(2012) Colder Than Death (20 page)

“Hard to say,” said Perry. “That's what's so damn frustrating about runaways. If a kid's parents are considerate they'll call and say their son or daughter came home. If the parents don't call us we call them in a couple days and most of 'em are back. Some get arrested in other cities or they get bored or lonely and they show up on mommy's doorstep. Then there's the ones who never return.”

He lowered his voice, and displaying a rare sense of consideration, said, “Like your Aunt. We had her down as a missing person/probable runaway. There wasn't much we could do. Nine years ago we didn't have the kind of technology we have now. And we didn't have the manpower to do any serious searching for your Aunt. Once we found out that your Aunt was the woman in the mausoleum, I pulled out her file. Nine years ago a call was made to the FBI regional office. There wasn't a lot they... I... we could do. Even the most sophisticated law enforcement operations can't do much with a missing person case. There's so little to go on.”

Perry was behaving so decently to Quilla it took me aback. I kept waiting for him to ruin the moment with some ill-timed barb. But he continued to be kind in his words.

“Once I learned the identity of your Aunt,” he said. “I studied her file. I have no details. Not one specific fact. And if you don't give me something, I want to tell you up front that I can't see this case ever being solved.”

“All the more reason to consider our theory about the disappearance of Del's girlfriend and Mrs. Thistle,” Quilla said.

Perry shook his head. “As far as I'm concerned, the investigation my father conducted twenty-four years ago solved that matter.”

“But without a body how can you be sure?” she protested.

“Lots of cases are tried and convictions gotten without a body,” said Perry. “As for Del's girlfriend, this is all news to me. What'd you say her name was, Del?”

“Alyssa Kirkland.”

Perry punched a few keys on the computer. “And she disappeared fifteen years back?”

Perry punched a few more keys. Something appeared on the screen and he read it out loud. “Missing person report placed by her mother. Presumed runaway.” Perry wrinkled his forehead. “I don't remember any Alyssa Kirkland from high school.”

“She didn't go to Dankworth. Her family moved here when we were Seniors. She was a freshman in college that Fall. I didn't even meet her until the following summer when she came home for vacation. That's when we were together.”

“Then one day she just disappeared?”

“Yes. I didn't know she was gone. We'd stopped seeing each other. There was no contact. Then I got a note from her in which she apologized for leaving so abruptly and I just assumed she took off. Her parents got a note too.”

Perry frowned. He suddenly looked angry. “Then why the hell did her parents file a missing person report if she sent notes to them and you?”

“Her mother didn't think it was like Alyssa to just take off.”

“Is that how you felt?”

“No. She hated Dankworth. Didn't get along with her father. Couldn't stand the college she went to. All the while we went out she talked about getting out of Dankworth.”

Perry frowned again. “Then why did her leaving come as a surprise to you?”

“It didn't. I mean it
did
... but not really... ”

“What the hell are trying to say, Del? So far, you're painting a picture of a girl who wasn't especially happy living in our fair town, wasn't looking forward to going back to college, didn't have a happy home life, and had just ended her summer romance. Why
would
she stick around? She said to hell with everything and everyone and took off.” He looked at Quilla. “Does that make sense to you or am I missing something?”

Quilla was speechless. I think she was so surprised that Perry had asked for her opinion, she couldn't talk. “I, uh,” she stammered. “But you're leaving one thing out. Something Del said on the way over here. Alyssa broke up with Del. He hadn't spoken to her in three weeks. In her mind, the relationship was over.” She looked at me. “But like you said, Del: why would she send you a good-bye note, apologizing for leaving so suddenly? She didn't owe you an apology. She didn't owe you anything. If I dumped a guy there's no way I'd send him a fucking postcard.” Quilla bit her lower lip and seemed to be thinking, formulating the words she wanted to use, making sure she got the phrasing right. “What if the killer didn't know that Del and Alyssa broke up?”

Perry was expressionless. I wondered where Quilla was going with this.

“And because the killer thinks Del and Alyssa are still a couple,” said Quilla. “He sends Del a note, figuring that the brief message will make Del not be suspicious.”

“But Del
was
suspicious,” said Perry.

“Not at first,” said Quilla. As she spoke, she turned her head back and forth between Perry and myself. “Even though they'd broken up, Del was still in love with her, so he probably wasn't thinking straight. The chick who dumps him suddenly sends him a note? It gives him hope. And there's nothing like hope when you've been dumped by someone you still love. I think Del was so blinded by hope that he couldn't let himself believe that something bad had happened to Alyssa. A note and then a postcard a few months later and he was in limbo.”

“Postcard?” said Perry.

“I got a postcard six months later. So did her parents.”

“So why would he think Alyssa was missing or some kind of crime victim?” said Quilla.

Perry looked at me. “But now, after all these years, you've decided she was murdered?”

I took a second to answer. “Yes.”

“And all because of this theory about the same guy killing her Aunt and Thistle's wife?”

“It's the most logical explanation I've heard so far to explain the disappearances.”

“Three women vanish in the course of twenty-four years,” said Perry. “Twenty-four years! You call that a pattern?”

Quilla and I looked at each other. In her eyes I could see her saying, “See, I told you so.”

“If a woman disappeared every year or every two years or even every five years for twenty-four years, then I could see a pattern,” said Perry. “But not three disappearances spread out over two-and-a-half decades.”

“We don't know that there weren't more,” I said. “How do you know that some of those missing people who never came back weren't murdered by whoever killed her Aunt?” Perry said nothing. “And how do you know that the killer only took women from Dankworth? If every police department around here gets as many missing person reports as you, there could be dozens of names of girls who never were heard from again.”

Perry pointed at his computer. “Any serious missing person report gets bumped onto the network. I might be able to give this more credence if there were more to the pattern than the three women over twenty-four years.”

“Whattya mean?” said Quilla.

“What were the ages of the three women?” he asked.

“Quilla's Aunt was nineteen,” I said. “Alyssa was nineteen. And I'm not sure how old Virginia Thistle was.” I turned to Quilla. “Do you know how old Gretchen's mother was when she disappeared?”

Quilla hesitated, her face flushed. Begrudgingly she said, “I don't know.”

“Let's check,” said Perry. He punched in a couple of keys on his computer. “We keep the closed cases in one file, active in another. I can understand how you might come up with ideas on who might've killed your Aunt. But rather than waste time trying to tie her death to an obscure case that's officially been closed for nearly a quarter of a century, you'd be better off concentrating on remembering who your Aunt associated with before she

disappeared. Here we are. Virginia Thistle was thirty-two years old at the time of her murder. Two nineteen-year-olds and a thirty-two-year-old doesn't sound like much of a pattern to me.” He leaned back. “Let's let the Thistle case rest in peace and concentrate on Brandy Parker.”

“What about the Alyssa Kirkland case?” said Quilla.

“There
is
no Alyssa Kirkland case,” said Perry.

“Can't you start an investigation now?” said Quilla.

“On whose complaint?” he said.

“Mine,” I snapped.

“An ex-boyfriend
this
long after the fact, filing a complaint?” said Perry. “With nothing except a remote hunch.”

“You're a policeman,” said Quilla. “Are you telling me that if a person tells you that someone might've been a crime victim you're not going to at least check into it?”

“If it's within reason, sure. Based on what's in the Alyssa Kirkland file, nothing happened.” He looked at me. “Del, I'm sorry to hear about this long lost love of yours, but you can't expect to come in here fifteen years after she gave you your walking papers and want me to suddenly believe she's a murder victim.” He glanced at his watch. “I don't want to hear anymore about things that happened so long ago. It's gonna be hard enough for me to solve a murder that took place
nine
years ago.” He turned to Quilla. “The way I understand it, the purpose of this meeting was for you to tell me everything you know or remember about your Aunt. That's what I want to talk about. Nothing else.” He leaned back in his chair and looked at the cardboard box setting on the floor next to Quilla's chair. “What's in there?”

“Some personal things from my Aunt you should check.”

“Let's take a look,” Perry said.

With a frown Quilla picked up the box and set it on Perry's desk. She removed the items one at a time, setting them on the desk. Four photo albums overflowing with pictures, a calendar of the year Brandy Parker disappeared, five notebooks and a cigar box filled with knickknacks.

“There's a lot of information here,” said Quilla. She picked up the notebooks. “These have her thoughts and feelings about things. It'll take you a while to read them.”

“I'll go over every line, believe me,” Perry said. “But what can you tell me about your Aunt that only you know?”

Quilla paused for a few moments, clearly unsure of where to begin. “Well...it's like...I...”

“Tell him what you told me,” I said.

She looked at me, confused.

“About your Aunt and cemeteries,” I said.

She turned to Perry. “My Aunt was a cemetery buff.”

Perry looked at me, then back at Quilla. “You know that for sure?”

“I remember her talking about it. I didn't understand what she meant because I was little and didn't really understand cemeteries. She only started doing it near the time before she... near the end.”

Perry considered Quilla's remark for a moment, then said, “This is good. Okay. What else?”

“You gotta understand that I was so young when I knew my Aunt... I didn't understand... sex. So when she would say things to me about guys, I didn't really know what she was talking about. But, after I started to read the stuff she wrote in her notebooks I was able to put things together. I think my Aunt really got screwed over by boys her age. I think she started to go out with older guys. Father figures. See, my grandfather, my Aunt's and my mother's father, was a real dork. When he died, nobody really cared. Not even my grandmother. And from what I've been able to piece together, he and Aunt Brandy didn't get along. IIf I had to take a guess, whoever killed her might've been some older guy who she thought would treat her nice.”

“An older guy who might've also been a cemetery buff? Is that possible?” said Perry.

I shrugged. “Why not?”

Perry scribbled something down on a piece of paper, then said, “Do you think it's possible that this 'older' man you think she might've been seeing is the one who introduced her to being interested in cemeteries?”

“There's no way I could know that. Until Del mentioned the words cemetery buff I never even knew such a thing had a name.”

“Anything else I should know?” said Perry.

Quilla thought for a few seconds. “No.”

“Let's see if I get any info from your Aunt's things, then we'll talk again.”

“Alright,” said Quilla.

“Del,” said Perry. “I need to talk to you for a second. Quilla, why don't you wait out front with Greg?”

“Why should I be left out?”

“I need to ask Del about another matter.”

Clearly not believing Perry, Quilla blurted a suspicious, “Okay,” glared at me and walked out.

I looked at Perry as he began removing the possessions of Brandy Parker from the box.

“Who came up with this crap about three murders?” he said, lifting out a thick photo album. “Her or you?”

“Both of us.”

“I get the feeling you think that little shit's a good kid.”

“She is. She's troubled, but she's okay. She's honest and sincere.”

“This idea about Kyle Thistle's wife and your girlfriend is so off the wall I'm not even gonna consider it.” He pulled out Brandy Parker's notebook. “But what I will consider is what the kid said about her Aunt being a cemetery buff. I don't know what it is about that, but ever since you mentioned it the day we found the body I've been haunted by it. I've felt that somewhere in it was the clue I need. And now that she says her Aunt was one, it places the victim in the cemetery.”

“She could've been killed somewhere else and brought to the mausoleum.”

“Or she could've been doing whatever cemetery buffs do, checking out a tombstone and the killer could've snuck behind her, killed her and hid her in the mausoleum. So I have to ask myself if the killer was a cemetery buff or not. And if he was... was he there with her, you know, like, on a date or something? Or was he just a stranger who popped into a cemetery to look at old tombstones and who saw Brandy Parker and maybe he knew who she was from her wild nights in bars... and maybe he thought she was sexy because she was wearing that tight 'I'm A Virgin Islander' T-shirt...and let's face it, she was a babe. Only problem with
this
line of thought is what you said about the graves where she was hidden.”

“Whattya mean?”

“Nobody goes there to visit.”

“That reminds me,” I said. “We made a list of all the names on the headstones near the mausoleum.” I reached into my shirt pocket and removed the pieces of paper on which we'd written down the names and handed them to Perry. “We figured that maybe one of the names on the headstones might be the ancestor of the killer.”