Presumed Dead Read online

  Dedication

  For Scarlett

  Title Page

  PRESUMED DEAD

  Mason Cross

  Contents

  Dedication

  Title Page

  April 6, 2004

  Thursday

  1

  2

  3

  Friday

  4

  5

  6

  7

  8

  Saturday

  9

  10

  11

  12

  13

  14

  15

  16

  17

  18

  19

  20

  21

  22

  23

  24

  Sunday

  25

  26

  27

  28

  29

  30

  31

  32

  33

  34

  35

  36

  Monday

  37

  38

  39

  40

  41

  42

  43

  44

  45

  46

  47

  Tuesday

  48

  49

  50

  51

  52

  53

  54

  55

  56

  57

  58

  59

  60

  61

  Wednesday

  62

  63

  64

  65

  66

  67

  68

  69

  70

  71

  72

  73

  74

  75

  76

  77

  78

  79

  80

  81

  82

  83

  ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

  ALSO BY MASON CROSS

  Copyright

  APRIL 6, 2004

  It was raining again, but not like it had rained on the night she had last seen her father.

  This was merely a moderate downpour. Nothing that would flood the low part of the south road, or make the river burst its banks; both of which had happened over the winter. She sat in the easy chair by the window and watched as the rain fell through the branches of the big oak tree and splashed in the puddles in the yard. From the living-room window, she could see all the way down the hill. She saw the lights of the car two minutes before it got close enough to be sure that it was a sheriff’s department vehicle.

  She heard the creak of a floorboard and turned to see her mother standing in the doorway. She was staring out of the window as the blue-and-white patrol car reached their house and stopped. Her hand was pressed against her chest, her eyes wide.

  Her mother didn’t look at her. She turned back to the window, in time to see the sheriff and one of his men get out, fitting their hats on and hunching over in their black raincoats. They approached the door with expressions darker than the late afternoon sky. Time seemed to be suspended in the gap between the car doors closing and the inevitable ring of the doorbell.

  Her mother’s voice was almost inaudible. She had known this was coming for five months. She was resigned to it now. It didn’t make it any easier to hear.

  “They found him.”

  Present Day

  Thursday

  1

  Carter Blake

  After the service, most of the mourners moved on to the gathering at Betty’s house. I hung back, watching as the crowd shuffled away from her graveside. I found a spot by a tall pine tree that was far enough from any of the knots of people hugging or smoking that I wouldn’t get drawn into a conversation. A white-haired man in a rumpled black suit who looked to be in his early eighties squinted at me over the rims of his glasses. He stared at me for a few seconds before shaking his head and moving on. I didn’t know him, but maybe he had seen me around in the old days.

  I bowed my head, which made me fit in just fine in the circumstances, and everyone else filed past without comment. I recognized a few faces: all of them older and sadder. Nobody I felt like talking to, in particular. And then I saw a familiar face. Karen Day’s mother, Lauren. She looked in good health.

  I hadn’t been back to Ravenwood in more than twenty years. I hadn’t thought much about the place in almost as long. Only one thing could have brought me back, and unfortunately that one thing had happened. I didn’t intend to linger: just stay long enough to pay my respects. But it was a crisp and cloudless late-November day, and I felt an unexpected urge to hang around a little longer. Perhaps it was the funeral, perhaps it was being back in a place I had put down roots, once upon a time.

  I was parked a couple of streets down from the church, and I took a circuitous route back to the car, partly to avoid the crowds, partly because it would take me past the house where I used to live.

  Forty-two Hemlock Road was still there, though I knew Betty had long since moved to the small apartment where she died. The house had weathered the years well. The lawn was neatly kept, the paint job looked fresh. A shiny red kids’ bicycle was lying on its side at the line where the grass met the sidewalk, its owner clearly having no cause to worry about passing thieves. There was a love seat hanging from the lilac tree out in the front yard – a new addition. When I looked closer, I could just make out a frayed, gray loop of rope curled around the thickest branch, from the tire swing I had hung there a lifetime ago. I wondered if I was the only one of Betty’s kids to come back for the funeral. It had been pure chance I had happened to read about her passing. I guessed the rest of them were out there somewhere. I had never formed any lasting friendships with any of the others she fostered. The only person I ever occasionally thought about from my Ravenwood days was Karen Day – the lost girl.

  I took a last look at the house and headed back down the hill toward Main Street. I was passing Dino’s Diner, reaching into my pockets for the car keys when I heard a name being called. A name I hadn’t gone by in twenty years.

  I turned and saw Karen Day’s mother, standing in the doorway of Dino’s, holding the door open. Lauren Day had to be in her mid-sixties by now, but was wearing it well. Her brown hair showed only a few streaks of gray. She was slim and had a narrow face, only a few lines around her eyes. She was dressed for the occasion. Dark pants, black shoes and a white blouse. No coat, so I guessed she had come out of the diner just to see me. I turned and retraced my steps. I hesitated over the appropriate greeting then she pulled me in for a hug, kissing me lightly on the cheek.

  “I thought that was you,” she said. “Are you staying in town?”

  I shook my head. “Just here for the funeral.”

  “It was a lovely service,” she said. “People always say that, though, don’t they?”

  She was still holding the door open. “Do you have time to get a coffee?”

  I hesitated, but made my mind up when I saw the hope in her eyes. What harm could it do?

  We went inside and sat down in a booth by the window and I ordered a black coffee. Lauren already had a full cup of Earl Grey in front of her.

  “It was good of you to come. We tried to get in touch with all of the kids, but …”

  “
Hard to find some people,” I said. “I saw the obituary in the Times.”

  It had been the first time I had picked up a physical newspaper in months. The previous customer had left it on the table at one of my regular breakfast places.

  She smiled. “Betty wouldn’t have minded. It was enough for her to know she had made some kind of difference.”

  “Dino isn’t around anymore, huh?” I observed as my coffee was delivered. Dino – a short, rotund guy with not much hair and even less regard for service with a smile. The diner was open seven days a week, seven a.m. till nine p.m., and if he took a day off, I never knew about it.

  She shook her head. “Heart attack. Ten years ago, maybe.”

  I wasn’t surprised. “You look well,” I said.

  She waved away the compliment. “You’re seeing me at my most presentable, dear. Weddings and funerals. So, what do you do now? Somebody said you had joined the military?”

  “That was a long time ago,” I said. “I work for myself now.”

  “Doing what?”

  “Consultancy. The work varies.”

  “My, that’s awfully vague.”

  I smiled. “I look for people. Usually they’re the sort of people who don’t want to be found. How about you?”

  She took a breath and hesitated a second. “Actually, I look for people too. I’ve been doing what I do for a lot of years. I started it up after what happened to Karen, figured I would get the ball rolling, but it’s just grown and grown.”

  Karen Day had been in the year above me in high school. She was tall, and had her mother’s brown hair and eyes. We were friends, but not close friends. Then again, none of my friends had been all that close.

  She had gone missing on the night of May 25, 1995. She had been working at the Esso station on the edge of town and left at eleven, after closing up. Nobody ever saw her alive again. Over the course of that long, hot summer, we searched for her. There were six hundred acres of woods separating Ravenwood from the next town. At first, we had teams of volunteers out there, all of us reassuring each other she would be found safe and well. The whole town searched for weeks. Gradually, it set in that if we found anything it would be a body. Little by little, the volunteers found other commitments, until there were only a few of us left. The first big storm of the fall brought her back. The coroner speculated that her killer had trapped her body under water, and that was how her corpse ended up on the riverbank. She had been dead for months, probably since the night she disappeared. Her killer was never found.

  “It’s called the Missing Foundation,” Lauren continued. “We have staff now, a half-dozen offices across the country. We work with families of people who go missing. We eventually found Karen, but not every family is so fortunate.”

  Fortunate. Some would think that an odd choice of words. I didn’t.

  “It sounds like important work.”

  She nodded. “I really think so.”

  We looked down at our drinks in silence for a few moments. I thought about Karen. How the whole town had gone from concern to foreboding to despair. I had gone through a different cycle. Building frustration that I couldn’t find her, rage when we learned her fate. I had never really forgotten those feelings. I couldn’t help but admire Lauren Day. She had channeled her own grief and sense of helplessness into something worthwhile, something that touched other lives.

  “Are you able to help everyone?”

  She considered. “Nothing can fill the hole in these families’ lives. Nothing. But in some way, we can usually help. There’s this one man I’ve been in contact with who—”

  She hesitated. I motioned for her to go on.

  “Obviously, confidentiality is important, but I don’t have to tell you his name. Some of our clients, we have a relationship that lasts years. This man is one of those. His sister was taken many years ago.”

  “Taken?”

  “They never found her body, but she was one of several people who disappeared in the same area at the same time.”

  She didn’t have to say any more. There are at least a couple of dozen serial killers operating in the United States at any given time, according to the experts. Some of them are never caught, some of their victims are never found. I have more knowledge about this subject than I would like.

  “Something happened recently that was curious,” she said.

  I met her eyes, realizing that perhaps there was a reason she was relating this particular story about this particular client. Maybe on some level, it was the reason we were having this conversation. She needed to talk to somebody about this case.

  “You have to understand,” she continued, “denial is incredibly common among these families, especially in the early days. This man never really got over his sister’s disappearance, but I always thought that intellectually he knew she was never coming home. Head and heart pull you in different ways, don’t they?”

  “What happened?”

  Lauren Day looked out at the street for a long moment.

  “His sister is dead. The authorities are sure of it, and deep down I believe he had accepted it too. But then something happened.”

  “What?”

  “He says he saw his sister. Alive.”

  2

  Carter Blake

  What do you know about the Devil Mountain Killer?

  Lauren Day’s question came back to me that evening as I turned my key in the door of the 40th-floor apartment in Battery Park City that was my home for the moment.

  I switched the coffee machine on in the kitchen, took my jacket and shoes off and sat down on the couch, looking out at the view of the Hudson that was one of the main reasons I hadn’t felt the urge to move on just yet.

  She was good: I didn’t realize I was being recruited until it was too late. Maybe she had been doing the work she was doing so long that she could identify the right skills in someone she needed to do a job.

  I had told Lauren I knew the name, but not much more than that. She gave me the potted history. The Devil Mountain Killer was the moniker given to the unidentified person or persons responsible for a series of murders and disappearances in northeast Georgia fifteen years ago. A rural, sparsely populated area, not far from the course of the Appalachian Trail.

  The killer had claimed at least nine victims, with more suspected, between August 2002 and October 2003. The murders attributed to him shared the same M.O.: killed by gunshots to the head from a .38 caliber pistol. The same .38 caliber pistol. The gender balance was almost even: five men and four women. There was no evidence of ante-mortem beatings or torture, no evidence of sexual assault. These were more like dispassionate executions: a double tap to the head. As far as the investigators could work out, the killings had always taken place out in the woods. Lonely stretches of highway, remote trails. The victims were hikers or hunters or drivers passing through, who must have stopped for the wrong person. The bodies were found concealed in rivers and shallow graves in the vicinity of Devil Mountain, hence the media-friendly name.

  The killer was never caught. Too often, they aren’t. The killings just ceased with as little explanation as they had started. People did what they always do when there’s a loose end: they speculated about what had happened. Some thought he had moved on to a new hunting ground, or gone to jail for another crime, others assumed that he had killed himself. The authorities worked along the same assumptions, looking closely at anyone from the area who fell into one of those categories. There were no similar killing sprees in nearby states that matched the pattern. They found candidates for the jail or suicide explanations: one man serving time for a stabbing in a bar fight, another for holding up a liquor store, and another who had hanged himself in the first week of November of that year. The lack of evidence left behind by the killer meant that there was frustratingly little information to work with to definitively rule any of the three in or
out. Both of the imprisoned men denied involvement, and the one who killed himself hadn’t left a note.

  Over the years, the media and the police moved on to fresher cases. It was still technically a live investigation, but the FBI had enough active murderers to catch without expending resources on the ones who were retired or dead.

  On the way home, I had stopped to buy a book on the case called Devil Mountain: State of Fear, by a guy called William P. Heaney, along with a Rand McNally state map of Georgia. In the middle of the book were a series of pictures showing some of the locations where bodies had been discovered. There were photographs of some of the lead investigators on the case, a couple of the suspects, and family snaps of some of the victims. I was looking at one of these.

  The man Lauren Day wanted me to talk to was named David Connor, and the girl in the photograph was his sister, Adeline.

  The photograph in the book showed a seventeen-year-old girl. She was pictured sitting on the hood of a red car. She wore cut-off jean shorts and a T-shirt the color of claret. She had black hair and brown eyes, and wore a thin chain around her neck with a small gold crucifix attached. Adeline Connor’s wasn’t one of the eight bodies that had been recovered, but the cops were sure enough of her death that she had been written up as the final official victim of the Devil Mountain Killer.

  Sometimes, the bodies of victims are found years or decades later. Often, they’re never recovered. What doesn’t happen is them showing up alive and well. Chances were good that David Connor had seen someone who looked like his sister and had been blinded by wishful thinking. Chances were also good that any attempt to find her would be a waste of time, and worse, would reopen old wounds.

  I thought about it for a long time before I picked up my phone and dialed the number Lauren Day had given me, looking at the picture of Adeline Connor as the phone rang.

  “Hello?” The voice was that of a relatively young man, but with a smoker’s huskiness. The tone was wary. Someone who wasn’t used to his phone ringing.

  “Is this David Connor?”

  “Who’s asking?”

  “Lauren Day asked me to give you a call. My name’s Carter Blake.”