve-hugging teal dress, four-inch wedge sandals, and dark hair falling in loose waves down her back. “You’re not a cop, are you?”

  “I’m a detective.”

  “No kidding.”

  “I never kid a kid.”

  “Ouch.”

  “Sorry. I say that all the time to my son. You remind me of him.” She flashed him a smile. “What do you remember about Molly Temple?”

  “Just that she didn’t need a cab,” he told LaJuanda’s cleavage, “and then she walked away, heading south, toward downtown.”

  “You have no idea where she was heading?”

  “A lot of tourists go that way. There’s a lot to do down there. The park, the Convention Center, Bayside Marketplace, Riverwalk . . . She could have gone anywhere.”

  Yes—and she must have crossed paths with a predator along the way, LaJuanda thought at the time.

  Now, she shifts her thinking: What if the woman who’d left the hotel was the predator?

  Then she was making her escape, LaJuanda realizes. This changes everything.

  The tape over, Nancy Temple turns to her, trembling. “That wasn’t Molly. What in the world is going on?”

  Good question. Her mind working through various scenarios, LaJuanda clicks the mouse and briskly presses a few keys, pulling up a new file on the computer. “There’s footage from the Carousel’s security cameras. Can you take a look at that, too?”

  Nancy nods mutely, and LaJuanda notes that her eyes are no longer dry. She plucks a tissue from the box and passes it over. Molly’s mother takes it with a wan thank-you.

  “Hang in there.” LaJuanda pats her hand again.

  “Believe me, I’m trying.”

  “I know you are, honey.”

  “Do you think . . . do you think it’s a good sign that it’s not her?”

  Of course it isn’t. How can it be? Someone else wearing a missing person’s clothing, using her credit cards . . .

  All signs point to foul play.

  LaJuanda learned long ago that a lie—even one meant to be kind—can be cruel in the long run.

  So she tells Nancy Temple, “All you can do is hope for the best. Let’s take a look at this other footage.”

  The Carousel’s security cameras show Molly in the public areas of the ship over the course of her week on board: dining in restaurants, browsing in shops, coming and going at ports of call, and disembarking in Miami on the last day.

  Nancy weeps openly through most of it as LaJuanda hands her tissues, keeping her own gaze trained on the video looking, once again, for signs that Molly attracted unwanted attention from a stranger.

  Not a thing. For the most part, she moves about the ship alone, spending long hours on sea days lying in a chair with a book. At evening meals, she dines with several other women, all of whom were randomly assigned to her table.

  No one in Molly’s orbit seems to be paying unwarranted attention to her. As far as LaJuanda can tell, the fellow passengers and crew members she encountered had only polite, casual interaction with her.

  It takes a couple of hours to work through the footage, even with LaJuanda fast-forwarding through several long stret
ches of Molly reading in the sun.

  Nancy Temple has grown increasingly subdued, her elbow propped on the arm of her chair, chin in hand, fingers splayed across her cheek as she watches the last known evidence of her daughter’s existence.

  Then, all at once, she sits up straight. “There—see that? It’s not her! Can you back it up? There . . . stop it!”

  LaJuanda works the mouse, doing just as the woman asked—backing up the video and then freezing on a frame that shows Molly coming up the gangplank at the final port of call in Saint Antony.

  “That’s not her!” Nancy Temple rakes a hand through her short gray hair. “Look at the way she’s walking! That’s not her walk!”

  Even LaJuanda can see, this time, that something about Molly has changed. She’s wearing the same clothes she had on earlier, when she got off the ship, but . . .

  Can it be? Is it true?

  Incredulous, she realizes that Nancy Temple might be right. And if she is . . .

  Something happened to Molly on that island. She got off the ship there, but she never got back on.

  Who did?

  The patio behind the deserted house next door to the MacKennas is pretty fancy, with a wet bar and an outdoor fireplace. It’s easy to imagine it all lit up on a summer Saturday night, filled with furniture and people.

  Tonight it’s shrouded in darkness beneath a waning crescent moon. As always, the shadows serve Carrie’s purpose well. She sits on the low brick wall that borders the patio, watching the house next door through the trees, waiting . . .

  Allison and Mack, she knows, aren’t home. Earlier, her heart pumping in excited anticipation, Carrie stole across the property line and crept up to the nearest ground floor window. But instead of seeing familiar faces, she saw a teenage girl. She was talking on her cell phone, and her voice floated out through the screen.