by Dan Ames
“Yes, just visiting. I came with friends.” The girl tucked a lock of hair behind her ear. He gave her his most charming smile. The girl blushed slightly.
The friends part was disturbing, but they obviously weren’t with her now. Didn’t care enough to keep track of her.
He made small talk, asking her where she was visiting from, her family, for more details on these friends. The girl—her name was Emily—answered eagerly. She was alone for the day. Her friends were off tracking some kind of rodent to record its breeding habits.
“Biology majors,” she added. “We’re all working on our master’s, but I’m the only liberal arts geek. History,” she added. “They have plans all week, but I told them it was fine. I’m independent.” She waved the map and laughed.
She seemed glad to have someone to talk with, and he kept up the flirtatious touches. He shifted his weight, so he was in her space and then moved back out. He plucked a nonexistent bug from her hair, and then flushed and apologized for his forwardness.
She shook her head. “No, no, that’s fine. It isn’t like I want to walk around with a bug nesting in my hair.” Then she laughed.
It was a nice laugh. She brushed her hair from her face.
She was flirting back. But then they always did.
He played on her love of history, sharing some stories he’d picked up about Good Isle, when it was settled, how trapping drew the French here in the 1700s and some rubbish about how he was descended from a French trapper and Native American woman. “Ojibwa,” he explained.
She seemed impressed. He talked some more. It was fun, playing this part, convincing her he was someone he wasn’t.
A few minutes later, they were standing in the shade of a nearby building, both laughing, like they’d known each other for years.
The sweet ones were the easiest. They wanted to believe humanity was good, that people were well-intentioned.
He touched the map she still held, directing the conversation back to her and her plans.
“Well, there’s plenty of great things to do around here and lots of historical sites. Have you been around the lake yet? There’s the remains of a fort on the north side, not much left of it, but it is still pretty fascinating. It’s hard to get to without a boat.”
The girl shook her head. “No, there’s supposed to be a trolley around downtown. It takes you on a tour? I was going to do that.”
“Oh.” He frowned. “That sounds like fun.” He grimaced.
“What?”
“Nothing. It’s just…” He hesitated as if working out what he wanted to say next. “It’s just…”
“What? Is there something wrong with the trolley?”
He shook his head. “No, not at all if you like hanging with old people and families with toddlers and screaming babies.” He made another face. “My niece made me go with her last week.” He rolled his eyes. “I’m pretty sure we were the only ones not wearing diapers of some kind.”
Emily laughed, a real laugh. The kind that comes from deep inside.
He smiled. “I probably shouldn’t have said that.”
“No.” She touched his arm. “I appreciate the honesty. So, the trolley is out. Any ideas on how else I could squander a sunny afternoon?”
He had all kinds of ideas.
And he couldn’t wait to share each and every one of them with her.
Chapter Eight
Two days later, I’d learned nothing new about the girl. To relieve some of my frustration at the wall we’d hit, I’d turned to one of the things that had always helped me clear my mind and focus.
Home renovation.
When I bought the house, it was with the knowledge that the whole place needed to be done from the roof to the basement and everything in between.
I’d started with the in between and was ready to move on to the basement.
So, it was 8 a.m. and I was hoping to get past the wall I’d encountered in the investigation by taking down an actual one in my house.
My friend, maybe more than a friend, Billy “Dynamite” Dawkins, had come over bright and early to help me assess my next step in project home beautiful.
Dynamite, as he was still called by many, was a former boxing champion who’d retired to Good Isle. My first case here had involved him and I’d originally thought he might be a magnet for trouble. But since then he’d been good. He hadn’t gotten himself mixed up in any business other than helping me renovate my house.
Dawkins owned a gorgeous house that I’d admittedly done a lot of ooh-ing and ahh-ing over. And sometimes, I needed a second pair of hands or eyes. So, when he’d offered to help me spruce up my place, the answer was an easy yes.
The fact that we were kind of growing closer wasn’t something I was overlooking. My brother, John was happy to tease me about my romantic prospects, but I preferred to keep those things on the down-low. Especially now being in a much smaller town, gossip about my love life was the last thing I needed.
Together—and sometimes with the aid of a little wine or beer—Dawkins and I had been getting to know one another, bonding over old houses.
Just then, there was a knock at the door.
As expected there was a contractor in overalls waiting on the other side of the door. I needed a combination of plaster and some drywall installed and I’d found a guy online.
A pair of sunglasses hid his eyes, but I could tell he was a little younger than I’d thought he’d be and aside from the overalls, a little nondescript. Non-threatening. That was, I guessed, a good trait for someone who was dependent on people opening their homes to them.
He introduced himself as Jake Terrace, the person I’d contacted online. He walked in and I noted he was average height with a slim build. Light brown hair. If he’d been a woman, I’d have called it dirty blonde. Overall though, average summed him up fairly well.
Until he smiled. Then I realized he was actually pretty good-looking. He took off his sunglasses and slipped them into a chest pocket, revealing dark, kind of piercing blue eyes. I immediately reassessed my average tag.
“So, is contracting a family business?” I asked, making small talk as I led him down to the basement.
Most businesses in Good Isle were family businesses inherited from parent to child. Some newer businesses were being put up for the tourists, but most had been around for decades. Even the t-shirt shops.
“Yeah, got it from my dad,” Jake said. “He’s the Dave of Dave’s Drywall.” He gave a self-deprecating laugh. “I don’t think he thought about how that name would sound when I took over and didn’t have the same first name.”
I laughed. “It could be worse,” I pointed out.
“That’s what I tell myself, things can always be worse.”
We entered the basement where Dawkins was on all fours, inspecting the floors. “These aren’t as bad as we thought,” he said, looking up. When he saw Jake, he frowned and leapt to his feet in an agile bulldog kind of way that was strangely impressive.
He held out one meaty hand. “You the drywall guy?”
Jake nodded and gave his hand a quick shake. He shifted a bit from foot to foot as if Dawkins was making him uncomfortable. “Yeah, mind if I just…”
I gestured to the walls. “Have at it.”
Jake walked between us on his way from one side of the room to the other. I tilted my head, watching as he pulled a retractable tape measure from his pocket and ran its length down the wall.
Dawkins cleared his throat. “Until you get your washer and dryer installed, you can use mine.”
Dawkins’ house was closer to mine than the laundromat was, and I assumed he wouldn’t expect me to bring a roll of quarters along. Both good things. But doing laundry at his house seemed like a step of some sort. A step I wasn’t sure I was ready to take.
“I could…” I agreed, trailing out the word to indicate my hesitation.
Dawkins’ gaze slid to the contractor and he shoved his hands in his pockets. “You should. It does
n’t make sense for you to waste time and money going to the laundromat.”
Jake walked over.
“So how long have you two been dating?” He smiled in a kind-of-knowing way.
I froze. “We’re not,” I blurted out. Trying to keep a professional demeanor and avoid making eye contact with Dawkins, I asked, “So, what’s the estimate?”
“Depends on what you want to do,” the contractor responded.
My phone rang—giving me another out. I sighed and gestured from the contractor to Dawkins. “Could you shoot me a text with the numbers? If it sounds good, I’ll get back to you later to set up a time or whatever.”
I walked up the stairs, pulling my phone out of my pocket as I did. “Rockne.”
It was Peyton. “We’ve finished going through the missing persons database.”
My breath caught in my throat. “And?”
“We have a match.”
Chapter Nine
I entered the station and headed straight for Donovan and Peyton. “Who’s the match?”
“Charlotte Richards,” Donovan said, holding up a picture.
It was the dead girl, all right. She looked a lot healthier and prettier in the photograph, but it was easy to tell she was the victim.
“Says here,” Peyton said, glancing down at a sheet of paper. “…that she was originally from Chicago. She’s up here in northern Michigan on vacation with three friends from college. They reported her missing when she didn’t return to the hotel that night.”
“All right,” I said. “Let’s bring them in for questioning. See what they remember.”
“Already did that,” Donovan said. He gestured towards our interrogation room.
I eyed the pair of them. “So, when exactly did this ID come in?”
They glanced at each other. Donovan, however, just stared back at me. The hairs on the back of my neck bristled. They knew I’d wanted to know of any news as soon as it came in. If the friends had already been contacted and made it to the station, the ID had been made hours earlier, probably even the day before.
Peyton dropped her gaze to her feet and then brought it back up to somewhere in the vicinity of my face. “We wanted to make sure, and the girls haven’t ID’d her officially.”
“And we know how to do our jobs,” Donovan added.
Maybe he had a point. Being boss meant letting go of control, at least somewhat. But not completely.
I leaned forward and caught his gaze. “Make sure of it.” Then I turned and made my way to the room where the girls waited.
When I entered the interrogation room, three heads swiveled towards me. A trifecta of perfect hair care: blonde, brunette, and redhead. They were young and pretty and dressed like tourists in T-shirts, shorts and flip-flops.
A box of tissues sat in front of them. The blonde pulled a tissue out, dabbed her eyes and then crunched it into a tiny white mass and dropped it onto the table in front of them. The other two held tissues of their own. The brunette opened and closed her fist on hers as if trying to pump reassurance from it. The redhead just held hers, still smooth and unused. Her eyes were dry, but they were wide and hinted at shock.
Obviously, Donovan or Peyton had already delivered the bad news. I could only hope it had been Peyton and done with a bit more finesse than what the girls’ grief hinted at.
Peyton stood to the side, her arms folded, and her face bored. Annoyance surged inside me again.
“Ladies, I’m Chief Rockne of Good Isle, as I’m sure Officer Peyton told you,” I said, sitting down across from the three girls. “You reported your friend, Charlotte missing a bit ago.”
The redhead nodded. “We were supposed to go home a day ago, but we’ve been waiting around, to see if maybe… she’d come back. But then the police called and they told us…”
Her attention shifted to Peyton and then back to me. Her eyes were wide and begging me to tell her that Peyton had been wrong. Beside her, her two friends froze, neither even taking a breath as they waited.
“Yes, as I guess you’ve heard, we think we’ve found Charlotte,” I said.
The silence shifted to sobs and gasps. Each girl processed my confirmation in her own way. When they had calmed, I slid a picture of the dead girl across the table.
As one, they pulled back. The girl in the middle, the redhead, closed her eyes, but the brunette nodded. “That’s Charlotte.”
I nodded back. “Later, we’ll need one of you to go with Officer Peyton to identify… Charlotte in person.”
The brunette rubbed her face. “I can go,” she said.
“In a bit,” I told the girl. “After we’ve talked.”
The brunette looked at her friends. The redhead grabbed her hand and squeezed. “Olive’s always calm,” she said.
“She knew this was coming, though,” the blonde added. “She told us, she said that Charlotte was dead.”
“Why would you say that?” I asked Olive.
She lifted one shoulder in a half-hearted shrug. “We were all out at a bar when Charlotte went off with some guy. That was the last we saw of her. Charlotte wasn’t the type to check out on us like that. To just run off. If she’d been okay, she’d have texted. And she hadn’t posted anything on Twitter or Snapchat either. Or Instagram. She loves… loved Instagram.” Her face folded.
The blonde jumped back into the conversation. “If Tiffany had gone off with someone and been gone for a while we wouldn’t have worried so much.” She looked at the redhead from the corner of her eyes.
The redhead seemed unfazed by the claim. “Yeah. I’m, uh, I like guys. So...”
“You don’t have to explain yourself,” I said, trying to keep the conversation on topic.
“But Charlotte doesn’t just go off with people easily,” the blonde added. “We were surprised she seemed to like this guy so quickly.”
A guy. That was good. Sounded like they’d possibly seen their friend’s killer. “Did any of you talk to this guy?” I asked.
They shook their heads.
“Sara was in the bathroom,” Tiffany said.
“I’m Sara,” the blonde added.
I resisted the urge to say that yes, through the power of elimination, I could figure out that she was Sara.
“Sara was in the bathroom,” Tiffany repeated. “And Olive was talking to the bartender. Charlotte had gone over to the jukebox to put in a song when this guy came up and started talking to her. They seemed to be hitting it off. They were both laughing and she ignored my looks to see if she wanted rescuing, so I didn’t want to go over and ruin the mood, you know?”
“Tiffany ruins moods,” Sara added.
This time Tiffany shot her a look.
I took in Tiffany’s bright, carefully styled red hair, her low-cut top, and her shorts which were just a shade shorter and tighter than her friends’. Charlotte’s picture had shown a pretty but innocent-looking girl. I could definitely see how a girl like Charlotte would be thrown over for a girl like Tiffany once Tiffany joined the conversation.
“How long did they talk?” I asked. “Did any of you overhear what they were saying?”
“They talked for about fifteen minutes. They stayed near the jukebox the entire time,” Tiffany said. “We couldn’t hear anything. The bar was crowded and the jukebox was a ways away.”
“We were giving her thumbs-up,” Sara said. “We—we thought, you know, she’s kind of shy. We were doing this big summer trip, sort of a last hoorah kind of thing before going back to school. We wanted her to have a fun night with a handsome guy.”
“Can you give us a description of the man she left with?” I asked.
“Cute?” Sara offered.
I held in my sigh.
“He was tall,” Olive said. “Light hair. Blue eyes. Looked clean-shaven and all of that, but older, like ten years older or more than we are.”
“Tall? How tall?” If you swung a board at five feet five inches, it wouldn’t have disturbed one perfectly brushed hair on any of their he
ads. I wasn’t sure what tall meant to them.
“At least six feet,” Olive responded.
Tiffany shook her head. “No way. My dad’s that height and he’s way taller than this guy was.”
I looked at Sara for her vote.
“I never got that close. He was taller than Charlotte.”
Okay, so that wasn’t helpful. I nodded anyway.
The three sat there for a moment, silent. I could see the reality of all of this was setting in.
Sarah’s eyes grew misty. Then she blinked and looked up at me, composed. “He looked really nice, was the thing. You know those people that you just look at and you can sense right away that they’re nice or kind?”
I nodded. Many killers appeared that way. They weren’t menacing or creepy the way that people thought. How would they get so close to their victims if they were? They just looked like the guy next door.
“I’m never going to a bar again,” Sara added. “I’m never trusting anyone again.”
Olive reached out and took her hand.
“Could you tell me any other details?” I asked. “What time it was, or which bar, or anything?”
“It was the Bait n’ Tackle,” Olive said.
The Bait n’ Tackle was a popular bar that catered to a lot of tourists, and locals—especially men—who liked to sleep with tourists. It wasn’t right in Good Isle, either. It was over near the main road that led to several local lake towns. This guy could be from any one of those towns. Hell, he could be from across the damn lake. It wasn’t out of the realm of possibility. If you went to a bar inside a town, like Good Isle, you could bet that the people in there were locals, and then a few vacationers who were staying pretty close by. And you could bet someone would remember you better than these girls remembered this guy.
Maybe the killer knew that. Maybe that was why he’d picked the Bait n’ Tackle.
“Charlotte went off with the guy at around eight,” Tiffany said, pulling a bit away from Olive so she could speak. “I remember because I’d just pulled out my phone to look at a text, and the clock on there said eight-oh-five. I looked up, and Charlotte was waving goodbye to us and leaving with him. She looked happy. He did too.”
