Presumed Dead Page 6

  “The thing to remember about Bethany: trouble comes from outside. You play nice, we’ll treat you nice. You cause a ruckus, you’ll be run out of town faster than you can spit.”

  “I’m not here to cause a ruckus.”

  “Time’s up.” He turned on his swivel chair and looked out of the window. Interview over. I didn’t push it.

  “Thank you for your time.”

  I got up and opened the door, pausing when McGregor surprised me by speaking again.

  “You want my advice, Blake?”

  I didn’t answer, fully expecting to get it regardless.

  “Take a couple of days in town if you want. Bethany is a nice place. But then you should tell David Connor you’re not interested in wasting your time, and you should go someplace where you can do some good.”

  “Again,” I said, “thanks for your time.”

  The door swung shut behind me. Haycox looked up, pretending that he hadn’t been listening to our parting exchange. I bid him a good afternoon.

  As I approached the door, I saw someone coming the other way. A woman. I recognized her. It took me a second to realize it was the same woman I had seen at the convenience store earlier on. Not because she had the kind of face that was easy to forget, but because she was dressed in the same uniform Haycox and McGregor were wearing, her blond hair tied back. I opened the door and held it for her.

  I saw recognition flicker in her eyes too, and she smiled quickly. “Afternoon, again.”

  She nodded inside the office as if to draw my attention to where I was. “Everything okay?”

  “Everything’s fine,” I said.

  I went outside and got behind the wheel, thinking about what McGregor had said. Perhaps he was right. The odds were good that Adeline Connor was dead, and that the Devil Mountain Killer was dead too. Perhaps I should just forget about the town and go home. Those were real possibilities. But I had some questions to answer first.

  13

  Isabella Green

  “Who was that guy?”

  Haycox opened his mouth to answer Isabella’s question, but Sheriff McGregor beat him to the punch.

  “More trouble, is who that guy is.”

  McGregor was standing at the window, watching as the man with the dark hair and green eyes drove off in the gray Lincoln Continental with New York plates.

  “Don’t tell me …”

  He nodded. “David Connor. You think he would have quit after what happened to the last one.” He let out a long sigh. “I’m going to have to have a conversation with that boy.”

  Isabella glanced back at Haycox, who was typing something and pretending not to be interested in the discussion.

  “Who’s out on the road this evening?” the sheriff asked, not taking his eyes off the parking lot, even though the Continental had disappeared out of view. “Feldman?”

  Isabella shook her head. “Me.”

  He considered for a moment. “He says his name is Carter Blake. Keep an eye out for him, make sure he doesn’t make any trouble.”

  “Any reason you’re expecting him to?”

  “I hope not.”

  With that, the sheriff turned and went back into his office, closing the door behind him. Isabella turned to Haycox and asked him if he had finished the TC16 reports for last quarter. As he was opening his mouth to answer, she moved closer keeping her voice low. “What did he ask about?”

  Haycox gave a disappointed shrug. “They went in there. I guess it was about Adeline Connor.”

  She sighed. “Poor girl should be left to rest in peace.” Haycox colored a little at that. “Any new theories?”

  Haycox smiled and looked as though he was about to say something, and then shook his head.

  “What?”

  “Nothing.”

  Isabella narrowed her eyes and stared him out.

  He leaned forward, his voice conspiratorial. “Okay, I got something that looks promising. I’m talking to a guy who—”

  “You know what doesn’t look promising?”

  “What?”

  “Your future employment prospects if you don’t get me those reports.”

  He grinned sheepishly and gave her a salute. “Yes ma’am.”

  Isabella turned away before she smiled. She liked that Haycox was starting to be a little more comfortable with at least one member of the department.

  14

  Carter Blake

  I took a drive out to the last place anyone reported seeing Adeline Connor alive. It was on the north road, about a mile and a half out of town. She had been spotted at a small bridge across a culvert, just before the road forked: the last stretch to route 19 in one direction, the road that wound up to the start of the Devil Mountain hiking trail in the other. She had been out in the rain with no coat. A woman named Jennifer Gorman, had been driving by. She had wanted to stop, but had been in a hurry home to relieve the babysitter. An hour later, unable to forget about seeing Adeline, she had sent her husband out to drive the road. There had been no trace of her. She came forward a couple of days later, when David Connor reported his sister missing.

  The next trace of Adeline had been the blood in the car found at the bottom of the ravine. I drove out to the bridge first and got out. It wasn’t much of a bridge. Just a series of wooden slats over the culvert. Water carried down from the hills trickled through the pipe on its way down to the river below. The bridge was as wide as the road, and the drop was so shallow there weren’t even guardrails at the side.

  I parked at the side of the road and got out. The clouds had cleared again and the sunset was glowing through the branches of the trees. The wooden slats of the bridge looked old, and I was a little nervous about driving over it. But when I stepped onto it, it was firm, stronger than it looked. I walked across the bridge, listening to the soft burbling of the water beneath me. I reached the other side and stepped back onto the blacktop, surveying the area. Woods on both sides. The road disappeared around a curve a quarter of a mile in the direction I had come, and ahead of me rose about another quarter-mile until it was obscured by the tree cover. My eye caught something and I took a couple of steps to my right to get a better view. There was a house up there. Small, clad in dark wood, with a stone chimney on one side. It looked as though it could be abandoned.

  I heard the sound of an engine from far off and looked both ways, trying to work out which direction it was coming from. After a couple of seconds, a battered old Volkswagen pickup truck appeared from the direction I had come. The driver was an old man wearing a faded denim baseball cap and glasses. He had a bushy gray beard and peered through the glasses first at my car and then at me as he crossed the bridge and saw me. I smiled and raised a hand, because it seemed to be the kind of thing people do in the country. He didn’t acknowledge me, just passed and sped up at the hill. He slowed as he approached the old house and swung in, the vehicle disappearing behind the structure. Not abandoned after all.

  I crossed back over the bridge and got in the car. As I passed the old house, I glimpsed the man in the cap standing at his living-room window, staring out at me.

  A couple of minutes later, the Lincoln’s GPS told me I had reached the point I was looking for, just as I spotted a sign warning of the drop and indicating a turn in the road. I knew the location by sight, anyway. I thought back to the picture in the book, the one of Eric Salter’s car being hoisted from the ravine by a crane. It had been set up on a wide shoulder at the side of the road, and there were only a few such spots in the vicinity.

  There was no crash barrier, probably because the curve was gentle, curving in a wide arc around and slightly upwards. I parked at the side of the road, framing the view through my windshield in approximately the same position as I remembered the picture. I took my phone out and called up the image, finding my position matched almost exactly to where the photographer mu
st have stood in 2004.

  The foliage on the verge had encroached into the shoulder, but aside from that not much had changed in the past fifteen years. I stood still and listened, just as I had done at the bridge. I didn’t expect to find anything new at either of these scenes. The events of Halloween night 2003 were too far in the past for that. But I like to visit the important scenes of any investigation if I can. You can never pick up everything second hand, or from photographs.

  I got out of the car and faced in the direction of the edge of the ravine. I was a dozen paces from the big tree at the side of the road, and therefore fifteen or sixteen paces from the edge, but you wouldn’t know that from my position. I walked forward, slowing down when I got to the edge of the shoulder, and picking my way carefully through the undergrowth. Underfoot was a deep tangle of long grass and twisting weeds. I kept my eyes down, being careful not to trip. I could hear the faint sound of running water ahead and below me as I got farther in. I reached the tree and braced my right hand on it, only now seeing where the ground disappeared, less than five feet in front of me. I looked back in the direction of the road and realized why it had taken two seasons to find Salter’s car. Unless there had been clear tracks, there would have been nothing to suggest anything had gone through here. A crash would have caused more damage, but Salter’s car hadn’t crashed. Investigation of the wreckage showed that somebody had put it in neutral and pushed it over the edge. It had been an ideal spot for both the murders and the disposal of the evidence. Opportunism, or local knowledge?

  The drop was about sixty feet, a steep slope that was almost vertical. The river carved its way through a stone bed at the bottom. McGregor was right, if the occupants of the car hadn’t been dead when they went over the edge, they sure as hell were when they hit the bottom.

  I remembered the picture of Salter’s vehicle being hoisted out of the ravine. The car had impacted front-end first; the hood compacted to half its length, the engine block driven back into the cab. The windows were all shattered and the driver’s and passenger side doors had been ripped off. It was easy to see how the bodies had been carried away. Or at least one of them had, if David Connor’s story was true.

  Looking at the drop and thinking about the condition of the car, I found myself agreeing with Sheriff McGregor. There was no way Adeline Connor had survived the car falling into that ravine. So that left only one plausible line of enquiry.

  What if she hadn’t been in the car when it went over the edge?

  15

  Dwight Haycox

  It was getting dark and Haycox was on his way home when he spotted David Connor’s distinctive orange pickup truck pulling to a stop across the street in front of Andy’s. He watched as Connor got out and made for the door, head down. Haycox hesitated a second, and then crossed the street. He glanced through the glass door and saw Connor at the register, and then turned around, acting like he was inspecting the front wheel of the pickup while he waited for the sound of the bell over the door as Connor exited.

  “There a problem, Deputy?”

  Haycox took another couple of seconds to examine the wheel and straightened up.

  “Not so far as I can see.”

  Connor was standing in front of the doorway, a six-pack of Corona cradled in his left hand. Haycox had made a point of trying to talk to anyone with a link to the DMK case, but in the six months since he had moved to Bethany, this was the closest he had been to David Connor.

  “Good to hear it,” he said, moving toward the driver’s door.

  “We had your guy down at the station today,” Haycox said.

  Connor reached past and put his hand on the driver’s door handle. He stared at Haycox, expressionless, waiting for him to move.

  “We’re just hoping he’s more careful than the last guy. Wheeler, wasn’t it?”

  Connor broke into a grin and looked down at his feet. He dropped his hand and stepped forward, raising his eyes to meet Haycox’s.

  “Not bad.” He glanced down at the nametag. “Haycox. How many credits do you need to complete the sheriff’s mini-me course?”

  Haycox cleared his throat and tried to think of a witty comeback. But Connor was already speaking again.

  “Get out of my way, Deputy. I don’t have time for this shit.”

  He reached for the handle again, and this time Haycox stepped aside. He kept his eyes on him, and watched as he pulled out into the road and made a U-turn. When he was sure Connor was out of earshot, Haycox cursed under his breath.

  Ten minutes later, Haycox got a glass of water from the kitchen and sat down on the couch, slipping his tie off and unbuttoning the collar. His brain was still cycling through the three or four best comebacks to Connor’s question he had come up with on the short walk back to his apartment.

  He opened his laptop, selected the TrueSleuths website from the favorites bar, and logged in, humming the start of the song unconsciously.

  One new discussion on the Bundy forum. Nothing new on DMK. And then he looked at his inbox.

  Private messages 13(1 new)

  He clicked in to read the new message.

  16

  Carter Blake

  It was later than I thought when I got back into the car. The digital clock on the dash read 17:32 when I turned the key in the ignition. Atlanta was only about a hundred miles or so from Bethany, but I wanted to wait and see it in the daylight.

  I stopped a couple of minutes down the road, parking at the edge of the trail up to the old house where I had seen the old man go. I got out and approached the house on foot. It was small. There were places where the dark wood siding was patched with newer pieces, and the slates on the roof were coated by moss. There were half-shut blinds on each of the two windows flanking the front door. The pickup was still parked around the back, the front bumper sticking out slightly from behind the house. I knocked three times on his door and waited. There was a small brass nameplate reading ROUSSEL screwed into the door frame just above a sign that warned, No hawkers, no politicians, no Jesus freaks. I hoped I would be able to reassure Mr. Roussel I was none of the above. But there was no answer after a minute.

  As I drove back toward town, I put the thought of Adeline Connor to one side, and began to think a little more about the person responsible for her death, and the people hunting him.

  I had finished the true crime book on the killings before going to sleep last night. Digging into a case over a decade old is a difficult task. I had been lucky that the killings, however briefly, caught public attention. The author had interviewed several of the detectives on the task force, and had gotten access to autopsy reports and unpublished crime scene pictures. Sheriff McGregor was conspicuous by his absence.

  The most frequently cited investigators were Captain Willard H. O’Neill, who had led the task force, and Sergeant Dave Correra, of the Atlanta PD. O’Neill had died in 2007, but Correra was still listed on the Atlanta PD’s Homicide Department web page. I hoped he might be more willing to speak to me about the case.

  Eric Salter, Arlo Green and Adeline Connor were the last official victims credited to the Devil Mountain Killer. After those killings, nothing. There had been a long, tense period as everyone waited for the next murder, but it never came. Sometimes that’s the way it happens, there’s no neat resolution.

  As the months passed, the usual theories were floated. The killer, obviously a nut to begin with, had decided to do the world a favor and put the next bullet in his own head. Or perhaps somebody else had done it for him. The discussion forums I had skimmed on TrueSleuths and similar sites had had a strong line in conspiracy, the most popular of which was that the cops had found the killer, executed him, and covered the whole thing up for their own nefarious purposes. I thought it was amusing that they thought the police would want to avoid credit for catching a murderer.

  And then, there were less hopeful scenarios. The killer
hadn’t stopped, he had just moved on, or perhaps gone to jail for an unrelated crime. That would mean the killings might start again someday. Perhaps that explained why this town had never fully been able to relax and put the events of 2003 behind them.

  I was so deep in thought that I was taken by surprise when I saw the blue lights flash in my rearview mirror, just as I crossed back over the wooden bridge where Adeline Connor had last been seen. I saw a blue-and-white Crown Victoria fifty yards behind me, not in any hurry.

  I drove the rest of the way across the bridge and pulled to a stop at the side of the road. The patrol car swung in behind me and stopped, keeping the engine running. I stayed put, kept my hands on the wheel, and sighed as I watched the driver’s door of the car open in the mirror.

  So Sheriff McGregor had decided I had been a little too curious. He was cutting it fine if he planned on telling me to be out of town by sundown. The sheriff didn’t strike me as the type who liked to indulge clichés, but you never know.

  And then I saw that it wasn’t McGregor. The female cop I had seen in the store, and again this afternoon, got out of the car and fixed her hat on her head. She approached me unhurriedly. I saw the holster on her belt was unbuttoned, and her right hand hovered a couple of inches away. Force of habit, or at least I hoped so. I thought about the details of the Salter autopsy I had read in the book. Two shots to the head, close range.

  I buzzed the window down as she drew level with the driver’s side. The setting sun was blazing through the trees, getting in her eyes. She held her left hand over her brow so she could look straight at me. The uniform fit her well. The nameplate over her right breast said GREEN.

  “Mr. Blake, right?”

  “Is there a problem, Officer?”

  “There doesn’t have to be,” she said. “Can you tell me why you’re out here?”

  “Just going for a drive.”

  She held my gaze, to let me know she knew exactly where I had been.