Photograph, page 16
Kimble handed me back my phone. He steered onto the road again and accelerated. “Phil may know her, too. He knew everybody in town.”
“Okay.”
I could see the detective’s mind hard at work behind his eyes. I didn’t think it would take him long to reach the same conclusion I already had, and the egotist in me wanted to prove that I’d gotten there first.
“You know what this means, don’t you?” I asked.
He gave me a sideways glance. “What?”
“Well, we already know Faith was at the motel that night. The fact that Vince Marmaide’s plumbing truck was there confirms that. Now we also know that Faith and Dawn knew each other. They were friends.”
“Go on,” Kimble said.
“So we may not know why Dawn left her house in the middle of the night,” I told him, “but now I think we know where she was going. She was headed for the motel. She was going there to meet Faith.”
Phil Potter did not know who Faith was.
“She can’t be a Devil Creek native,” he told me as he gave me back my phone. “If she was born here, I’d know her. I knew all the kids in those days. I led after-school programs every month. That’s how you stop crime. You make sure the kids in the schools know who you are. Grammar school, middle school, high school. I knew those kids like they were my own girls.”
“Faith would have been about twenty-five years old in this picture,” I pointed out. “Not a kid.”
“Yeah, but I’m a lifer in this area. I would have been on the job in Devil Creek when she was born. Whoever she is, this woman did not grow up here.”
“Okay,” I said, “but one way or another, Faith knew Dawn. How?”
“No idea about that,” Phil replied.
He took a bite from a microwave breakfast sandwich and washed it down with a swig of Michelob Ultra. The three of us sat at a picnic table on Phil’s lawn, near a two-bedroom cottage that backed up to flaky white birch trees. His pickup truck and fishing boat were both parked in the driveway. Phil was dressed for a hot day in a white tank top undershirt and cargo shorts, his bare feet shoved into old sneakers. He was fit and muscled for his age—I figured he was in his late sixties—with as much matted black-and-gray hair all over his body as Homo habilis. He had an untrimmed beard creeping up his cheeks and a shock of wavy hair combed back over his head. His skin was wrinkled and sunburned, his eyes dark brown below bushy eyebrows.
“It makes it seem less like a stranger killing,” I suggested. “Dawn was going to the motel for a specific reason—to meet Faith. Whatever actually happened to her, it doesn’t sound random.”
Phil worked his tongue inside his cheek, trying to dislodge something caught in a tooth. “You could be right. So maybe this Faith woman is the one who killed her. She’s afraid of Dawn saying something about the two of them, you know? Twenty-five-year-old woman, sixteen-year-old girl. Could have been a lesbo thing.”
Both men smirked. They were trying to piss me off.
“Anything’s possible,” I replied pleasantly. “For all I know, Faith and Dawn did have a sexual relationship. But that doesn’t get us any closer to figuring out why someone from this area drove to Florida last month and murdered Faith because of a photograph.”
The smile vanished from Phil’s face. “This area?”
“That’s right. There was an article about the photo book in the local paper in June. Someone obviously saw it and realized the book gave him a way to find Faith after all these years. That doesn’t really sound like a lesbo thing to me.”
Phil put down his beer and leaned forward, his chin on his fist. His eyes looked me over the way male cops always did, body first, mind second. But he was beginning to realize he couldn’t just blow me off.
“Chuck said you were smarter than the others.”
“The others?” I asked.
He grinned. “You think you’re the first outsider to figure they’ll come to town and crack a cold case and get themselves on 20/20 or in some big spread in People magazine? The internet is full of do-it-yourself crime buffs these days. Couple of times a year, somebody shows up spouting their pet theories and asking me lame questions about the case. They think I was sitting on my ass for fifteen years.”
“I wasn’t suggesting anything like that,” I told him.
“Oh, hell yes you were. You think I’m a small-town fool. That’s okay. I don’t have an ego about this. All those years, I spent a lot of weekends, vacations, and holidays trying to figure out who killed that girl. Bottom line is, I want this case solved, even if it’s not me who does it. So go ahead. Ask me your lame questions.”
I couldn’t help smiling. I was beginning to realize I couldn’t just blow Phil off, either.
“The Daughertys,” I said.
“What about them?”
“A county attorney and his family get murdered after he takes a run at the Chicago drug lords. Nine days later, Dawn gets killed, too. Are you really convinced there was no connection between the two cases?”
“I’m convinced there was no evidence to connect them,” Phil replied. “Evidence is the only thing that matters. Did I look? Of course I looked. But those two families didn’t know each other. They didn’t overlap socially or professionally. Dawn was squeaky clean, no drugs. Yeah, her brother was a problem kid, but nothing Gordon did ever crossed Greg Daugherty’s desk.”
Phil was convincing, but I still didn’t believe in coincidences.
“Dawn and Zeke Daugherty went to the same high school,” I pointed out.
“Yeah, sure, along with half the kids in the county. They were a year apart, and they never had a class together. As far as I could tell, they didn’t even know each other. Yes, Ms. Wells, I checked.”
“But the high school was ground zero for the drug crisis in town. Right?”
“That’s true.”
“Well, what if Dawn knew something about the drugs flowing through the school? Maybe she went to Greg Daugherty secretly.”
“Now who’s speculating? You can think whatever you want, but like I said, there was absolutely no evidence of anything like that. Plus, it doesn’t fit with this girl. Dawn was shy, socially awkward, not a lot of friends. She wasn’t the type to play undercover spy and worm her way inside an illegal drug network.”
I frowned, because Phil was right. I was also frustrated, because I had a lot of threads and yet I couldn’t see a way to knit them together.
Faith was at the motel. Why? Who was she?
She was there to meet Dawn that night. I was sure of it. But again—why?
“Dawn was scared,” I told Phil.
The retired detective’s eyes narrowed. “What do you mean?”
“That night. Dawn was scared of something.”
“Who told you that?”
I thought about my promise to Gordon and didn’t answer, but Phil guessed the truth quickly enough.
“Her brother, right? Yeah, the phone records at her house showed a call to Detroit around one in the morning. Gordon told me Dawn was asking how the gig went. That was all.”
“He lied. It was more than that. Dawn saw a car outside her house. She thought she was being watched.”
Next to me, Chuck Kimble exhaled loudly. “Why didn’t the asshole say anything before now?”
Phil popped the last bite of his breakfast sandwich into his mouth. “It doesn’t really change anything, Chuck. We knew something was up with Dawn that night. Why else would she be running away?”
I stared at him. “Running away?”
A look passed between the two detectives on the bench. I saw Kimble shrug his shoulders, as if giving Phil permission to tell me the truth.
“We didn’t release everything we knew to the public, Ms. Wells,” Phil told me. “Believe it or not, even small-town cops know how to hold things back so we can verify whether witnesses are giving us the whole story. And no, I wasn’t a complete idiot for thinking a random stranger might have picked up Dawn on the highway while she was hitchhiking. You see, we found a backpack with her body. It was stuffed with clothes. Dawn was trying to get out of Devil Creek that night.”
NINETEEN
The epicenter of the drug crisis in 1999 was the high school. So said Terry Blaine. So said Phil Potter.
Twenty-six years ago, a river of pills flowed through Devil Creek, poisoning kids and families. Victims filled the hospital. The Chicago gang behind the drug trafficking defended its business with ruthless violence. Witnesses were killed. Reporters were threatened.
County Attorney Greg Daugherty—plus his wife and teenage son—died of shotgun blasts for the sin of trying to bring the gang down.
Then there was Dawn West.
How did she fit into the picture?
On the last night of her life, I now knew she was running away from home, her clothes stuffed in a backpack. She was running straight to Faith Selby for help, but instead of escaping, she took a bullet in the back of the head in the empty lot behind the Thunder Mountain Motel.
That was nine days after the Daugherty massacre.
There was no evidence to connect the cases. Not according to Phil Potter.
Okay. Fair enough.
But the Devil Creek High School loomed over all of the murders.
After Chuck Kimble dropped me back at the motel, I got in my SUV and followed Google Maps to the high school on the east side of town. It was a three-story tan brick building with multiple extensions that had been added over the years. The complex took up three square blocks, surrounded by green lawns and athletic fields. The school’s baseball diamond backed up to an empty meadow with long grass, and I could imagine all the teenage escapades that went on there during summer nights.
I parked outside the main entrance. A few cars were parked on the street around me, but not many. It was still summer. I crossed the lawn and found that the school’s double doors were open, so I went inside the old building. The tile floors and high ceiling gave the place a cavernous echo as I wandered down the main hallway. Rows of tan metal lockers were mounted to the walls. I passed a display case filled with state championship trophies, mostly for basketball.
Near the central administration office, I saw months-old notices about dances and SAT tests pinned to the bulletin board. There were also framed honor society pictures of high-achieving students from prior years, but the photographs didn’t go back as far as the time when Dawn West attended the school.
I saw a light through the window of the principal’s office, and I went inside and called, “Hello?”
A few seconds later, a gaunt man with thinning black hair gelled into spikes appeared in the doorway to the inner office. He was tall and wore a pink dress shirt with sleeves rolled to the elbows and a crisp pair of black jeans with neon tennis shoes. His skin had a deep, unnatural tan. He looked to be about fifty years old, but trying to pass for forty. “Can I help you?”
“Are you Rick Kaslan?” I asked. “I was told you might be here.”
He cocked his head with surprise. “And you are—”
“My name’s Shannon Wells. I’m—”
He interrupted my introduction as he heard my name. “Oh, yes, you’re the private investigator from Florida. Gretchen told me about you last night. You’re looking into Dawn’s murder.”
“That’s right.”
“Well, come in, please,” Kaslan said.
He led me into his windowless office. Music by the Backstreet Boys was playing, which made me cover a smile. Photos of Kaslan with generations of Devil Creek students filled the walls, along with framed prints of geometric symbols and drawings by Escher. I did a quick survey of the photos, looking for one face in particular, and I wasn’t disappointed.
“Yes, that’s Dawn,” Kaslan said, following my gaze. “Such a sweet, smart girl. Everyone was devastated when she was killed.”
He sat down behind a laminate desk and switched off the music with a remote control. I sat in an uncomfortable plastic chair on the other side of the desk and felt like a misbehaving student.
“Did Gretchen tell you what’s going on?” I asked.
“I gather there were murders in Florida this summer that may be connected to what happened to Dawn. After all this time, that’s amazing. But of course, if I can help in any way, I’m happy to do so.”
“I appreciate that, Mr. Kaslan.”
He rolled his eyes and grinned. His teeth were so white he probably used dental trays, and it made his smile look fake.
“Oh, call me Rick, please. I get enough of the ‘Mr. Kaslan’ from my students.”
“Okay. Rick. I understand you taught math back then?”
“Yes, that’s right. I grew up in this area, and I’ve been at this school my whole career. Back then, I was just starting out, of course. You can’t imagine how terrifying it is to walk into a classroom of thirty high school students when you feel like you’re barely out of school yourself.”
He chuckled, but I didn’t think he was exaggerating his anxiety. Rick Kaslan looked as if he still carried emotional baggage from his early years. I guessed that he was gay, and I didn’t think it could have been easy for a gay student or teacher in Devil Creek two decades earlier. It probably wasn’t easy now. I noted that Kaslan wore a wedding ring, but his desk was noticeably devoid of any family photos.
“What class did Dawn take from you?” I asked.
“Trigonometry.”
“People tell me she was very good at math.”
“Oh, yes, she was miles ahead of her fellow students. Her brain just naturally figured it all out. That’s rare.”
I dug in my pocket and unfolded the old math assignment I’d found in Dawn’s memory box. “This will seem like an odd question, but I was going through some of Dawn’s things, and I came across this trig identity test. It was dated months before the murder, but Dawn kept it for some reason. On the back of the test, you wrote a note asking her to see you after class. I know how long ago this was, but do you happen to remember what you talked about?”
Kaslan took the page from my hand. His mouth pushed into a frown as he reviewed the back of the assignment. “It’s definitely my handwriting, but I’m sorry. I have no idea what this was about.”
He handed the paper back to me with another uncomfortable smile that was electrically white. I had the strangest feeling, as I read his face, that Kaslan was lying to me. Despite all the years in between, he knew why he’d written that note. But why conceal something like that?
“How well did you know Dawn?” I asked.
“Oh, reasonably well, as students go, I guess. As a teacher, you remember the good ones. I can’t say I knew anything about her personal life, though. I remember her being a little awkward socially, but that’s normal for high school kids. A pretty girl. She would have blossomed with a little time.”
Kaslan made a show of checking his Apple Watch. Interesting. All of a sudden, he wanted me gone.
“Am I keeping you from something, Rick?”
He looked up, and zing! There was that televangelist smile again, oddly out of place for this conversation.
“Well, I do need to wrap this up soon. Sorry. I have to meet my husband. I just came in here to do some prep work for a couple of hours. School will be starting up next week. Lots to do.”
“I won’t keep you much longer,” I promised him. “You knew Dawn, so I’m wondering. Did you also know Dawn’s brother?”
“Gordon? I didn’t have him in any of my classes. He was older. A senior, I think. I’d only been at the school for a couple of years, and I mostly taught freshmen and sophomores.”
“Gordon had a lot of problems,” I said. “Including dealing drugs.”
“I heard that,” Kaslan replied. “Although maybe I just read it in the paper after Dawn was killed. Unfortunately, there were plenty of drugs going around back then. We had a lot of kids with problems.”
“So I gather. What was the atmosphere like at the school?”
“Tense. I mean, there are always secrets and cliques when you get hundreds of teenagers together, but in those days, you never knew when the other shoe was going to drop. At least one boy died of an overdose. There was violence on campus. Kids were beaten up. The police were here a lot.”
“Just the police?”
“What do you mean?”
“What about the county attorney? Greg Daugherty? Did he ever come to the school?”
Kaslan had a little fit of blinking, and he rubbed his eyes. “Oh, you know about Greg? The murders? Yes, what a terrible thing that was. I don’t remember ever seeing him at the school in an official capacity, but he and his wife came to parents’ night that year because of Zeke.”
“So you knew them?”
“Yes, Zeke was in one of my classes. His parents stayed in close touch about his performance. They were very devoted to him.”
“Was that the same class you had with Dawn?”
“No, Zeke was a year younger. A freshman. He took geometry.”
“What was he like?”
“Zeke? Very handsome. Really good-looking boy. Good values, too. I guess that probably came from his dad. He played a number of sports, but he wasn’t the arrogant jock he could have been. I remember he was soft-spoken, polite. Not a great student, no better than a C in my geometry class. Academics didn’t come easy to him like they did for Dawn. He wanted to go to med school, and I told him he was going to have to buckle down about his grades if he wanted to do that. He took it seriously; he seemed intent on doing better. Zeke was a good kid. I liked him a lot. It was such a shock, the whole family being killed like that.”
“Were there rumors around school about what happened? People speculating on why they were murdered?”
“Oh, sure. It was the only thing people talked about. Everybody assumed it was because of the drug prosecutions. You know, Greg was trying to break the back of the Chicago gang. Gutsy but foolish, I guess. People around here figured someone from the gang committed the murders. They wanted to send a message.”
“Actually, I heard Greg buzzed the killer in.”
“What?”
“At the gate to his house. Greg let him in. Seems like he knew the person who killed him.”
