Photograph, page 21
Two more shots.
Lauren Daugherty was dead now.
I imagined a terrible calm coming over Zeke, the brave calm of a brave boy. Dawn, go! Get out, go now, take your things and go out the window. Run and don’t look back. Don’t tell anyone you were here!
Dawn would have protested. She was terrified. In disbelief. But when Zeke grabbed his baseball bat and headed downstairs, she knew the horror was all too real. She snatched up her book, her CD, her backpack. She crawled over Zeke’s bed to the casement window and cranked it open, and then she threw herself down, rolling as she hit the ground. She got up, ran like crazy, ran like her life depended on it.
Which it did.
Behind her, she heard two more shots.
Her boyfriend was dead. Dawn was on her own.
Chuck Kimble looked up at the crumbling Daugherty house, probably seeing and hearing the same things that I did, all the echoes and memories rattling through his imagination like an old film. Then, silently, he handed me the jewel case and the book, which I replaced in my oversized purse.
His face told the story. I was right.
“Let’s go talk to Phil Potter,” he said.
An hour later, I laid it all out for Phil.
The three of us sat in the sweaty heat of his back porch, near a creek that gurgled through sandy soil toward the lake. Mosquitoes feasted on us. I told him about Dawn and Zeke, about tutoring, the ring, the CD, the trig book. I showed him the pictures. The retired detective didn’t say a word. He heard me out with a monkish expression on his face, giving away nothing. When I was done, he looked toward the creek, still utterly silent. He got up, went into the house, and came back with a bottle of Michelob Ultra for himself, which he swigged down as he contemplated what I’d said.
His head finally swiveled, and he stared at me with chocolate-brown eyes. Stroked his beard. Ran a hand back through greasy hair.
“Shit, I missed it,” he admitted, the kind of confession I knew was difficult for a cop. “I had Dawn’s box under my desk for years. I went through everything half a dozen times. I never made the connection. Dawn and Zeke. Son of a bitch, it was staring me in the face, and I missed it.”
“It was easy to do,” I said, letting him off the hook.
But I wondered: Did he really miss it?
The Chicago gang killed the Daughertys. They killed Dawn. They threatened Terry Blaine. Phil, like Terry, was married with three little girls back then. If a stranger had given one of his daughters a Barbie doll outside school and told her to say hi to her daddy, would Phil have recognized the warning?
We got to Greg Daugherty and his family. We can get to yours, too.
So yes, maybe he missed the evidence. Or maybe he buried it in a box for twenty-six years while his girls grew up safe and sound. But it didn’t really matter. I wasn’t sure anything would have turned out differently.
Phil got out of the chair again. When he returned from the house this time, he had three more bottles of Mich Ultra. He placed one in front of Chuck and one in front of me. I’m not a beer drinker, because really, what’s the point of drinking urine? But sometimes you have to be polite. I tilted the bottle and drank, and I have to admit, I began to see the appeal of a cold beer on a hot day.
“Okay, Ms. Wells,” Phil went on. “It looks like you’ve taken me and Chuck to school on this case. So what now? You’ve got Dawn West jumping out a window and escaping the scene of a triple homicide. But she didn’t escape for long. Nine days later, whoever killed the Daughertys caught up with her, too. Do you think Dawn knew who he was?”
That was a good question.
How much did Dawn really see as she was running away from the Daugherty house? Did she see his car?
Did she see him?
“I don’t think so,” I replied. “Dawn wasn’t acting like she knew who was coming after her. But that wouldn’t have mattered to the killer. He had no way of knowing if Dawn could point the finger at him.”
“And how did the killer even know that Dawn was in the house?” Phil asked.
“He probably heard someone upstairs. He went up to the attic bedroom and saw the open window, and he realized there was a witness. Whoever it was, he had to find them.”
“Which he did,” Phil said.
I put myself in the mind of a killer.
“Yes, he did, but not right away. It took a few days for him to zero in on Dawn. That tells me he didn’t know who she was, either. Not at first. Dawn was laying low. She didn’t go to the funeral, because she knew her emotion over Zeke would be a dead giveaway. In the meantime, she was trying to decide what to do. Here’s a sixteen-year-old girl whose boyfriend was just killed along with his parents, and she’s afraid that she’s next. She can’t talk to anyone in town. She doesn’t know who to trust. So she turns to the only real friend she’s ever had in her life. Lara Lovell.”
“You think she told Lara what was going on?”
“I’m sure she did. She would have been desperate to tell someone. My guess is, Lara dropped everything and drove south to help her. She showed up at the Thunder Mountain Motel that evening. She and Dawn had probably arranged to meet in the morning, but overnight Dawn saw a car outside her house and realized the killer had found her. She tried escaping to the motel, and he chased her there and shot her. But Lara must have seen the killer do it. Or they saw each other. That’s why she disappeared and became Faith Selby.”
“Sounds neat and tidy,” Phil said.
“It does. Except for—”
“Except for what?”
“The photograph.”
Yes, the photograph.
The motel parking lot in the rain. The little girl.
I kept coming back to the photograph, because every time I did, it blew up my theory of what had happened.
I got off the chair on Phil’s patio and went to the railing.
“The killer saw that photograph in the newspaper, and he immediately connected it to Lara Lovell,” I said, trying once again to talk my way through the mystery. “That’s the part that doesn’t make any sense. How did he know Lara took that picture? How did he know it was the night of the murder? At first, I thought he saw her take it. There was a man cropped out of the picture in the book, so maybe that was him. But that would put the killer at the motel, standing there among the rooms, and that’s not what the evidence shows, right? The killer followed Dawn from the trees and shot her in the empty lot. He never got to the motel.”
“That’s right,” Phil said.
We were all silent for a long while.
Phil propped his bare feet on a Parsons table and tapped the neck of the beer bottle against his chin. “So maybe the killer knew who the girl was. He knew she was at the motel the night of the murder.”
“Yes, I thought about that too, but how on earth could he know that?”
Then, as I asked the question out loud that had taunted me for days, I suddenly knew the answer. I felt myself hit by lightning. An electric shock rippled through my body, and my hands flew to my mouth.
Phil was right. It was so easy. So obvious. So horrible. How could I have missed it?
“Oh shit!” I exclaimed. “Oh shit, oh shit, oh shit, I’ve been so stupid! I can’t believe it. It was staring me in the face from the beginning, and I never put it together. Jesus! Don’t you see? This was never about Lara Lovell at all. It was the girl. It was always the girl!”
“What the hell are you talking about?” Kimble demanded.
“The girl saw him! The girl was the one who was outside the motel and saw him shoot Dawn! That’s why he knew who she was. That’s why the photograph was so important. He was never looking for Lara. He was looking for the girl.”
TWENTY-SIX
But who was the girl?
The killer had tortured Faith Selby to get the truth out of her. He’d torn apart her house in a desperate search for any kind of clue. Now it made sense. He was searching for something, anything, that would identify the little girl.
The witness who, somewhere in the recesses of her young memory, could put a face to a killer.
I wondered if Faith had talked in the end. He’d beaten her. Burned her. Had she told him who the girl was? Had she even known? If Faith had given up the secret to the killer, then I was sure the girl was already dead. But I was also pretty sure that Faith Selby—Lara Lovell—would have gone to her grave in agony rather than tell him anything at all.
“Were there children staying at the motel?” I asked Phil.
“Sure. Plenty.”
“So how do we track them down?”
He chuckled. “Good luck with that, Ms. Wells. The only thing you could do is go through the motel registration cards one by one and hope for the best. But in twenty-six years, parents will have moved, divorced, died. You could spend years on the search and not find half of them. Plus, if you were a parent whose kid had witnessed a murder, do you really think you’d admit it if some private detective came calling? Nope. You’d lie. You’d say, My girl didn’t see a thing.”
Phil was right.
I couldn’t ask who the girl was. I had to know.
But the killer had searched for a quarter century without finding her. The only clue that had ultimately set him on her trail was a photograph, and the woman who took it was dead.
I looked up at the sky through a web of trees. Hawks circled high above us. The damp humidity of the day got inside my clothes, as if I were back home in Florida. The chirpy gurgle of the creek stood in for the thunder of Atlantic waves on the coast. I drank more beer, then closed my eyes, putting myself back inside the photograph, imagining how the night at the motel had gone.
The girl had not been alone. Of course not.
She would have had her parents with her. They were the ones who’d had to make an excruciating call in a matter of seconds. If a child ran back to her motel room in the middle of the night and told her parents that she’d seen someone get killed, what would they do? If they found their daughter standing over a girl’s dead body in an empty lot behind the motel, what would they do?
Call the police?
Maybe. A teenage girl has been murdered, and your daughter has seen the killer. You can’t stay silent about that. You need to tell someone.
You pick up the motel phone; you start to dial the digits 9-1-1. But then you stop before your finger presses the final button, because once you make that call, there’s no going back. A husband takes the wife’s hand, or a wife takes the husband’s hand, and puts the phone back in its cradle.
Do we really want our daughter in the middle of this?
You’re a parent. You’re not thinking about anything except what’s best for your little girl. At three in the morning in a strange town with a shooting outside your door, I knew the decision a mother or a father would make. There was only one thing they could do. Go. Run. Get away before the police get there. Don’t let them talk to your daughter. Don’t let anyone know she saw anything at all. Tell her it was a bad dream. Tell her she imagined it.
Drive away from the motel. Now!
“Who called it in?” I asked Phil.
“What?”
“Who made the first call about the murder? It must have been someone at the motel.”
“Yes, it was a man staying three doors down from the empty lot. Solid guy, about forty. I don’t remember his name, but I’m pretty sure he was an accountant from Kalamazoo. The first shot awakened him, and then he heard the second shot not long after that. When he went to investigate, he found Dawn’s body behind the motel. He went back to his room and called the police, and he waited for us to arrive.”
“You took a statement from him?” I asked.
“Sure.”
“Can I see it?”
Phil glanced at Kimble, who opened his mouth as if to protest. But he didn’t. We’d come too far together. Kimble pawed through the murder book in his hands and finally extracted a stapled set of typed pages, which he handed to me. It was a transcript of an interview with James Patton of Kalamazoo, conducted by Detective Philip Potter, at the Devil Creek substation of the Berrien County Sheriff’s Department, at nine o’clock on the morning after the murder.
I skipped from question to question, looking for what I wanted. When I found it, I focused on the transcript.
About how much time passed between hearing the second shot and you going outside to investigate?
It’s hard to say. If I had to guess, not more than five minutes. I waited in bed to see if I heard anything more.
Did you?
No. Well, actually, that’s not true. There were no more shots, but I heard footsteps or a door closing somewhere nearby. I figured someone else at the motel had heard the shots, too.
Then what did you do?
I went outside to see what was going on.
Where was your room?
I was in room 104. It’s three doors down from the end of the motel’s perpendicular wing, so it was very close to the empty lot.
Did you see anyone else at that point?
No, I was alone.
When you found the body, did you see or hear anyone nearby?
No.
What about vehicles? Did you hear car engines? Tires squealing?
Not that I recall.
How long did you stay with the body?
A few seconds, maybe a minute. I tried to check her pulse to see if she was still alive. But when I looked more closely, I saw that she’d been shot in the head. There was no hope.
Did you touch or move anything else at the scene?
No.
And you didn’t see anyone else?
No.
What did you do then?
I returned to my room and called 911. After that, I changed clothes. I was still in my pajamas, so I changed into my regular clothes. I went to the bathroom. Then I went out to the parking lot to have a cigarette and wait for the police.
How long was it before they arrived?
I’m not sure. Five or ten minutes maybe. I’m sorry, I didn’t check my watch. I probably should have.
That’s okay, Mr. Patton. Did anything happen while you were waiting?
Well, the whole motel started to wake up. Lights were coming on all over the place. People were coming outside to find out what was going on. Some people were leaving.
You saw guests leave the motel before the police arrived?
Yeah. Several. A family two rooms down from me came outside while I was smoking. They had a kid with them. I told them to be careful, there’d been an incident behind the motel. They said yes, they’d heard shots and were leaving. I couldn’t really blame them for that. I don’t know how many others took off, but I definitely saw a few cars heading out of the parking lot.
I put down the interview transcript and tapped the page with my finger.
“It was them.”
“Who?” Phil asked.
“A family with a kid bolted before the police arrived. It was within a few minutes of the shots. I’m betting the kid was the little girl. They didn’t want her in the middle of a murder investigation, so they ran.”
Phil reread the question and answer and pursed his lips. “That’s possible.”
“Were you able to identify that family?”
“We identified as many people as we could among the guests who took off. Not all, but most.”
“Patton says they were in a room two doors down from him. We need to figure out who had that room. I’m sure they lied about what they saw, but at least we’d know who they were.”
Phil nodded at Kimble, who was already extracting motel registration records from the murder book. Inside a thick manila folder, I recognized the stack of index cards maintained by the motel owner, Wayne Donalds, as well as the backup sheets attached to each card with the police notes. On the cover of the folder was a hand-drawn map of the motel, with numbers marking the rooms in each of the two wings, as well as the location behind the motel where Dawn’s body had been found.
I pointed to the map. “Patton said he was in 104. The room numbers go one by one. Who was in 106?”
The index cards had grown messy over the years, so the stack was no longer in room-number order. I took a third of the index cards, Kimble took another third, and Phil took the rest. It only took a few seconds before Phil announced, “Bill and Marion L’Heureux of San Mateo, California, were staying in 106. They were on a cross-country driving trip.”
“Did they have a child?” I asked.
Phil glanced at the notes. “Yes, a ten-year-old son. They were still in their room when we knocked. They hadn’t left.”
“So it wasn’t them. What about the room two doors down the other way? That would be 102.”
We dove into the index cards again, but the card for that room was the very first one in the stack that I held in my hands—because Chuck Kimble and I had already been looking at it the previous day.
Of course.
Somehow I had already known that hers was the card we’d find.
“Lara Lovell,” I said quietly. “Lara was staying in room 102.”
The two detectives looked surprised, but I wasn’t.
I’d begun to realize that Lara wouldn’t have taken a photograph of a random girl at the motel. She wouldn’t have been outside by accident at the exact moment the little girl was standing at the Coke machine.
