Ashes, Ashes, They All Fall Dead

by LENA DIAZ,

  “You seem to know this area very well,” Tessa said.

  “Not as well as I’d like. I have friends in Madisonville, so I come up this way every now and then. Be careful that you don’t actually go near any of those old mines. Stick to the nearby towns for your investigation. Those mines are closed for a reason, and not always because they run out of coal. Sometimes the mines are too unstable. There might be pockets of gas that’ll suffocate you, or explode if there’s some kind of spark.”

  “Trust me,” Tessa said, “I have no intention of going into a coal mine.”

  Stephens reached for his wallet, but Matt stopped him. “I’ve got this. You’ve been a big help.”

  Stephens nodded his thanks and stood. “Much obliged. I hate to leave y’all with this on your own, but I have to get back and it’s a bit of a drive. You’ve got my number.”

  As soon as Stephens was gone, Tessa said, “Now are you going to tell me why you’ve been so distracted all morning?”

  Matt sighed. “That obvious, huh?”

  “There’s a glowing neon sign above your head.”

  “Really? What does it say?”

  “That you’re keeping something from your partner, and she doesn’t appreciate being kept in the dark.”

  “All that fits on one sign?”

  She narrowed her eyes.

  “Okay. You’re right. We need to talk. But not here. Let’s go.”

  TESSA STOOD IN the middle of the pay-by-the-hour motel room. She clasped her purse against her side.

  “Stop looking like you’re afraid you’re going to catch some kind of disease. This was the closest private place I could find,” Matt said.

  “But I am afraid I might catch a disease. This place is gross.”

  He rolled his eyes and grabbed the straight-backed chair shoved up under the desk that doubled as a chest of drawers. “Here, this looks relatively clean.”

  She gingerly perched on the edge.

  He sat on the foot of the bed across from her.

  She barely refrained from shivering with revulsion. She wasn’t getting anywhere near that bed. “Hurry and tell me what you’ve been holding back so we can get out of here.”

  He pulled a folded piece of paper out of his suit jacket pocket and handed it to her. The serious look on his face put her on alert. Suddenly the condition of the motel room didn’t seem quite so important.

  At the top of the paper, big bold letters declared MISSING. Underneath that was the name REBECCA MILLER. And underneath that was a picture of a young girl, about seven or eight years old, with green eyes and bright red hair. Tessa shook her head in confusion.

  “I don’t understand. This is me, but my name isn’t Rebecca. It can’t be. I had the bracelet. My name is Tessa. Isn’t it?”

  “That’s not a picture of you. It’s Sissie. Look at the date.”

  “But . . . this flyer is from . . . before I was born. I don’t understand. We were abducted together, weren’t we? Wait, no, that wouldn’t work with the date here. None of this makes sense. Was I . . . abducted by the same person, years later, when Sissie was older? Did you find a flyer for me too?”

  He shook his head. “Keep reading.”

  She skimmed the rest of the flyer. “Priceville. She went missing from Priceville, South Carolina? But that’s where—”

  “Where Jim Crawford was killed, yes. Last night, when I realized you and your sister had been abducted, I called Casey and asked him to perform a database search focusing on the South, looking for missing-persons reports for green-eyed, red-haired sisters who went missing within a year or more of the accident where Sissie was killed.”

  Tessa shook her head. “But Sissie was much older than the girl in this flyer. The police report said she was about sixteen. The flyer has to be wrong.”

  Matt took both her hands in his. “The flyer is accurate. Sissie’s real name was Rebecca Miller. Her father, Tom Miller, called her Becca. She went missing when she was seven years old. Tessa, Becca was an only child. She didn’t have any sisters.”

  She shook her head. “Yes, she did. She had me. I called her Sissie.”

  “I know you did, and that’s probably what she told you to call her, just in case anyone ever asked questions. Sweetheart, Becca wasn’t your sister. She was your mother.”

  Tessa’s stomach clenched. She jerked her hands free. “That can’t be true. You’re wrong. If she was my . . . if she was my mother, that means when she had me, she would have had to be . . .”

  “She was nine years old when she gave birth to you.”

  Tessa clamped her hand over her mouth and ran to the bathroom.

  “ARE YOU SURE you’re okay?” Matt asked.

  Tessa had thrown up her breakfast, and then she’d dry heaved over and over.

  After brushing her teeth with the toothbrush and toothpaste Matt had hurriedly purchased at the motel gift shop and washing her face, she was now sitting across from him again, looking pale and in shock.

  “I’m fine. Well, except for the fact that I’m the daughter of a child-rapist and a pedophile, I’m perfectly fine.” She shuddered and pressed her hand to her throat again. “Poor Sissie.” She swallowed hard. “Poor Becca. I have to call her by the right name. She deserves that. Becca Miller.” Her green eyes shined with unshed tears. “Tell me everything.”

  He hesitated.

  “Stop looking at me like you think I’m about to break into a million pieces. I’m tougher than I look, and I want to get the bastard who brutalized an eight-year-old little girl and forced her to carry his child. Tell me everything.”

  He blew out a long breath. “All right. Once we found the flyer, that pointed the task force to Priceville. Your maternal grandparents—the Millers—are still there. You can imagine how upset they were when some agents interviewed them. All this time they’ve never known what happened to their daughter, but they held out hope she might still be alive. Now they know she was held for years, had a child, and was murdered.” He shook his head.

  Tessa pressed her hand to her throat again. “Those poor people. I can’t imagine. I really can’t.”

  “They were extremely helpful, once they calmed down enough to talk to the agents. And there are plenty of other people still in Priceville who remember when Becca disappeared. With everyone they interviewed, the task force kept hearing one name—Isaac Hoffman. By all accounts, he was obsessed with Becca. But he was much older than her, in his mid-twenties when she disappeared.

  “Oh my God.” She wrapped her arms around her stomach and shook her head.

  “Are you sure you want to listen to this now? We can find a nicer hotel, take a break.”

  “No, no. Tell me all of it. You’re saying Hoffman is the one who abducted her, right?”

  “It looks that way. He was always a little . . . off. The summer Becca disappeared, John Crawford warned Becca’s father about Hoffman. John said he saw him watching Becca and her friends at the playground and other places. The way he looked at her and followed her around worried him.”

  “That’s why Casey thinks Hoffman is . . . the one. Because John Crawford was murdered?”

  “Yes, partly,” Matt said. “But also because Hoffman disappeared the same night Becca did. No one in Priceville has seen him since, except for Crawford of course, assuming Hoffman killed him.”

  Tessa shoved her fingers through her bangs and leaned back against her chair. “What else? Tell me.”

  “Casey told me this morning that a maintenance worker was murdered at your apartment complex the night Tonya Garrett disappeared. His body was found this morning.”

  Her eyes filled with sympathy. “The poor man. Wait, you wouldn’t tell me that unless you thought . . . the killer was the same killer we’re looking for. You think . . . you think he was there, at my apartment complex, looking for . . . me?”

  “Yes. I do.”

  She clasped her hands together. “So, what, he didn’t find me, so he grabbed Tonya instead? Is that what you’re s
aying?”

  He put one of his hands on top of hers. “No one knows yet.”

  She twisted her fingers beneath his and held his hand tightly. “What’s Casey doing to find this Isaac Hoffman?”

  “No one knows his whereabouts since he left Priceville, but his name and social security number popped up in Alabama three years ago.”

  “Three years? When the letters started.”

  “Right. They’re staking out an apartment in Alabama. Casey’s hopeful he’ll show up soon, with Tonya.”

  Her eyes narrowed. “I know you, Matt. I’ve learned your gestures, the tone of your voice, the way you choose your words. Everything you’ve been telling me is what Casey believes, what the task force believes. You don’t think Hoffman is the killer, do you?”

  “I didn’t say that.”

  “But you aren’t correcting me. You think the killer is still out there.”

  “Do I think Hoffman is the killer? Yes, probably. Do I think Casey’s going to find him in Alabama? I honestly have no idea. But I have a hard time believing he was clever enough to disappear for so many years and then suddenly pop up three years ago using his real name and social security number. Something’s wrong.”

  “You think he’s here, don’t you? In Kentucky.” She didn’t wait for his answer. “Why? Why do you think he’s here?”

  He studied her closely. “Are you sure you don’t want to go back to the hotel and wait this out?”

  “I refuse to cower while a young girl dies.”

  He looked around, but there wasn’t anywhere to work in the tiny room. “Let’s get out of here. We’ll find a table on the back patio if we have to. I need that map of yours, and I need to spread it out.”

  Five minutes later they were behind the motel by the pool, which was deserted, probably because the pool looked like a dark-green swamp. Matt used some napkins from the gift shop to wipe pollen off a table and two plastic chairs. He spread Tessa’s map out, the one Stephens had drawn circles on back at the pancake house.

  “Okay, what do we know about our killer geographically? We know he has killed people all over the South, but he hasn’t killed anyone here in Kentucky. What does that tell you?”

  “He doesn’t want to kill close to home, so he doesn’t kill where he lives. Unless he killed Sissie . . . Becca.”

  “I consider that an anomaly, not like his typical arsonist kills. It’s an outlier that skews the data. For now, let’s focus on the other cases.”

  “Okay.”

  “We already know that only Kentucky and South Carolina have the exact same kind of coal that was found on the letters. My lab confirmed that. The car accident was in Kentucky. The home you were taken to was here, in Kentucky. Latham said they put the story on TV about the crash, trying to find someone who knew your sister and you—the survivor. There was a picture of you standing in front of the home in the newspaper. It makes sense the killer would have been looking for something like that. It probably wasn’t hard to find out where the survivor was sent after the crash. It might have even been mentioned in the news reports. The killer tracked you to the Murray State Girls’ Home and tried to kill you by torching the place. But when he failed, and you were sent to South Carolina, he didn’t have any way of tracking you there. He didn’t know where you went.”

  “Okay, makes sense. So you’re thinking he eventually figured out I was in the FBI, in Savannah. How? How did he find me again after all these years? How did he know to send the letters to Savannah?”

  He smiled. “Now you’re thinking like me.” He pulled his computer out and set it on the table. “The letters started coming three years ago. What happened in your life three years ago?” He punched some buttons on his computer and turned it around.

  Her eyes widened as she looked at the screen. “The Simon Says Die serial killer case. Every time the team successfully wraps up a major investigation, Casey throws a party for us, a big shindig with family and everything. And he always brings a professional photographer to take a picture of the agents who worked the case.”

  “This picture of you and your team,” he said, tapping his screen, “wasn’t just local to Savannah. It was picked up nationally. This ran in USA Today.”

  “Meaning the killer could have seen it. Matt, he must not realize I’d lost my memory. He must think I remember him, and where I . . . where we used to live. He sent those letters with the ‘Ashes, ashes’ line because of Becca. He thought I would remember her singing me to sleep at night.” Her brow wrinkled. “But what about the names of the victims? Are those supposed to mean something to me too?”

  “You tell me. Do they?”

  “Maybe. Maybe they do. Some of them have always seemed familiar, but not all of them. Sharon Johnson’s name never seemed familiar. John Crawford’s name wasn’t familiar.”

  “The names weren’t the only thing he put on those letters,” he reminded her.

  “Right. He always put that curlicue on them. Do you think that was something I used to put on my drawings, when I was coloring or something?”

  “It’s possible. It’s a workable theory, at least.”

  She rubbed her temples as if a headache was starting up. “Let’s play this all the way out. He wants to find me, but we don’t know why. And he thinks if he sends those letters I’ll realize who sent them. All this time he’s been giving me clues, thinking I would remember.” Her gaze shot to his. “He took Tonya as bait. He wanted to make sure I would come . . . home.” She shook her head. “But I don’t know where ‘home’ is. How are we supposed to find her?”

  “That’s where the map comes into play.” He took out a pen and drew lines across the map. Some of them intersected, some didn’t.

  Tessa scooted her chair beside his. “What are you doing?”

  “I’m using my own crude form of geographical profiling.” He drew a large circle that encompassed Murray on one side and Madisonville and all of Hopkins County on the other. “I’m breaking my own rule and making some major assumptions, but it feels right. Everything in Kentucky that involves our killer, that we’re aware of, happened either near the town of Murray or here in Hopkins County. I’m assuming the killer is somewhere in this big circle that encompasses both areas.”

  “That’s still a lot of territory, three counties besides Hopkins and Calloway, where Murray is.”

  “Yes, but we don’t have any clues relating to those other counties, and I’m betting on Hopkins, since that’s where your car accident was. Plus, there aren’t any matching coal mines in Murray.”

  “All right. Seems reasonable. We focus on Hopkins County. Why did you draw those lines on the map?”

  “Those are the major highways. The killer’s profile says he’ll avoid living near major population centers. I think that naturally extends to major highways. He doesn’t want to draw any attention. And you mentioned that you were always afraid of the woods. I think he lives in a heavily wooded area, near an old, closed-down mine, several miles away from the nearest town and nowhere near a major highway. The closest town would be small, without a lot of contact with people from other areas who might have heard of any of his kills.”

  Tessa picked up his pen and bent over the map. “Did you verify whether Stephens was accurate when he circled the closed-down mines?”

  “I did. And he was right. There are only the three.”

  She studied them for a moment, studied the areas around each mine, the highways nearby, then drew a big circle around one small town, Stoneyville. “That’s where he is.”

  Matt grinned. “You’d make an excellent private investigator, Special Agent James.”

  She cocked a brow and smiled right back. “And you’d make an excellent special agent, Mr. Buchanan.” Her smile faded. “If he’s here, I’m not allowed to go near any of the evidence. Casey’s worried that would taint the case against the killer.”

  “Then we call Casey and tell him our theory. Have him get some agents up here to see if Hoffman is anywhere around here
.”

  “Agreed. But . . .”

  “But what?”

  “It’ll take half a day to get a group of agents up here. If Hoffman has Tonya, she may not have half a day.”

  “Then what do you want to do?”

  She studied the map, her brow furrowing as she considered everything. When she looked back up, her face was a mask of determination. “I’ll call Casey and tell him to get some agents here as quickly as possible. But I’m not waiting for them. You and I can do the initial legwork to narrow down the area where Hoffman might be holding Tonya. We’re not breaking any of Casey’s rules by doing that. As soon as we think we know where Hoffman is, we back off and let Casey do the rest.”

  He nodded his approval. “Looks like we’re going to Stoneyville.”

  SHERIFF LATHAM SQUINTED up at the less-than-adequate lighting above his dining-room table for perhaps the third time that morning. Should have changed the damn fixture out years ago, but Betsy had loved the frilly, useless light and, as always, he’d been helpless to say no whenever she asked him for anything. As usual, when he thought of her, his gaze strayed to the last photograph they’d had taken together, hanging in its place of honor over the fancy table she’d loved so much.

  The cuckoo clock chirped from the kitchen, reminding him he didn’t have time to moon over his late wife’s picture. If she was here she’d slap him silly for wasting even a minute when a seventeen-year-old girl’s life was at stake.

  He picked up the picture Special Agent Tessa James had given him, memorizing the curve of the girl’s face, the exact shade of her hair, but mostly the eyes. The eyes were what made a person. The old adage that the eyes were the window to a person’s soul rang true with him. He’d always made a point of studying people’s eyes to get the measure of their character.

  Or to identify their body.

  He hoped that wouldn’t be necessary in this case. He set the picture back on the table, out of the way, and pulled the profile toward him, the profile of the man believed to have taken that young girl. The profile of the same man who’d eluded him all these years, the man who’d killed the only Jane Doe he’d never been able to identify in his entire career.