The Forgotten Girl, page 4
Public interest in the case was high, since it involved the disappearances and murders of six ten-year-old boys. Lynn and TJ had managed to get one boy back alive and give the other grieving families closure in the form of being able to bury their children, which is no small thing, but also never enough. It had been a grueling eighteen-month mission, that took them all up and down the West Coast and culminated in a manhunt in the wintertime Alaskan wilderness, and it took a toll on both of them. A much bigger one than either of them had been willing to admit.
News outlets across the globe picked up that story, and the reporter who included them in his story got his five minutes of fame. Right before he lost his job and all hope of making a name for himself as a journalist in the future, for exposing two FBI’s top undercover operatives along with the way the Bureau went about solving the most heinous serial killer cases.
The reporter destroyed TJ’s and Lynn’s careers, since they could no longer pretend to be anything other than who they were now that it was so easy to find their true names and identities online.
They were both still finding their feet in this new path they were on. And today, TJ, judging by his anxious movements and raised voice, seemed to be slipping and sliding. The look he gave her as he noticed her—anguished, frustrated, and fed-up all rolled into one—said as much.
But she’d need him to pull together for this case. She needed him and his uncanny ability to get under anyone’s skin. Child molester, rapist, businessman with a secret identity, you name it, TJ could charm them and get them to spill all their secrets.
“The ME is still with the body?” Lynn asked Tara, who nodded.
“And that’s the two detectives talking to my father,” she added, her cheeks reddening slightly as Lynn gasped and did a double take.
“Sheriff Payton is your father?” she asked, and Tara nodded again.
Lynn’s reaction was over the top. But her heart was now racing, her hands were clammy and sweat had broken out on her forehead.
All because this was yet another vivid reminder of her own past. She had always planned on following in her father’s footsteps and becoming Sheriff one day. She’d also always meant to go back home one day and use all the knowledge and experience she accumulated in her long career to solve Alicia’s and her parents’ murders, assuming, as she still tried to, that her brother was not responsible for the latter. She just never did.
And now everything was conspiring to point her in that direction, even though she had a much more pressing case to focus on and solve.
TJ was waving at her to come over, and the annoyed grimace on his face told her he’d been doing it for a while. She wiped her sweaty palms on the inside lining of her coat pockets, told Tara to hang on and went to join him.
“Grimes wants us to take a seat way in the back for this one. He thinks you’re too close,” TJ told her, still pressing the phone to his ear.
She could hear the on-hold, upbeat elevator music through it as he continued, “But I’ll be damned if I let him pull us off this one. I saw what that monster did to her face. I almost puked and it’s been a lot of years since that was my initial reaction at a crime scene. You can hold it together, right? I know you were close to her family.”
“Of course I can hold it together,” Lynn said and nodded and hoped the whole thing looked and sounded more assertive than it felt.
Grimes was their station chief and the guy they answered to. Normally, he gave them total free rein. Him wanting them to take a back seat was strange.
“I’m on hold with the CSI team now,” TJ grumbled. “They owe us a couple of favors, so I’ll get someone up here even if Grimes doesn’t OK it.”
Lynn pulled out her own phone. “I’ll call Grimes. He owes us too, and I’m not stepping back.”
The sweat that had erupted on her face and down her back was cooling unpleasantly as she waited for the boss to answer her call. By the fifth ring, she was sure he wouldn’t. But by the eighth he did.
“The locals are dragging their feet, they seem like they have no idea how to even get started, what do you mean you want me to step back?” Lynn asked, the words all coming out in a rush.
“I understand you’re very close to the victim’s parents—” Grimes said, but Lynn cut him off.
“And the victim herself,” she huffed. “I would’ve been her godmother, if my job wasn’t what it is. I need to find whoever did this to her. Don’t stand in my way. Please.”
Grimes wasn’t a bad guy. They’d known each other for a long time and worked several cases together before he found his calling sitting behind a desk rather than working in the field. He sighed as she made her request and then fell silent.
“You know I can do this,” she added in a calmer voice.
“Are you sure?” he asked. “With your history… I just thought it’d hit too close to home.”
Everyone in the Bureau knew about Lynn’s history, but no one ever asked her any questions or commented on it where she could hear. They whispered though. And the sidelong glances she’d often get were one of the main reasons she took that first undercover assignment she was offered. After that, she never looked back.
TJ was standing next to her now. The lightning in his eyes had given way to soft rain as he waited for her to end the conversation with Grimes.
“I can handle it,” she said curtly.
Grimes sighed again. “Fine. I’ll authorize the resources and manpower.”
Lynn thanked him and hung up.
“I was harsh before,” TJ said. “Are you all right?”
“Yes, and the next person who asks me that—"
“Will be very sorry they did,” TJ finished for her.
He was the only person in Lynn’s life who truly understood her. And the only person in the world she trusted completely. They shared the same passion for throwing themselves into cases and not surfacing until they were solved. Neither of them had a life outside of work.
Because both of them knew exactly what it felt like to lose those you loved the most. And neither of them wanted to feel that pain again, so they buried themselves in other people’s lives.
“Enough talking,” she said. “Let’s get this one solved.”
4
Detectives Monroe and Ricci who had come to take control of the scene from the local Sheriff’s office weren’t interested in standing in Lynn’s way like she feared they would be. If anything, they were eager to hand over the case to someone else. Up-close, both men look like they’d been working back-to-back shifts—sunken, blood-shot eyes, crumpled shirts to go with their wrinkled pants and an odor of coffee that seemed to exude from their pores.
“We think it’s best if someone from the city came to take this over,” Ricci said in a thick New York accent. “Seeing as the victim is from there.”
“Two detectives are already enroute from the 96th Precinct,” Monroe added hastily, and Lynn detected a hint of remorse in his voice. For throwing in the towel so fast, perhaps.
“We don’t get many cases like this up here,” Ricci added.
“What about manpower? Will your office supply that?” she asked.
“The police station in Harrington will handle all that,” Monroe explained. “We already spoke to the chief. It’s arranged.”
“Officers are already here to help,” Ricci said pompously and Lynn fought the urge to roll her eyes.
He wasn’t entirely wrong. About six uniformed police officers had joined the deputies already in the field and they all looked like they were in desperate need for someone to tell them what to do.
Lynn had some, but not a whole lot of, experience navigating all the different branches of law enforcement called out to a crime scene. She preferred to work alone, as did TJ, which was another reason they made such a good team.
As far as she could tell right now, the only people actually working were the three CSIs in white coveralls, but that would change in an hour or so when the team TJ called in arrived. At least there was that.
“Then I guess all that’s left for you to do is wait for the big city detectives and fill them in while we get to work,” she said bitingly and didn’t wait for a response.
She joined TJ at the flap of the tent obscuring Shanna and the tree she was tied to from view. Shanna’s skin had begun turning a dark blackish-blue and the scars on her face were now black.
She’d been cut down from the tree and was lying in an open black body bag. Lynn turned away as they zipped it up. In her mind, the finality of that action was akin to a funeral in her mind. Irrevocably final.
“Have the body transported to the office of Dr. Rick Zinchenko,” TJ said beside her, and when she looked up, he was talking to a slight man almost a head shorter than her, with wispy grey hair and silver-rimmed glasses that looked too big on his tiny face.
He looked relieved if anything.
“Someone has to sign for that,” he said and TJ told him he’d do it.
Dr. Z had done the post mortems on some of the worst cases Lynn and TJ had worked on, so Shanna would be in good hands with him.
“When did she die?” Lynn asked the ME while TJ dealt with the paperwork.
He shrugged and moved his glasses higher up on his nose, leaving a bloody streak on the side of his nose.
“I can’t tell you that,” he said. “But I can tell you that some of the cuts on her face had already begun to heal by then. I’d say they were inflicted at least twenty-four hours before she died. But that’s just my educated guess.”
He looked and sounded shaken, and he was saying things Lynn didn’t want to hear. Things she already knew, but didn’t want to acknowledge.
“There is also bruising around her neck,” the ME added.
“So she was strangled?” Lynn asked.
It’s a good way to go. Better than bleeding out like her mother had done. Lynn pinched the soft spot between her thumb and index finger to jolt herself out of that line of thinking.
The ME shook his head, a lost, almost scared, look in his eyes. “There are no other signs that she had died of strangulation. No petechiae in the whites of her eyes for example.”
But how could he even see that, the way her face is covered in blood?
“I think she might have been tortured that way too,” the ME said quietly, clearing her throat, and chipped ice filled Lynn’s chest.
“Thank you,” she said and exited the tent, tripping over a root and practically falling into TJ’s arms.
“What did the ME say?” he asked, but she just gave him a blank stare. She couldn’t repeat it. Not yet.
“We’ll wait for Dr. Z’s report,” she said as she righted herself and smoothed down her black cotton sweater, which didn’t keep her warm at all this morning, but was now, together with her long wool coat, suddenly too hot.
“I’ll take a couple of officers and go check out those abandoned cabins,” Lynn said and pointed to the overgrown wooden structures peeking darkly from amid the trees. She felt watched by them. “Maybe that’s where the primary crime scene is.”
“I’ll go with you,” TJ said, but she shook her head.
“No, you go back to the cafeteria and speak to Shanna’s party again,” she said. “The director’s girlfriend, Alicia West, has some pretty serious scratches on her arms. And she didn’t like Shanna much.”
TJ nodded. “You think this could’ve been a cat fight gone too far?”
TJ had the blackest sense of humor of anyone she’d ever met. He’d been a competitive swimmer, had a silver Olympic medal under his belt while still at university, and a bright future in the sport ahead of him, when his pregnant fiancée and mother—all the family he had—were killed by a school shooter.
He’d entered the Bureau with the same goal as Lynn—to understand. But as the years passed and understanding didn’t come, they’d both settled for the next best thing—devoting their lives to catching as many bad guys as they could.
The gallows humor was part of the package and normally Lynn enjoyed it. But there was nothing even remotely funny about Shanna’s death. Nothing that warranted so much as a grin.
“It’s a possibility,” she said and hoped it would be that easy.
This case had already gotten so far under her skin that memories she hardly acknowledged anymore were busting up to the surface like they had happened just yesterday. And they hadn’t even started working it yet.
5
The camp’s groundskeeper—Jerry Whittaker—was nowhere to be found to provide the keys and maps of the camp. Lynn and two deputies—including Tara—spent the time waiting for him to unlock the cabins, checking out the area around them. Lynn had them all wear gloves and plastic booties over their shoes, and made sure they weren’t trampling any potential evidence as they did so.
But apart from a few cigarette butts, a sandwich wrapper and drops of what looked like blood on a pile of freshly fallen leaves, they found nothing even remotely resembling a crime scene of the kind Shanna’s murder would’ve produced. Lynn looked inside the abandoned cabins through holes in the wooden shutters on the windows and found no reason to believe a person had bled to death in any of them.
The thick clouds that had been obscuring the sun didn’t bring rain and they’d begun dissipating as the day went on, but the sun was starting to set now. When she and the deputies returned to the tent, the Bureau’s CSI team was already fanning out to search for evidence. Hopefully they’d have more luck finding something.
Someone’s radio crackled in the distance. Tara answered it, said, OK, I’m on it, then came over to where Lynn was studying a set of boot prints on the ground. To her they looked to be fresh and made by a very heavy person, since they were deeper than any she or anyone in their party were making. But she was far from a tracker.
“The groundskeeper has arrived,” Tara informed her. “He’s at reception waiting for us. Apparently, he spent the night in the drunk tank in the next county, that’s why he couldn’t be reached. Should we go talk to him?”
Lynn shook her head and took a few snaps of the footprints she had been looking at. “I’ll go. You stay here and make sure the CSIs process this set of prints.”
Tara looked a little put out, but she hid it well. Her lips, already a very pale pink before had turned blue, but if she was cold, she hid that very well too.
Lynn took off through the trees, taking a path that would take her in a wide arc around the tent. Before long, she found herself in grey, dusk-like darkness, the trees growing thickly all around. She could see people working. But she couldn’t hear them. And soon she couldn’t see them anymore either.
Is this what Shanna experienced walking out here alone? Being grabbed and dragged off? So close to people who could help, yet unable to call out?
That feeling of being watched that she’d been sensing all day via the prickling on the back of her neck and a tickling feeling in the pit of her stomach intensified now and was quickly edging its way towards fear and then panic the further into the trees she walked.
Undercover work had honed her instincts to finely tuned instruments over the years. Ones she trusted and relied on completely. Getting close enough to psychopaths to get their confessions or at least getting them to slip up required such finely tuned senses.
And right now, she was willing to bet the psycho who killed Shanna was out there, watching them scurry around investigating her death. Unless it was Alicia West who had done it, and Lynn’s senses were going haywire after all the stress that this day had brought.
The trees around her had finally begun to thin and she could see the dining hall, lit up by three floodlights on one side. Thick white smoke was rising from the orange brick chimney dominating one side of it, meaning a fire was blazing inside. The thought filled her with an irrational jolt of happiness, when a dark shadow she saw from the corner of her eyes materialized into a tall and wide man wearing all black, blocking her path.
He was standing with his back against the lights, so she couldn’t make out his face. The fear roiling in her belly reached a fevered pitch and her hand instinctively reached towards her Glock. Which wasn’t there. Her holster and gun were still safely locked away in the trunk of her SUV.
“Lynn, it’s me,” the man said quietly. “Ryan. Ryan Connor.”
And just like that, the fear roiling in her stomach stopped and her whole body relaxed, including her arm which now hung loosely by her side. Ryan always did have that kind of effect on her. Like coming home back when home was still safe. He didn’t have to say his name, she’d recognize his voice anywhere, still, even after twenty years. And she’d recognize his face too, she found as he stepped closer and light hit it. He’d aged, sure, but well.
The anxious fear in the pit of her stomach didn’t exactly turn into anything a whole lot more pleasant though. Why is he here? Her mind was screaming. He can’t be here.
“What are you doing here, Ryan?” she asked, her voice gravelly and toneless, because she tried to keep all that silent screaming out of it.
As soon as he spoke, her heart had started beating so fast that the whooshing of blood in her ears made her nearly deaf. If he’d answered her question, she didn’t hear it.
Him being here, at this crime scene, was the final straw that now completely broke Lynn’s ability to separate what had been then, twenty years ago, and what was now. It was like she had walked into two crime scenes this morning—Shanna’s and her best friend Alicia’s. And now they seemed like the same crime scene.
Lynn, Alicia, and Ryan had known each other since they were in kindergarten. They were always in the same class at school, always got along, even if they weren’t exactly from the same social circles.
But when Alicia was murdered, Ryan was the prime suspect.
He was never charged for the murder and left town to join the Army a few months after Alicia’s body was found, because no other suspect was ever unearthed, and in the town’s eyes Ryan was and remained guilty. Lynn hadn’t seen him in over twenty years. But she still thought about him. More than she thought about Alicia, if she were honest.
