Photograph, page 19
The waitress came to take our orders. Terry asked for a hungry man’s breakfast—scrambled eggs, sausage, bacon, hash browns, pancakes—and I ordered nothing but black coffee, which I didn’t even feel like drinking. I wished Rina were here to bring me my morning piña colada.
Okay, maybe I was more rattled about last night than I was letting on.
“So what did you want to talk about?” Terry asked me. “Did you find something new?”
“I did.” I opened up my phone to Dawn’s photograph of Lara Lovell and pushed it across the table. “Do you know her?”
Terry squinted at the picture. “I don’t think so. Who is she?”
“Her name’s Lara Lovell. She was at the motel in Devil Creek the night of Dawn’s murder, and she disappeared right after that. She took on a new identity, but someone tracked her down this summer. She was one of the Florida murder victims.”
“Wow.” Terry studied the photo again. “What’s her connection to Dawn?”
“Lara was an art teacher at the high school during Dawn’s freshman year. Sounds like they were pretty close. Lara got laid off and moved home to Frankfort in the northern part of the state. She came back down to the motel the day of the murder, probably because Dawn asked her for help. I know you did a lot of research on Dawn for your follow-up article, even if you never got to publish it. I was wondering if Lara’s name came up with any of the people you talked to.”
Terry shook his head. “No, sorry, it didn’t. I reviewed my notes after we met the first time, and nobody mentioned a woman named Lara Lovell. Honestly, if it was a name I didn’t know, I would have picked up on it back then, and I would have done more digging.”
“You still have your notes from those days?”
“Yeah, I keep them in a safe-deposit box. Just in case something ever happens to me, you know? Actually, I thought you might like to see them.” He retrieved a thick manila envelope from his gym bag. “I’m not sure it will tell you anything, but I kept all the records of my interviews. Maybe you’ll catch something I missed. Assuming you can read my handwriting.”
I opened the envelope and dug out the contents. Terry’s notes were on yellow pads, and as I peeled the sheets back one by one, I saw that he’d been thorough. He’d talked to Dawn’s mother and father, her brother, several of her teachers, and at least ten of her high school classmates.
“Whoa, hang on, is that blood?” I asked with concern, pointing to a few red splotches on one of the pages.
Terry glanced at his notes, then grinned. “No, it’s strawberry jam. I had three daughters, remember?”
“Ah. Well, do you mind if I—?”
“No worries, go ahead. I’ll eat. You read.”
Over the next half an hour, I went through Terry’s interview notes from front to back. When I was done, I reviewed them all again, including one interview I reread half a dozen times. By the time I’d finished, Terry’s plate was empty, and he was on his second refill of coffee.
“You were a good reporter,” I told him. “I know Dawn a lot better now.”
Terry cocked his head in surprise. “It’s interesting that you should say that, because when I read my notes again, I was frustrated at how little they told me about Dawn. I didn’t feel like I knew her at all.”
“Yes, but that’s the point, isn’t it?”
“What do you mean?”
“Well, Dawn’s friends and family seemed to know almost nothing about her. She didn’t share her secrets with them. She had surface relationships, not deep ones. But her relationship with Lara Lovell was obviously different, which makes it important. Dawn trusted her in a way she didn’t appear to trust anyone else. That explains why, when she was in trouble, Dawn reached out to Lara.”
“But why was Dawn in trouble?” Terry asked. “That’s the big question, isn’t it?”
I tapped the pages that he’d given me. “It is, and I think part of the answer is right here in your notes.”
He frowned. “Really? What did you see?”
“Something was going on in Dawn’s life behind the scenes, something nobody mentioned to me before. You interviewed a girl who was in several of Dawn’s classes. Lisa. Did you catch what she said?”
Terry nodded. “Dawn had money.”
“Yeah. Lisa said Dawn bought an expensive purse. Not a knockoff. And earrings, too. Dawn had diamond earrings, and Lisa swore they were real.”
“Would a teenage girl be able to tell?”
“If she had a chance to see them up close, I think she would. I found one of the earrings in the box that her mother gave me. Dawn must have lost the other one. I assumed they were fake, because I figured Dawn couldn’t afford the real thing. But now I want to check again. If the earrings were real, Dawn definitely had money. Where did she get it?”
“Dawn told Lisa she had a job.”
“Sure, that makes sense, except her mother told me Dawn didn’t have a job. She was too busy with homework. Plus, what kind of job would she get around here? Mickey D’s? Bagging up burgers and fries wouldn’t pay for diamond earrings. No, if it was a job, it was something a lot more lucrative.”
Terry frowned as he read my face. “You think she was mixed up with drugs?”
“I don’t like to think that, but drugs and money go hand in hand.”
“Except everybody told me she was clean.”
“I know. That’s the story I got, too, but then where did she get that kind of cash?”
Terry shook his head. “You can’t judge a book by the cover, but Dawn just didn’t seem like the type. She was a sweet kid.”
“I agree with you. I’d like to be wrong. But a drug connection also answers a lot of our questions. It would tie Dawn’s murder to the massacre of the Daughertys, and I’m still convinced that all of the murders have to be linked.”
“So when the Daughertys got killed, Dawn was afraid she was next,” Terry concluded. “That’s why she was scared.”
“Exactly. And she was right.”
Terry finished his coffee but waved his hand over the mug when the waitress came by with the pot to refill it. He put his notes back in his bag. “Look, if Dawn was dealing, somebody had to know. After she was killed, it’s hard to believe that news wouldn’t have gotten back to the police.”
“You said the magic words. After she was killed. The gang was sending a message with the murders. Keep your mouth shut. What kid at school was going to risk having the same thing happen to them?”
“Fair point,” Terry acknowledged.
“But you’re right, somebody had to know. Especially her brother. He insisted to me that Dawn wasn’t involved in the drug scene, but now I wonder. Gordon has a guilty conscience about something. It’s been eating away at him for years.”
“You think he’ll tell you anything?”
“I think deep down he wants to spill his guts. This was his sister. It’s a question of getting him to talk.”
Terry took out his wallet and put some cash on the table. “Well, there’s one other thing you should know. It might fit with what you’re saying. Nobody mentioned it in my later interviews, but I remembered it from the previous year when I was writing that first article about Dawn’s murder.”
“Remembered what?”
“Dawn didn’t go to the funeral for the Daughertys.”
“How do you know?”
“Her mother told me. I asked Gretchen whether Dawn had any ties to the Daugherty family—I mean, that was the obvious question back then—but she said no. She said Dawn didn’t even go to the funeral. She didn’t think it was a big deal, but for me, that was kind of a red flag.”
“Why would Dawn go if she didn’t know the family?” I asked.
“Because everyone went. Pretty much the whole town did. Definitely all of the local students from the high school were there. Nobody was going to miss the chance to say goodbye to Zeke Daugherty. He was a very popular kid. But Dawn didn’t go. It made me wonder why.”
TWENTY-THREE
Gordon West didn’t show up for work at the Dollar Store. He called in sick, his assistant manager told me with a roll of her eyes. I had no trouble reading between the lines. “Sick” was when Gordon had a bad night and couldn’t shake off the drugs. It sounded like it happened a lot. The assistant manager had no problem giving me the address of Gordon’s apartment, as if she thought it would be a good idea for someone to do a welfare check on him.
I found the address in a row home on Britain Avenue in Benton Harbor. There was no answer when I knocked on Gordon’s door. I checked with his next-door neighbor, who told me that he’d seen Gordon leave on foot an hour earlier. He also suggested—with another eye roll—that I should just follow the trail of urine odor if I wanted to find him.
Gordon definitely hadn’t had a good night.
I got in my car, but I’d only driven a block before I spotted Gordon sitting in the grass, his back propped against a barbed wire fence outside a city water tower. The sun was burning his balding head to a deep, sweaty red. His neighbor wasn’t kidding about the smell. I wrinkled my nose at the stench of ammonia before I even got close to him. His limbs twitched, as if he were freezing, despite the hot summer weather and the long-sleeved jean shirt he was wearing. His skin had a deathly pallor, the whites of his eyes shot through with red blood vessels, making him look like a vampire.
“You need help, Gordon?” I asked, squatting in front of him.
He bared amber-colored teeth at me. “How about you go to hell?”
“I’ve been there,” I told him. “No thanks.”
“Go away.”
“And leave you here? Nope, not doing that. Come on, Gordon, on your feet. I’m taking you home.”
I expected him to protest, but he didn’t. I tugged on the collar of his shirt and managed to drag him off the ground. He wore loose shorts, and his feet were bare. I sure as heck wasn’t letting him in my SUV the way he smelled, so I let him lean on me as we limped the block back to his apartment. When we got inside, I turned on the shower. He seemed incapable of getting undressed, so I took off his clothes down to his underwear and then helped him stretch out in the bathtub, where the warm water sprayed all over his pencil-thin body.
While Gordon was coming down from his high, I threw his soiled clothes in the washing machine, but not before finding a half-empty bottle of Oxy in the pocket of his shorts. I washed the remaining pills down the drain in the kitchen sink. When I searched the rest of his apartment—medicine cabinet, nightstand, kitchen cabinets—I found four more bottles tucked away with prescription labels peeled off. Those pills went the way of the others.
I checked on Gordon again, and his eyes were open and somewhat focused. His dresser provided me with a clean T-shirt and boxers, which I brought into the bathroom. I turned off the shower and helped him out of the tub, and he obeyed my directions like a child. I dried him off with a towel and quickly replaced his underwear with my head turned to avoid looking at his junk. Finally, I shoved the T-shirt over his upraised arms.
We went into the living room. Gordon sat on a ratty sofa that didn’t smell much better than his shorts, and I sat next to him. He reached for a pack of cigarettes, and I didn’t try to stop him from lighting up. He eased back into the cushions and closed his eyes as he blew smoke toward the ceiling. I noticed two framed photographs on the coffee table, both of them face down. I picked them up and saw a photograph of Dawn and Gordon together and one of Dawn by herself.
Say what you want about Gordon, but he missed his sister.
“So was Dawn selling drugs?” I asked him bluntly. “Because she had money, and I’m wondering where she got it.”
He opened his bloodshot eyes and rallied to her defense. “No. I already told you no. I told the police no. No, no, no, no, no. Dawn had nothing to do with drugs.”
“You’re not helping her by lying.”
“I’m not lying. I lie about tons of shit, but not that. Dawn didn’t take drugs. She didn’t sell drugs. That was me. I was the one who should have been killed back then, not her. Dawn would have grown up and done something with her life, not thrown it all away like I did.”
His voice fractured. Tears slipped down his cheeks, which he didn’t bother wiping away. His intensity convinced me that he was telling the truth. I believed him now that Dawn had had nothing to do with the Devil Creek drug scene. To be honest, I was a little relieved to know that she was the innocent girl I thought she was.
But it also blew up my most promising theory of why she was killed.
“You said it should have been you, not her. What do you mean? Was the gang trying to shut you up by harming your sister?”
He said nothing.
“Gordon, why was Dawn so scared that night? Was it because of Greg Daugherty and his family?”
Still nothing. I exhaled in frustration. He knew more than he was telling me—I was sure of that—but getting answers from him was like coaxing a cat from under the bed.
“Okay, so where did Dawn get the money she had?” I asked him.
“You’re wrong. Dawn didn’t have any money.”
“She bought expensive things that year. A designer purse. Diamond earrings.”
“Those were fake.”
I’d already been back to the motel to check the earring I’d found in Dawn’s memory box. “No, they weren’t fake. The diamonds were real. At least a thousand dollars, probably more. How did Dawn afford something like that?”
Gordon looked defensive now. “I don’t know. She was frugal. She must have saved up.”
“Come on, be serious. If Dawn was buying Prada purses and diamond earrings, she wasn’t frugal. And she was sixteen. Saving money as a teenager won’t buy you things like that. Where did she get it? Did she have a job?”
“No.”
“Was it you? Were you giving her cash?”
“No.”
“What about your parents?”
“They didn’t have money.”
“Then where did she get it, Gordon?”
“I don’t know. Tutoring maybe. She did a lot of that. She was really good at math, you know. She was really good at everything. Her teacher suggested she help out some of the other kids.”
I thought about Dawn’s math teacher, Rick Kaslan.
See me after class, okay? I want to discuss something with you.
Was that what Kaslan’s note on her trig assignment had been about? Was he suggesting that Dawn use her math skills as a tutor?
But there was more to it than that. Months later, the assignment with Kaslan’s note had still been in her nightstand. She’d kept it. She’d drawn a heart below it, surrounded by stars. Obviously, that whole interaction had meant something special to her. But what? I didn’t think that tutoring math a few hours a week had changed her life, and the ten or twenty dollars she made as a tutor weren’t going to pay for the things she’d purchased.
I got off the sofa and paced.
I was so close to a breakthrough. I felt the plates shifting beneath me, ready to give way to an earthquake.
“Gordon, why didn’t Dawn go to the funeral for the Daughertys?”
He stared at me, suspicious now. “How do you know about that?”
“I just do. I heard everybody went. Did you go?”
“Yeah. I hung out at the back.”
“But Dawn didn’t.”
“No.”
“Why not?”
He shrugged. “She didn’t think she could handle the funeral. If she went, she figured she’d lose it and start crying. I told you, she was sensitive like that.”
“Two days later, she was dead.”
“Yeah, what’s your point?”
“My point is, she didn’t want to draw attention to herself at the funeral because she was already scared. She thought someone would notice her there. Why?”
Gordon clammed up again, squeezing his jaw tightly closed. I knew that look. I knew I was on to something. Because Dawn’s brother was scared, too. After twenty-six years, the killer was back, and he hadn’t forgotten the past. He’d killed Lara Lovell. Overnight, he’d tried to kill me. I was willing to bet Gordon knew something that would make him a target.
But what?
I sorted all the random facts in my head, trying to put them in an order in which they didn’t look random anymore.
Rick Kaslan had asked Dawn to tutor students. She was so happy about it that at some point she decorated the note with a heart and little stars. She made money doing it—but definitely not enough money to buy diamond earrings. A purse maybe, but thousand-dollar earrings? No way.
Besides, diamonds weren’t the kind of thing you bought for yourself, certainly not at sixteen years old. That was something you got from—
My eyes widened.
“Jesus.”
I heard Rick Kaslan’s voice in my head again.
Academics didn’t come easy to Zeke 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.
Then I heard the echo of what Gordon had just told me.
Dawn didn’t think she could handle the funeral. She’d lose it.
Yes, of course. She would have been wild with grief. Uncontrollable, teenage, first-love, the-world-is-ending despair. Anyone seeing her there would have seen the truth written all over her face.
I came over to the sofa and knelt in front of Gordon. “Did you know?”
The fear rippled through his eyes again. He played dumb, but he wasn’t good at it. If a genie had offered him three wishes, he would have used the first one to make me disappear in a puff of smoke. “Know what?”
“Did you know Dawn was dating Zeke Daugherty?”
TWENTY-FOUR
The iron gate at the entrance to Greg Daugherty’s estate had long since rusted, with tendrils of ivy looping the bars like a boa constrictor squeezing the life out of its prey. Nature had won the battle. The branches of untrimmed trees bent over the walls. The black asphalt of the winding driveway was broken and potholed, and tall weeds grew out of the cracks. On the wall surrounding the property, white paint had given way to dirt and mold.
