Mistake in Christmas River

by Meg Muldoon

  “That kid we brought in for questioning when Amelia was reported missing – the one who worked at the gas station across from the truck stop where the girls disappeared? He knew something he wasn’t saying. I’d bet what years I have left on it. He knew something about what happened to the Delgado girl. But we could never get it out of him, and we could never prove he had anything to do with her disappearance. So we had to let him go.”

  I felt the hair on the back of my neck stand up.

  Sully shook his head, looking off in deep thought.

  “That was one tough kid. Most grown men left our interrogations crying like little girls. But this kid never cracked. There was something icy about him. Too icy, if you ask me.”

  Rex had mentioned that there’d been a suspect interviewed, but that his name had never been released to the press.

  Vicky leaned forward in her chair.

  “Do you remember his name, Mr. Coe?” Vicky asked. “That part of the file was lost in the fire at the station in 1999.”

  Sully smiled for a long moment, as if pleased to be holding the power for the first time in the conversation.

  “I do remember, Ms. Delgado. And I’ll tell you. But I want to talk to Cinnamon first. Just so you two don’t run off as soon as you’ve got what you came here to get.”

  Vicky’s expression became strained.

  I could tell she didn’t like the arrangement one bit.

  But I could see no way around it.

  If we wanted to know what this missing piece of the case file was, then this was what would need to be done.

  I nodded silently at Vicky.

  She hesitated for a long moment.

  Then she stood up.

  “Remember the signal, Cinnamon,” she rasped under her breath. “And don’t hesitate to use it.”

  I nodded again.

  Vicky glanced one more time at Sully, giving him a stern look.

  Then she walked across the room to a chair in the far corner.

  Sully looked at me the way a spider might after finding a dying fly caught in his web.

  ***

  “How’s my old pal Warren these days?”

  I glanced at the guard, who stood several feet away, monitoring the row of prisoners on the other side of the pane of glass.

  “I don’t think we have time to talk about my grandfather.”

  “Oh, sure we do,” Sully said. “Is the old chatterbox still having poker nights?”

  I didn’t answer.

  Warren didn’t know that I was here talking to Sully, and I had decided I wasn’t going to tell him, either.

  As a rule of thumb, I didn’t like keeping secrets from the old man.

  But in this instance, it seemed like the most thoughtful thing to do.

  He would have never approved of this. And I had already made up my mind that I was going to come here today to help Vicky.

  “Well, tell the old geezer that we have a pretty good game back here,” Sully said when I didn’t respond. “Almost makes me feel like I’m home. Just wish we had some of those poker night brownies you used to make to go with it. Those were good.”

  “What is it you want, Sully?”

  The knowing smile on his face faded a little. That was followed by a long pause. Those hawk eyes of his sized me up.

  “I know you think I’m some monster,” he said, pressing the phone receiver closer to his mouth. “And maybe you’ve got a right to think that way. But I’m not a monster, Cinnamon. I’ve got a heart beating in here, same as you.”

  He tapped his chest.

  “I’m not proud of how I acted that night. Greed turns men into foolish creatures. And I…”

  He trailed off, clearing his throat.

  “I need you to make a call for me,” he said.

  I raised my eyebrows.

  “Why can’t you make it yourself?”

  He cleared his throat again, looking past my shoulder at Vicky and lowering his voice.

  “Because I can’t.”

  I leaned back in the uncomfortable chair.

  “I won’t do anything illegal for you, Sully. That’s out of the question, so—”

  “It’s not illegal,” he said, cutting me off. “It’s—”

  He leaned into the phone.

  “It’s personal,” he said quietly.

  Sully sucked in a deep breath.

  “You remember my daughter, don’t you?”

  I hesitated for a moment, then nodded.

  I remembered him talking about her the December he was arrested. He was supposed to go spend Christmas with her and his grandson out in Las Vegas.

  I also remembered her absence from the trial.

  “She stopped talking to me,” Sully said. “All my letters get returned. The times I’ve tried calling, she hangs up on me.”

  I thought I saw shame in his eyes, but I couldn’t be sure.

  I wasn’t sure if Sully Coe was capable of actually feeling shame.

  “I thought that if you called her, she might listen to you. She might…”

  He gulped hard.

  “She was my little girl, Cinnamon. And I was her hero. She thought the world of me. She believed that I could do anything. And when all of this happened, she…”

  He shook his head.

  “I just need you to call her for me.”

  “And say what? Say that you didn’t try to kill me that night? Say that you’re a good person?”

  “Gosh dang it, I already told you I’m not proud of that, Cinnamon,” he said between clenched teeth. “And I’m not asking you to forgive me for what I did.”

  “You haven’t even apologized for it, Sully. And now you want me to call your daughter and tell her that you’re an upstanding guy?”

  I let out a scoff.

  He looked away.

  There was some sort of emotion in his face, all right. But knowing him, it was hard to tell if it was really shame, or a just a narcissist feeling sorry for himself.

  “I am regretful, if that’s what you want to hear,” he said. “More regretful than you could know. Believe me. I ruined a lot of things that holiday season.”

  He looked dead in my eyes.

  “But, Cinnamon. I can’t live knowing… knowing that she hates me. She’s the most important person in my life. And I need her to know that I miss her and that I still...”

  I saw a sight that I thought I’d never see in my whole life, then.

  Tears welling up in Sully Coe’s hawk-like eyes.

  “Please. Just tell her to read my last letter. I explain it all there. That’s all I ask. And tell her I’m not expecting forgiveness. Just the opportunity to say how sorry I am.”

  He drew in a deep, ragged breath.

  “And tell her… tell her I love her.”

  I bit my lower lip, wondering if Sully Coe was actually being truthful about any of it, or if he had a larger scheme going with trying to talk to his daughter again.

  But as I studied him, I realized that it didn’t matter.

  In the big scheme of things, it was a small request.

  And I would make a simple phone call to Brenda Coe if that’s what it took.

  “I’ll call her,” I said. “You have my word.”

  His face lit up and he clutched the phone.

  “Thank you, Cinnamon. I’m… I’m indebted to you and—”

  “What’s the name of that suspect?” I said, cutting him off before he could say anything more.

  The emotion in face receded like a tide going out.

  He glanced across the room at Vicky.

  Then he told me.

  There had to be some mistake.

  Chapter 44

  “I’m sorry,” Vicky said, wiping at her eyes with the back of her sleeve. “I don’t ever get emotional like this.”

  “Do you want me to drive?”

  She shook her head.

  “I’ll be okay.”

  She focused her eyes harder on the stretch of desolate road, as i
f to prove her point.

  We were still about twenty minutes away from Christmas River on the lonely highway lined with towering Ponderosa pines. Fog crawled along the asphalt and the grey sky overhead was already dimming.

  Vicky had kept silent up until a minute earlier, when I had noticed tears beginning to drip down her cheeks and I’d asked if she was okay.

  She wiped away another round of them as they spilled over the rims of her eyes.

  “It just hurts, you know? My sister wasn’t any saint. What Sully said back there was all true. She stole money from our mom. She worked in a bad place with bad people. She probably did some bad things, too. She was a lost youth.”

  She sniveled.

  “But there was more to Millie than that. That’s what the cops investigating the case never seemed to understand. There was more to her than the people she hung out with or the origins of her last name, you know? But nobody cared. Not really. And not enough. Her case didn’t even become known until Laura Baynes disappeared the next year.”

  Vicky shook her head.

  “Right after Millie went missing, I came out here to Christmas River to put up some missing posters and to see if I could find anybody who had seen anything the day she disappeared. I went to some of the local businesses and handed out the posters. When I walked through town the next day, only two of them had actually put the missing flyers up on their bulletin boards. I found some in the trash at the park, too.”

  Vicky bit her lip, and I felt a wave of sorrow wash over me as she spoke.

  “I went to go talk to Sheriff Coe about Millie on that visit, too. He said he was working around the clock on the case, but I knew he was lying. I could see in his eyes that it didn’t matter to him. He’d already written her off because he thought she was most likely a worthless runaway. Or if somebody had hurt her, I knew he thought she’d had it coming.”

  Vicky let out a staggered breath.

  “They didn’t care about what happened to Millie. But when Laura went missing, you couldn’t throw a stone without seeing a picture of her all over the news. Because she was middle class, white, blonde, and pretty. And when a pretty blonde woman goes missing, you always hear about it.”

  I closed my eyes for a moment, hearing the raw pain in Vicky’s voice as she spoke.

  Racism came in many ugly forms and guises, and it was a shameful truth that this very thing had played itself out in thousands of missing persons cases over the years.

  I struggled, trying to come up with something heartfelt to say.

  In the end, I could only seem to find four words. Four words that did little good.

  “I’m so sorry, Vicky,” I finally said, shaking my head.

  “There was just so much more to Millie than what Coe said in there. And I’m not making excuses for her, but we didn’t have it easy growing up. It was hard to come out of that home and not be messed up. Our mom was a real piece of work. She never got what she wanted in life, so she took it out on us. Millie shouldn’t have stolen that money from her, but maybe if I had been in her shoes, I would have done the same thing.”

  She wiped at her nose.

  “I became a cop because of what happened. Because I never wanted anybody else to go through something like this. To not know what happened? It just… it just kills you.”

  The words lingered as a silence settled over the car. I looked out the window at the stark trees passing by in the mist.

  Vicky glanced up in the rearview mirror for a long moment at the car behind us. The driver had hit their brights for a second by accident, catching the lieutenant’s attention.

  Vicky fixed her eyes back on the highway, wiping at her cheeks.

  She cleared her throat and took in a deep breath.

  “Anyway, thanks for seeing Sully with me today, Cin. And for being so brave. Maybe this is the lead that we’ve been looking for.”

  I smiled, glancing over at her.

  “I hope so, Vicky.”

  But as I said it, my stomach was twisting up in knots, thinking about the name that Sully Coe had given us.

  On one hand, I hoped that it would lead somewhere for Vicky’s sake.

  But on the other, I prayed that it didn’t. That it was all a mistake somehow. That—

  The car jolted forward unexpectedly.

  A split second later, it was completely out of control.

  I didn’t even have time to gasp.

  Or to scream.

  Everything became a hard blur of trees and screeching tires.

  Chapter 45

  When I opened my eyes again, the car was making a strange noise, and a white, foul-smelling smoke was coming from the hood.

  What was left of the hood, anyway. It was mangled around the trunk of a ponderosa pine, the driver’s side taking the majority of the damage.

  I looked over at the driver’s seat.

  Panic ricocheted through me like a stray bullet.

  A stream of blood trickled down the side of her face.

  “Vicky!? Oh my God. Vicky, wake up! Wake up!”

  I held my breath, the smell of smoke flooding my nostrils.

  She wasn’t moving.

  I grabbed her shoulder, shaking it.

  “Vicky!” I yelled.

  I watched.

  Hoping.

  Praying.

  Her eyelids fluttered suddenly and there was a low groan of pain.

  Relief flooded my body.

  I jumped into action, unbuckling my seat belt and tugging at hers.

  “That car…” she mumbled groggily. “That car… it was…”

  But we had no time for talking now.

  “We have to get out of here,” I said through clenched teeth. “Right now.”

  I got her seatbelt unbuckled and I pushed open the passenger’s door. I got out, noticing that more smoke plumes were streaming from the hood than before.

  And now I could see, too, that there was no way Vicky could get out on her side – the driver’s door was completely twisted and blocked by the tree.

  She would have to come out the passenger’s side.

  I reached back in, grabbing her arms.

  “C’mon, Vicky.”

  She cried out in pain as I tugged hard.

  I had no idea how badly she was injured. And I knew that you were never supposed to move someone with a head injury.

  But it seemed that there was no choice.

  I pulled harder. She moved her legs sluggishly over the middle seat, her voice coming out in a groggy wail as she did.

  Maybe it was the intensity of the moment or the fear of what would happen if we didn’t get away from the car.

  But I grabbed Vicky then with a strength I didn’t know that I possessed. I pulled her across the seat and down onto the ground. Then I gripped her hands and pulled her up, practically dragging her from the accident site and toward the highway.

  “That car, Cin…” she mumbled. “That car, it was—”

  Vicky didn’t get to finish her sentence.

  Moments later, a fiery explosion ripped through the fog.

  Chapter 46

  “It wasn’t any accident, Daniel. I know it. We were targeted out there today.”

  I sat at the kitchen table, trying to steady my trembling hands by gripping the ceramic mug of hot tea.

  A shudder kept echoing through my body, and I couldn’t seem to stay still.

  Daniel held me through the tremors.

  He’d hardly let me go since arriving at the scene of the crash hours earlier. When he’d seen what was left of Vicky’s SUV, the look on his face had said it all.

  It had been a look of pure shock.

  “It wasn’t an accident,” I said again through chattering teeth.

  “It’s okay, Cin. It’s okay.”

  After the paramedics arrived, they had inspected me, finding that I’d sustained a few bruises on the right side of my body. Thankfully, nothing was broken and I didn’t need to go to the hospital.

  Vicky had
n’t been as lucky.

  They’d taken her by ambulance, and we’d followed behind in Daniel’s cruiser. It took several hours of sitting outside the ER before anybody could tell us how bad she was hurt.

  She’d broken several ribs and had significant lacerations on her left leg. But the thing the doctors were most concerned about was the head injury. During the crash, she’d hit her head hard against the driver’s side window. The doctors were concerned about swelling and brain damage, and they had told us that surgery was a possibility.

  I didn’t want to leave the hospital that night. I wanted to stay so Vicky would know that we were there for her. That she wasn’t alone.

  But Daniel said there was nothing we could do for her on our end. And that I’d been through some trauma of my own and I needed to rest.

  Daniel promised that we’d go back first thing in the morning to check on her.

  “Cin?”

  I looked up at him, realizing that this wasn’t the first time he’d said my name, trying to get my attention.

  “Is the Tylenol kicking in?” he repeated in a gentle tone.

  I bit my lip, fighting off another round of shivers.

  “That car had been behind us for a while,” I said, staring down at the wooden table. “I remember. Like maybe it had been following us. It was a minivan of some sort. Vicky saw it, too. She said…”

  I closed my eyes, thinking of how she wailed as I was pulling her out of the smoking car.

  Thinking of that bright blood trickling down her temple.

  “She must have seen the driver,” I said in a shaky voice. “She looked back once when the car flashed its brights. She must know…”

  Daniel nodded.

  “We’re working round the clock on it, Cin. We’ll get the person who did this. I promise. Just try… try not to think about it so much right now.”

  But I couldn’t stop.

  “It has to be connected to the case. No way was it random, Daniel. No way was it…”

  I suddenly realized that tears were streaming down my face.

  Daniel held me tighter, making a shushing noise.

  “We’ll figure it all out tomorrow,” he said. “But you need rest now.”

  He looked down at me, biting his lip and brushing away the tears from my cheeks.