She Once Vanished, page 2
“And eventually, the two of you got together.”
Dain nodded. “We started going out together… getting more serious… going steady… then her Instagrammer life took over. Suddenly, she’s one of the most recognizable people on the planet. She has millions of followers. Everything she posts is an instant hit. What started out as being something fun ended up taking over her life. She spent every waking minute planning her next post, getting it just right, obsessively monitoring her views.”
“That must have been hard on the relationship.”
“It took over the relationship. Instagram became her boyfriend. I was just this guy who showed up in some of the shots. But people loved the relationship stuff. She had to post about us some of the time if she wanted to keep her views up.”
Zachary nodded encouragingly.
“I just… sometimes I wished we could go back to the way it was. To be able just to be boyfriend and girlfriend in a small town, this little rural place… like it was idyllic. Of course, it wasn’t really; there are always challenges. You want to do different things and have to consider each other’s feelings, and their backgrounds, and their families. But it seemed like it was a lot simpler before she became a famous influencer.’”
“I have heard that it can be very stressful.”
Zachary didn’t know a lot of famous social media figures, but he did know one, Brittany “the bombshell” Blake. He had misjudged her initially, thinking that she had it all made. He thought she had a life of leisure, with everyone worshiping her, and all she had to do was post a few pictures. He hadn’t realized how hard she had to work to look good, stay healthy, and make all the appearances that her fans expected. He had thought she was snobby and stuck up when she was really down to earth, thoughtful, and cared about other people. Her fans had rescued them from a dire situation, and she had also helped Zachary on another case since then.
He wouldn’t ever judge someone by their popularity again. Being famous did not equate with a life of leisure and luxury.
“It was incredibly stressful,” Dain agreed. “You don’t know how many times I thought about leaving. Just let Elysse live her life online, being the darling of social media, and live my life outside the spotlight, without all those expectations. Only… I love her. How could I leave her because she’s too popular? It sounds… ridiculous and shallow.”
“I’m sure that wasn’t the reason you thought about leaving.”
“No. Not exactly, but that was what it would look like. For the rest of my life, I would be the guy who left Elysse Allan. I would be the villain. The jerk who broke Elysse Allan’s heart.” He grimaced and looked away.
“And what you got instead was…”
“For five days, I was the guy who murdered Elysse Allan.”
Dain swallowed hard. He stared at the window as if he could see it all playing out before him.
“Everyone was so sure of themselves. I was the one who reported her missing! I was the one looking for her, insisting that the police follow up on her disappearance. But the police and everyone else made me the prime suspect. They decided that I had murdered her and dumped her body somewhere it might never be discovered.”
3
Everyone had been sure that Dain had killed his girlfriend. It had been all over social media and the TV. Everyone knew who Elysse Allan was and everyone knew that she had disappeared, had stopped posting, and had obviously been killed by her abusive boyfriend.
Kenzie, Zachary’s girlfriend and the assistant medical examiner, had even been called out to a body dump scene that was believed to contain Elysse Allan’s remains. But it had turned out the remains were not new and had not belonged to Elysse Allan. Instead, Elysse showed up several days later alive and well as a tourist in the Grand Canyon. That was what Dain wanted investigated. How had she gotten from Vermont to the Grand Canyon? Why had Elysse gone back there when she and Dain had already toured the canyon together? Why had she disappeared from view, not posting to any of her social media sites? None of these questions had been answered satisfactorily when Elysse had reappeared.
“Whose idea was it to go on vacation?” Zachary asked, trying to stay on track with the interview.
“It wasn’t much of a vacation,” Dain muttered.
“Because the two of you were fighting?”
“Because it was no vacation. You take a vacation to get away from your work. To relax and take a breather. Reconnect with each other. This was… a tour—a production. There was nothing unscripted. No fun, no impulsive choices. She had to keep up her posting schedule. She had locations already scouted ahead of time with her social media consultant, Kristy Echols, ready for her to drop in, set up her shots, make her posts, and move on. I couldn’t stand living like that. So frenzied… no time for us. For breaks. For intimacy. It wasn’t healthy.”
Zachary nodded. “You had already completed most of your tour. You’d started in California, gone through the Grand Canyon, toured through a lot of historic and park sites. You had a few places to see in Vermont and then were going on to New York.”
“Yeah. Then, flying back to Oregon. We were exhausted. It had been weeks, and I gotta say, I’m just not big on road trips. Not being able to sleep soundly in hotels, trying to find clean, healthy food, the frenetic pace. I was looking forward to finishing our vacation and being able to relax. Maybe we could actually enjoy some time together. Shut off the phones for a few hours and let the world do whatever they wanted without us.”
“What was the fight about?”
“What they were all about. Getting off the merry-go-round. Making time for each other.”
“It got heated?”
Dain looked at Zachary for a moment. He was looking for a way to smooth it over, to make it look like it had just been one of those things that happens when people step on each other’s toes or are cooped up together too long. Vacations were notorious for causing bickering. People had to live too close together. It wasn’t natural not to have any space or alone time.
But there had been cameras. Zachary had studied whatever footage he could get his hands on. He wouldn’t believe Dain if he said that it was nothing.
“It got heated,” Dain agreed. “It had been a long trip. She was being unreasonable. Maybe I was being unreasonable in demanding that she make some time for me. We both had… tempers.”
“Was there abuse?”
Dain swallowed. “Verbal abuse, maybe,” he admitted. “Neither of us was being particularly nice. Things had just gone on for too long. Maybe some names were called. Swearing.”
“Threats?” Zachary asked.
“I would never do anything to hurt her.”
“Were there threats made?”
Dain tilted his head back, staring up at the ceiling. “Not serious threats.”
Zachary waited. The smell of the coffee hung in the air.
“Was there physical abuse?”
“No.”
“No one was hit?”
“No.”
The way Dain’s face twitched, it was clearly a lie. No need for any polygraph here. Zachary took out his phone and started tapping the screen. He glanced up at Dain, who was watching him uncertainly.
“What are you doing?” Dain asked.
“I’m going to return your retainer.”
“What? No! You said you would take on the case.”
“I should have said that we had no agreement if you lied to me. If you want me to find out what happened, you have to tell me the truth. You’re not.”
“I didn’t hit Elysse.”
“Did she hit you?”
Zachary didn’t need to ask; he already knew the answer. Dain’s face was pale in the dimness of the room. He shook his head. Zachary swiped on his phone.
“No,” Dain protested. “Don’t return it. I’ll tell you the truth.”
“I can’t take a case where the client won’t tell me the truth.”
Of course he’d had clients lie to him. It wasn’t unusual. People didn’t want to reveal everything. They wanted things to go a certain way and tried to manipulate the investigation. They wanted him to see them in a positive light. Or people didn’t tell him the truth because they didn’t know what it was.
But he had to impress upon Dain the importance of telling him the truth. It was obvious he was prone to fabrication. Zachary was only getting one side of the story. If that side was a lie, there was no point in even investigating. He wasn’t going to get anywhere.
“Okay, yes,” Dain said. “She hit me.” He swallowed. “It was just a slap. I got over it.”
“She’d hit you before.”
Dain looked for a way to deny it. “She was… a physical person,” he said delicately.
Growing up in foster care, Zachary had heard a lot of excuses for abuse. It wasn’t the first time he’d heard something like that.
“And had you hit her?”
“No.”
Zachary raised his brows and waited. Dain fiddled with his coffee cup, turning it in circles.
“I think you have both hit each other on occasion,” Zachary suggested. He had seen enough of the red flags in the social media videos.
He could see Dain considering using the “we’re both passionate people” line again. It was on his lips. Then he looked down, avoiding Zachary’s gaze.
Shame.
“It has happened a couple of times,” he admitted finally. Passive language, still avoiding taking responsibility for his actions. “It has happened,” rather than, “I hit her.”
“Did you hit her that day? At any time during the day, not just during that argument?”
“No.”
“Not at all?”
“No.”
“But she hit you.”
Dain shrugged. “Like I said, a slap. It wasn’t a closed fist. Just… for emphasis.”
Zachary barely managed to stop himself from laughing at that. The slap was just to emphasize her point. Like an exclamation mark.
“Okay.” Zachary decided to leave the discussion of the argument alone for now. He would come back to it again later in the investigation as the verifiable facts were established and the points that Dain had lied about or attempted to obscure became more obvious. “So the two of you had this argument and she took off. Where did she go? Which of you was driving on this vacation?”
“It was… kind of a caravan. We were both driving and sometimes joined by cameramen, tech guys, her publicist, or whatever.”
“You and Elysse had separate cars.”
Dain nodded.
That cleared up one point that had bothered Zachary from the time he had first heard the story. How had they become separated in the first place? Which one of them had driven the car and which had been stranded? He’d heard that Elysse had abandoned Dain at the gas station. But as it turned out, they had both had transportation after the fight.
“We had a lot of equipment,” Dain explained. “And a lot of times, we needed to be in separate places. Elysse had me picking up supplies, or I had to talk to someone or set something up for her. She would be taking pictures or videos at another location. All so we could get to as many different places as possible in a short period of time.”
Zachary could see Dain’s point about their not having any intimate time together, about it not being a vacation. It sounded like it had been planned with military precision. It had not been about the two of them having a nice time together or taking time to relax. It was just a production for Elysse’s fans. And it had been wearing.
“So how soon after she took off was it when you started to worry about her?”
“She missed the next three stops on her itinerary. I was concerned after the first one. It wasn’t unusual for us to argue or for her to end it by walking off. But she was always at the next location. She might not wait for me, but she would be there.”
“So you were worried right away, with the first one she missed.”
“Yeah. There was this maple tree farm we were supposed to go to. Maple bush. It was summer, so it wasn’t like we would see them tapping the trees, but she still wanted to see the trees and the equipment, get some pictures of the taps and the boilers and everything.”
“That was the first place she didn’t show up?”
“Yes. I was calling her, apologizing to the people who had been expecting her, trying to figure out where she was and why she hadn’t shown up. I never thought… I knew that she was mad at me. Figured that’s all it was. That she would show up again once she was settled down. I didn’t think…”
“You thought she would be at the next place.”
“Yeah, of course I did. She should have been. I couldn’t understand why she wasn’t. It didn’t usually take her that long to cool off. But there had been a couple of times before… when she was upset with me or told me that she just needed space and would go off on her own for a day or two. So it wasn’t beyond the bounds of belief…”
“How long was it before you reported her missing?” Zachary had a pretty good idea of the timeline, but wanted Dain to confirm it, to nail down anything that was vague or where there were multiple stories to sort out.
“That night. When she wasn’t at the campsite where we had planned to meet…”
“Even though she had taken a day or two off before.”
“Yeah—but she wasn’t posting! That didn’t make any sense. Before… she always kept posting. She wouldn’t just stop. It was her livelihood. She knew that neglecting her socials could be disastrous. She hadn’t posted a thing since she had left me after the fi— after the argument.”
And that was one of the reasons that the police and everybody else had been sure that Dain had killed her. Nothing but death would stop Elysse from posting, and Dain had been the last one to see Elysse alive. The last one who had been with her before she disappeared. People had seen them together and knew that they had been fighting. As such “passionate” people, they were well-known for barn-blowing arguments.
The fight had been the last thing anyone saw of her. So of course they had assumed that Dain had been behind her disappearance. She had never reached the maple bush. Everyone knew that something had happened to her on the way there.
And then Elysse had reappeared five days later in the Grand Canyon. According to what she had told the reporters after her return, she had simply decided that she needed some time to herself. She and Dain had broken up before but, this time, she knew it was for good. She had apparently doubled back on their trail, going back over country they had already covered to return to the Grand Canyon. She didn’t have any good explanation as to why.
Nothing she said made any sense.
So why was she lying?
To begin with, Zachary had thought that it was something Dain and Elysse had concocted together to make her even more popular. A publicity stunt. He would report her missing, and she would stretch it out for as long as she felt like she could, and then she would return, tell her story, and get twice the followers. But it appeared that she had been discovered before she had intended to be. Her eagle-eyed followers had spotted her in the Grand Canyon even though there was no reason for them to look for her there. Her face was too well-known for her to hide, even in a place as packed with tourists as the Grand Canyon.
“Did the police do anything the day she disappeared? I wouldn’t think they would want to waste the resources, considering she was an adult and had only been ‘missing’ for a few hours.”
“Yeah, they didn’t want to. They said she was voluntarily missing. Most adults reappear within forty-eight hours. They are almost always close by, within a few miles from where they disappeared. They said she would just show up again.” Dain shook his head. “And I was sure something terrible had happened. That if they didn’t go out and find her, she would be dead. That she might already be.”
“So you talked them into it?” Zachary asked, impressed.
“No.” Dain shook his head.
4
Zachary cocked his head to the side.
Dain stood up and began pacing the cramped motel room. Zachary took it as his signal to stretch out his legs and get rid of a few fidgets as well. Zachary had jotted down some notes in his notebook but was already familiar with most of Dain’s story. Even with how little writing he had done, his fingers were cramped. He interlaced them and stretched them out, palms forward. He had a few more swallows of the coffee, which was starting to get too cold. Dain started another pot on the in-room coffee maker.
Eventually, Dain returned to his seat.
“The police wouldn’t listen to me. They thought I was just overreacting to her being gone and she had just taken off because she felt like it.” Dain paused, frowning, and then said as if the thought had occurred to him for the first time, “I guess they were right about that. If you believe her story.”
“But you don’t.”
“No. Anyway,” Dain flicked his fingers as if shaking water droplets from them. “Forget that. That was just a random thought. They wouldn’t believe me. I knew they had to open a case and start searching for her. They wouldn’t find her without a full-scale search, and they didn’t want to do that because of the cost and the fact that they didn’t believe she was really missing. Or thought that she was voluntarily missing, which is the same thing.”
Zachary nodded, waiting for Dain to go on and finish his thought.
“So I went to the fans,” Dain explained. “They were already all panic-posting asking what had happened to her. I told them she was missing, but the local police wouldn’t do anything about it. Told them they should start calling and emailing the police department if they wanted them to act.”
Zachary chuckled. “And with her millions of fans, I imagine a few responded.”
“They crashed the police department’s phone system. Locked up the exchange; no one else could get through in the entire area. Crashed their email server. People showed up at the police department in person, dozens of them, demanding that they take Elysse’s disappearance seriously. The police were begging me to make it stop. Said to let the fans know they would open an investigation immediately and to please stop calling.”
