Murder Mountain (8 page)

“What is Lizzie taking in college?” I asked him.

Lizzie had enrolled in college to be a nurse, but, of course, had started falling behind in her classes the last six months. She would have graduated in less than a year if she’d stuck with it.

“Tell me about your daughter, Mr. Johnston: what kind of a girl she is, things she likes to do, anything you can think of.”

For the first time I saw Larry smile. “She’s a wonderful daughter. Like they say, the apple of my eye, y’know? She never caused me a lick of grief growing up, until now.” His smile faded.

“Her mother died of cancer when she was only two-years old, so it was just us. She always got good grades, played sports, and always had nice friends until these last six months. I don’t know what got into her. I mean, I hate to imagine, but the girl living in this house the last six months wasn’t my Lizzie. She disappeared long before June,” he said, his eyes welling up with tears. “I don’t know who these people are, but they changed her. Her personality changed. She didn’t care about the way she dressed. And she got quiet; quit talking to me. Detective Gallagher, I only want one of two things right now. If Lizzie is alive and doesn’t want to see me for whatever reason, fine, as long as she’s okay. The other,” his voice quivering, “is that if she is, if she is dead, I pray to God that my baby didn’t suffer. If she did, I really don’t think I could bear it.” At this point, he completely broke down into tears.

I felt my own eyes welling up as I got a tissue out of my purse and handed it to him. “Mr. Johnston,” I said, putting my hand on his arm, “I’ll find out what happened to your daughter. I promise you that.”

I let Larry cry for a few minutes and stood there while he got himself back together.

“I’m sorry,” he said, wiping his eyes with his sleeve. “That happens to me more and more every day.”

“You have nothing to be sorry for,” I assured him. Then I paused before saying what had to be said. “Listen, Mr. Johnston, if you think you’re able, I only have a few more questions before I leave.”

“Of course, at least I feel like I’m doing something. Sitting here staring at the wall every day is hard.”

“I can only imagine. Mr. Johnston, did Lizzie ever mention anyone by the name of ‘Bob’ to you?”

“No. I told you. When things changed, Lizzie quit talking to me about her personal life. I’ll tell you one thing; she was getting phone calls from a guy. I didn’t recognize his voice and he wouldn’t give his name. It was definitely the same guy, though. He called a lot. Whenever I asked Lizzie who it was, she always said it was just a friend, but she usually left the house after talking to him.”

I wanted to know about the last night he saw Lizzie, about what the circumstances were when she disappeared. I had read it all in the report, but wanted to hear it from Larry. He said she was back in her room, had been for hours. He tried to get her to eat something and she wouldn’t, and when he tried to talk to her, she just shut her eyes and ignored him. The phone rang shortly after, Lizzie answering it in her bedroom. She came out about fifteen minutes after that and said she was going to walk up to the gas station to get cigarettes.

“She has a car. Was it unusual for her to walk up there?”

“No, she sometimes does on nice nights. She walked out the door, said she’d be back shortly, and that was the last time I saw her.”

“Do you remember approximately what time the phone rang? Do you have caller ID?”

He said no to the caller ID, and that he thought the call came in at about 10:30 that night. I asked Larry who his phone company was and then jotted a reminder in my notebook to subpoena the phone records of incoming calls.

I grabbed my bag and headed for the door, “Mr. Johnston, I need to take Lizzie’s car so it can be processed by the crime lab. I’m going to call a tow truck right now, if that’s okay.”

“That’s fine. I wondered if anyone was gonna do that.”

“I wasn’t aware until today that her car was here. I’m just going to briefly look through it first to see if there’s anything crucial in it. I’ll be out here for a little bit, and don’t worry, like I said before, I will find out what happened. I’ll be in touch with you as much as I can.” I headed for the door.

Following me out the door, Larry thanked me and told me the car was unlocked. I radioed dispatch and told them to start a tow truck going from the Johnston house to the crime lab.

As soon as I opened the door to Lizzie’s car, I almost gagged. The smell of dirty clothes and rotten food hit me right in the face. I told Larry my search of Lizzie’s vehicle would be brief, but when I said that I didn’t realize how brief it would be. I backed off, took a deep breath of fresh air and dove in, holding my breath, and quickly scanned the contents of the car.

I immediately saw a massive amount of gas receipts stuffed in the console between the driver and passenger seat; there had to be at least fifty. I grabbed two handfuls of the receipts and carried them back to my car, along with an empty cigarette pack. I wanted to remember Lizzie’s brand in case it became useful later. I placed the receipts and the empty pack in an evidence bag, unsealed; I wouldn’t submit them until after I’d looked at each one.

I went back to the car, sucked in my air supply, and started looking again. For what, I didn’t know. I knew I wasn’t looking in the trunk for the hidden compartment; I wanted the lab to process that for any chemical traces or prints. It was a stretch, but unless the propane tank had a slight leak, chances are there wouldn’t be anything.

Then, I saw a map of West Virginia, haggard and crumpled, lying on the passenger seat floorboard. I grabbed that on instinct, thinking it might come in handy down the road. I couldn’t see anything else worth a shit, so I backed out of the car and stood up, closing the door. I turned around to walk to my car and ran right into Larry, who obviously had been standing right behind me. I let out a quiet yelp.

“I’m sorry,” he said quickly. “I didn’t mean to scare you. I was just wonderin’ if you found anything in there.”

“That’s okay. I’m fine,” I assured him, a little rattled

I told him about the receipts, but that was all.

“You think she’s dead, don’t you?” he asked, catching me off guard with the question.

I hate it when people asked me questions like that, as if my opinion is the gospel truth. I admit that my opinions are usually pretty accurate, but I hate to tell someone what I think before I know for sure. At this point, I was pretty confident that Lizzie Johnston was dead, but I couldn’t bring myself to say that to Larry.

“No, Larry, I don’t think anything right now because I just don’t know,” was what I came up with.

He didn’t say anything else. He just turned around and went back in the house.

This is the point where it gets hard to work cases like this one, the point when the emotions start getting involved. I felt Larry’s pain, not to the extent he did, of course, but I deeply sympathized with what he was going through. I knew Larry was pretty sure that Lizzie was dead, too. He just wasn’t facing it, instead, holding on to that one percent chance of hope. It was hard to watch someone go through that.

The tow truck arrived. I left the Johnston house and headed back to the department. What little evidence I had so far—the receipts and the map—backed Matt Hensley’s story. It wasn’t much, but at least I knew some of it corroborated his statement. Merely glancing at the receipts when I carried them to my car, I saw several were from West Virginia, which confirmed that Lizzie had traveled there, as Matt had said. If, and when, the crime lab confirmed the hidden compartment in the trunk and traces of anhydrous ammonia, Matt’s credibility would climb considerably.

I needed to type up everything that Larry had told me for the case file while it was still fresh in my mind. I also wanted to look over the receipts and the map. When I got back to my office, I saw a note that Kincaid wanted to see me—always a high point in my day. Just as I’d suspected, she wanted a briefing on what was happening with the case. I’m sure she was hotly eager to phone the commissioner. I told her the basics, not going into much of the details.

She shrugged her shoulders and turned back to her computer, “Okay,” she said in a normal tone of voice, “just keep me posted.”

What is this?
I thought.
No bitching?
If I cared, I might’ve asked her if something was wrong, but, since I didn’t, I went back to my office.

Sitting down on the floor, I spread all the gas receipts out in front of me, along with the map. I counted 56 receipts and began putting them in order by their dates. I was specifically trying to find the very last time Lizzie had bought gas, and where.

What I thought would be a minor task took me forty-five minutes to finish. The last place where Lizzie had bought gas was at a station in Ovapa, West Virginia, wherever that is. I looked on the map and found it, and, when I looked closer, I saw a small red x marked there. I found the phone number of the gas station on the receipt and went to my desk.

I called dispatch and gave them the address and phone number of the gas station. I asked them to find which law enforcement agency has jurisdiction there, and to find a phone number for it as well. Who patrolled rural areas, which you didn’t need to be a mental giant to assume that in Ovapa was varied. It could be a village police department, a county sheriff’s department, or the state police. I wasn’t familiar with West Virginia law enforcement enough to know who it would be.

While I was waiting for dispatch to get back to me with the information I’d asked for, I called the gas station directly. I asked to speak to the manager, assuming he or she was there since it was still business hours.

Whoever answered, set the phone down and yelled, “Ya’ll go get Annie, she’s got her a call!”

After five minutes of listening to the employees bitch about their jobs, a female finally picked up the phone saying she was the manager. I identified myself, and began to explain what I wanted, but she cut me off with, “Ya say ya from Ohio?”

“Yes, ma’am. That’s right, Ohio,” I said, and again began to explain what I wanted.

“What parts? I got me a cousin over there somewhere,” she drawled loudly.

I was starting to lose my patience. “Annie? Your name is Annie, right? Like I said, I’m calling from the Richland Metropolitan Police Department, located in Mansfield, Ohio, which is directly between Cleveland and Columbus. If you do have a cousin in Ohio, congratulations, I’m not calling about confirming family trees. What I need to know is if you have video surveillance inside and outside of your store.”

“Jeez,” she whined, “Ya don’t have to be so snotty. All’s ya had to do was ask. We got us a video only on the outside to keep these suckers from takin’ the gas.”

“Perfect,” I told her. “How do I get a hold of the tapes covering the fifth through the ninth of last month?”

“Well, I ain’t just gonna mail ’em to ya if that’s what yer thinkin’!” She laughed. “I kin’t see yer badge through the phone, so ya’ll just have to have the sheriff pick it up here and give it to ya.”

I told her to expect someone from her local law enforcement to be there in the next day or two to pick it up, and I slammed the phone down. I knew I was rude to dear Annie, but she was such a moron, I couldn’t help it. I was worried. Judging by the way she sounded, she probably couldn’t find her own ass with both hands, let alone the tapes I was looking for. When I slammed the phone down, it actually rang in my hand; it was Dispatch. They gave me the phone number for the Chatham County Sheriff’s Department, which had jurisdiction in Ovapa.

A woman, identifying herself as the dispatcher, answered the phone. I assumed that she was the only one, unlike our communications center’s seven dispatchers at a time, because I heard a television on in the background. I told her who I was and what I needed assistance with.

She said, “Hang on a minute; I’ll grab Captain John for ya!”

He must’ve been standing right next to her because it sounded like she just reached over and gave him the phone.

“This is Captain John VanScoy, may I help ya?” He said, in a very deep, gruff voice.

For what seemed like the twentieth time that day, I told him who I was and what I needed. I asked him that when whoever picked up the tapes, they would be sure to confirm that they were from the fifth through the ninth of last month.

“The manager down there didn’t seem too bright,” I said, immediately regretting it, because with my luck, Annie was probably this guy’s sister or something.

He actually laughed, “Oh, that’s just Annie. She’s been at that station since Jesus was a boy. She don’t mean no harm, but yer right, she ain’t the brightest, and she’s about as worthless as two screens in a submarine. I think they keep her around ’cause they feel sorry for the ol’ bat.”

I chuckled a little at his response.

He went on, “If ya don’t mind me askin’, what is it yer lookin’ for? Maybe I can help.”

“I just got a missing person on a girl and I was looking to see if she might be on the tape, that’s all; no biggie.”

“You got a name on this-here missing person?”

“Yeah, it’s, uh, let me see here; Samantha Elizabeth Johnston.”

The pause before VanScoy spoke again was just a beat and a half too long. When he did speak, the syrup was still in his voice, but the warmth was gone. “Okay, well, I’ll get the tape mailed up there to ya, but I gotta go right now. It’s been nice talkin’ to ya. It’s Gallagher, right?”

“That’s right.”

Before I could say anything more, he said, “Have a nice day,” and hung up on me.

I figured that I was probably being paranoid, but it seemed to me that Captain VanScoy got less friendly, if that’s the term I’m looking for, when I told him Lizzie’s name. It was as if he went from being charming to being just smooth, and in a hurry to close things off. I knew there was an allegation of dirty cops in West Virginia, but I highly doubted that I’d just spoken to one on the telephone.

I was more than ready for my day to end, so I finished typing up my interview with Larry Johnston and headed home.