Presumed Dead Read online

  Isabella noticed Haycox had his arm over a piece of paper on his desk, as though he was shielding it. She angled her head to look at it. Before she could see anything beyond the fact it was a Xerox of an older, typed document, Haycox pulled it away and thrust it into his drawer.

  “I’m just fixing the, you know… the numbers that the sheriff asked me to do.”

  Isabella raised an eyebrow. He blushed like a schoolkid caught with naughty pictures on his phone. She lowered her voice, so Sally couldn’t overhear.

  “You know, McGregor catches you doing that on duty, you’ll be a dead man.”

  He swallowed and nodded. The sheriff was relaxed about his people maintaining hobby cases, so long as everything got done. But Isabella knew he would have a problem with the particular hobby case Haycox was looking into. Lucky for him, he had mentioned it to Isabella first. She had made sure she was the only person he mentioned it to. When he had discovered Isabella’s own connection to the case, he had apologized as though the whole thing was his fault. She told him not to worry about it.

  Sally cleared her throat when she saw they had finished talking and asked to use the ladies. Isabella pointed the door out while she hunted for the keys to the Crown Vic to take her back. Feldman appeared from the corridor and glanced around, seeing that Sally wasn’t in the room. He put a hand on Isabella’s arm and moved her to one side.

  “He’s gonna kill her, you know that,” he said, quietly enough for Haycox not to hear. She wasn’t sure why he did that, but he did it a lot.

  “Not much we can do right now,” she said. “Other than keep an eye on the situation.”

  Feldman sighed and took a seat behind the spare desk, tapping on the keyboard to wake the screen.

  “Haycox,” he called out, without bothering to look at the other man. “I’m sending you something over. Get it done, okay?”

  She saw Haycox grimace and say nothing. Probably wondering when he would have put in enough time to tell Feldman where to go.

  Sally came back out, wearing the reassuring smile that Isabella knew she had spent the last five minutes practicing in the mirror. They went out to the lot and got back into the car. She offered again to take Sally someplace else. They could fix her up with a place for the night at Benson’s Cabins, or she could drive her to a relative, but Sally declined. Back home it was, then.

  Waylon Mercer was waiting for them at the door, probably had been watching for the car as they started up the hill. They got out and Isabella followed a step behind Sally as she approached the house. Mercer’s face showed none of the smirk or anger from before. He put a hand on Sally’s shoulder as she reached him.

  “You okay?” he asked, almost sounding convincing.

  Sally just nodded without looking directly at him, and went inside. He looked back at Isabella and his lips tensed. He was probably thinking about how she had slapped him down earlier, and hoping she wouldn’t bring it up.

  “Take very good care, Mr. Mercer. We don’t want any more accidents.”

  His eyes didn’t waver from Isabella’s.

  “Appreciate the concern, Deputy,” he said at last. “You have a good day now.”

  He turned to go back inside and Isabella got back in the car. Despite Feldman’s grave warning, she didn’t expect any more trouble in the Mercer home tonight. Waylon was a bully and an abuser, but he wasn’t an idiot. Sally had stuck to the accident story, and she would tell him that. Her presence and the fact he wasn’t in handcuffs was all the proof he needed. Isabella guessed Sally had bought herself a few days of kid gloves, maybe even a week. But she knew they would be back up here sooner or later.

  She twisted the key in the ignition and pulled out, wondering what the rest of the shift would bring before she knocked off. Two miles from the station, she passed David Connor, out for one of his walks. He didn’t look up as the car passed him.

  6

  Isabella Green

  When her shift finished at seven, Isabella switched the Crown Vic for her personal vehicle, a five-year-old green Chevy Impala, parked around the back of the station. It took her less than ten minutes to drive up the hill to the house she shared with her mother, on the western edge of town.

  Feldman had been a little strange again this afternoon, in his manner with her. He had been more protective of her since her mom’s stroke, but now that she thought about it, the change had really come after she had come home to find the two of them speaking, a couple weeks after her mom had gotten out of hospital. For a little while, she wondered if Kathleen had said something about the night their lives had changed, all those years ago. But Feldman gave no hint that they had discussed that, and she was sure he would have done.

  Speaking of the past, she wondered whether Feldman knew anything about Haycox’s hobby case. She hoped not. Over the years, people in Bethany had gotten used to people showing up and asking questions about what happened. This was the first time one of them had managed to inveigle himself into the damn sheriff’s department, and Isabella couldn’t help but admire Haycox’s commitment, no matter how misguided he was. Besides, he was proving himself to be a decent cop, and he had had sense enough not to broach the subject with Feldman or McGregor or any of the other guys.

  The little house she had done most of her growing up in was at the end of a line of four well-kept one-story homes on a wide, level patch of ground on the slopes of the hills west of town. She parked out front, beneath the branches of the big oak tree that had been there before she was born and would probably be here long after she was gone. She opened the front door and immediately smelled something cooking. Mary Cregg stuck her head out of the kitchen and smiled. Mary was older than Isabella’s mom; in her early seventies, with white hair and a face creased with wrinkles. She had known Mary as long as she had lived in Bethany. She had lived next door since before they moved in, and had gotten on well with the family at once. Occasionally, it would catch Isabella by surprise how old she looked. She tended to think of her as eternally forty-something.

  “Right on time.”

  “Smells amazing,” Isabella said.

  “Just a pot-roast. You hungry?”

  “You really shouldn’t have,” she said, meaning it. If Mary wasn’t so close by and so constantly willing to help, Isabella would have had to think about alternative arrangements for her mother by now. As it was, she knew the clock was ticking.

  “Shouldn’t I? You don’t sound too convincing, Isabella.”

  “I guess I could be persuaded. But Sunday night I’m cooking for you. Where’s mom?”

  Mary indicated the direction of the living room, the smile fading a little. “She’s tired today.”

  “Tired” was Mary’s preferred euphemism for Kathleen Green’s worse days. Ever since the stroke, there were days she was almost her old self. Other days when she got her daughter confused with somebody she had been friends with at school. Others where she seemed almost catatonic.

  Kathleen was sitting in front of the TV, watching an old episode of Quincy, her eyes fixed on the screen. She didn’t look up as Isabella entered, didn’t react at all until she went over and put a hand on top of hers. She looked up and smiled. Isabella saw brief confusion in her eyes and wondered how tired she was, but then something clicked.

  “Honey. Good day at work today?”

  Does anybody ever truly want to know the answer to that question? Isabella knew her mom didn’t, so she lied and told her it had been a wonderful day.

  Kathleen nodded and looked back at the screen. Isabella sat down on the couch across from her and closed her eyes, massaging the side of her head and wondering what tomorrow was going to bring.

  7

  Carter Blake

  I was still wary of flying since the Winterlong business, so I made the journey to Georgia by road, selecting a gray Lincoln Continental from the rental company. On the Friday night, I stopped a
t a motel on Route 81, just south of Harrisonburg. I ate dinner in the deserted restaurant adjoining the motel and finished reading the book on the Devil Mountain Killer. It helped to put what Lauren Day had told me about her client in context.

  David Connor and his sister Adeline had lived in Lake Bethany, the nearest town to Devil Mountain itself. Halloween night, 2003, she had left home after an argument with her brother. She told him she was going to stay with a friend. That was the last he or anyone had heard of her.

  Most people were unaware of Adeline’s disappearance at first, because that same night, another person from the town had gone missing. Arlo Green, a forty-four year old father of one, had gone for a drive and hadn’t returned home. His car was found on the north road out of town, crashed into a tree. There was no sign of him. The damage to the car suggested the collision had been low-velocity, and the airbag wasn’t deployed.

  Meanwhile, David called the friend Adeline had gone to see a couple of days later and found she had never showed up. One person going missing without explanation didn’t necessarily mean the worst, but two? A town of just three thousand people, Bethany had lost one person to the killer already: a hunter named Georgie Yorke, whose body was found the previous summer.

  The story was familiar. As the weeks passed, a sense of dread set in. Everybody had theories about what had happened, nobody wanted to say it out loud. I thought back to the summer we had searched in vain for Karen Day, and felt a hollow ache in my gut.

  Two months later, some cops from Kansas City came to the town and added a new wrinkle to the puzzle. They were looking for a man named Eric Salter, who had disappeared on a driving tour of the south. They had tracked him as far as Atlanta and found no trace of him or his car, a blue 1999 Ford Tempo. He had last been heard from on October 31st, just like Adeline and Arlo Green. He had been headed north. The FBI task force worked on the theory that Salter’s disappearance was connected with the other two. Could their paths have crossed somehow? Could Salter himself have been the killer?

  They found Salter’s Ford the following April. It was buried in a ravine below one of the vertiginous curves on the road up to the start of the Devil Mountain foot trail. But this had been no accident, and he hadn’t been alone.

  I flicked back to the pictures bound into the center pages. One showed a crane lifting a wrecked car from a ravine.

  Arlo Green’s body was found in the back seat of Salter’s car, only a single bullet wound to the head in his case. The front seats were empty, but the interior told a graphic story. A .38 caliber bullet was dug out from the headrest of the driver’s seat, which was drenched in Salter’s blood. There was blood in the passenger seat too, even more of it. It was tested and matched to Adeline Connor. It looked as though Salter had picked both Adeline and Green up, maybe at the same time, maybe not. All that was certain was someone had fired multiple shots from outside the vehicle.

  Salter’s mostly skeletonized remains were eventually found a mile from where the car had come to rest. It looked like he had been thrown clear when the car had plunged – or been pushed – into the ravine, and been swept along in the river. Investigators theorized that the same fate had befallen Adeline Connor. An exhaustive search of the area followed over the weeks and months that followed, but her body was never recovered. That she was dead was considered beyond doubt. The amount of blood lost alone almost guaranteed that, even before taking into consideration the sixty-foot drop into the ravine.

  I closed the book and went back to my room, planning for an early night and an early start in the morning. But when I lay down on the bed, the wheels of my mind wouldn’t stop turning.

  Adeline Connor was dead and gone. So why did her brother think he had seen her alive and well in downtown Atlanta?

  8

  Dwight Haycox

  “You get done with that paperwork?”

  Haycox thought that Feldman always managed to sound like an angry dad whenever he spoke to him. He didn’t even think he had to consciously put it on anymore. He took a second to compose a smile before looking up at Feldman. “Of course.”

  He located the document and handed it over. Feldman took it in a manner that approached a snatch. He examined it, then grunted a thanks and walked back toward his desk. He stopped halfway there and turned around, glancing at the clock on the wall.

  “Aren’t you off-duty, Haycox?”

  Haycox shrugged. “Just finishing up.”

  Feldman shook his head. “Keen as mustard.”

  Haycox ignored him and finished up the edits on the report, before emailing it to McGregor, copying Isabella. McGregor was old school enough to demand a hard copy of everything, but three years of college followed by a year at the academy down in Forsyth had taught Haycox to make sure he kept an electronic trail of everything.

  Except for the things he didn’t want a record of, of course.

  He watched Feldman as he tapped away on his keyboard, no longer paying him attention. Feldman hit the keys hard, as though using a manual typewriter, even though he was probably young enough to never have touched one. Haycox looked back at his own screen. He wanted to log in to the Brownstone account, check if there had been any other messages, but he knew he shouldn’t risk it. Feldman came across as only marginally more tech-savvy than the sheriff, and Isabella already knew about his extra-curricular interests, but it was safer to maintain a complete separation. Just because no one around here would have the desire or wherewithal to interrogate his computer didn’t mean no one ever would.

  Feldman had pissed him off more than usual today. His attitude earlier when Isabella had been around, for a start. And then that report, which had consumed ninety minutes of his day, which Feldman could and should have written himself, had been accepted with no more than a grunt. He decided to prod the bear a little. He couldn’t help it.

  “So, is there some history there?”

  Feldman looked up, as though surprised to see Haycox still here.

  “What?”

  “You and Deputy Green, I mean. Just something I picked up on.”

  He stared back at Haycox for so long that he started to wonder if he was ever going to speak again. Regretting the decision to say anything, he cleared his throat and looked back down at the paperwork. “Just wondered, is all,” he finished lamely.

  “I still haven’t worked you out, son.”

  “I don’t follow.”

  “Why here? I saw your file when it came in. Top five per cent of your class. You would have had no trouble getting a prime posting in Atlanta. Or someplace else, if you wanted to get farther away from home. Why here?”

  It wasn’t the first time someone had asked the question. Usually, they were satisfied with his explanation: that he had fallen in love with Bethany on a camping trip years ago and wanted to work here. In a way, it was kind of true. He had first encountered the stories of the Devil Mountain Killer on that long-ago boy scout trip, and they had stayed with him ever since.

  “I like the town,” Haycox said. “It’s a great place to live.”

  “Remember what I told you on your first day?”

  He did remember, but affected a puzzled look.

  “I told you to keep your mouth shut and your ears and eyes open if you wanted to make it in this town. You remember that?”

  “Sure.”

  “Little more of the ears and eyes,” he said, indicating those points on his own head. “Little less of the mouth. Clear?”

  Haycox stared back at him, not wanting to give him the satisfaction of looking as though the older man had rattled him. Instead, he got up and put his hat on.

  “I’ll see you tomorrow.”

  Feldman didn’t answer, just looked back down at his keyboard. He resumed typing, harder than he needed to.

  Saturday

  9

  Carter Blake

  Starting out at six a.
m., I made good time on the second leg of my journey to David Connor’s home town. Lake Bethany was about a half-hour south of the Tennessee state line. It was nestled in the Blue Ridge Mountains, population around three thousand. High up and isolated. Any visitors tended to be of the sort who would use it as a stopping-off point, rather than a destination: hunters, hikers, fishermen, people on driving or motorcycle tours of the South.

  Devil Mountain itself was a couple of miles outside of town. Only two of the victims had been found on the trails on the mountain itself, but it wasn’t hard to see why the name of this particular location had leapt out to the media when reporting on the case.

  My route took me through some of the most beautiful country I had ever seen. The leaves were all but gone from the trees as winter began to settle in, and the sky was a crisp, almost arctic blue. There were only two ways to approach Lake Bethany; opposite ends of the same road. It left Route 19 to the north of Bethany, wound through town, and rejoined 19 five miles south. Aside from that, the town was a closed system.

  I reached the town a little before one in the afternoon. Planning out the trip a couple of nights before, it hadn’t taken me long to decide on accommodation options. The only game in town was Benson’s Cabins. A knot of vacation cabins on the south-western outskirts, by the shores of the lake that gave the town its name. I took the northern exit off the highway so I could drive through the town itself on the way. The place made Ravenwood look like the big city. It had the basics, and not much else. One of everything: a general store named Andy’s, a post office, a realtor, the Peach Tree Diner, Value Propane, and Jimmy’s Bar. A sign indicated that the sheriff’s office could be reached by turning right at the main crossroads. I expected I would be paying them a visit later.

  I parked in one of the spaces outside of the general store and got out. It was cold, but the sun was high in the clear blue sky. I saw something on the sidewalk as I approached the door and stopped to examine it. It was a doodle in blue chalk showing a stick man with a sad face. Underneath it was neatly lettered: The customer is always wrong.