Shattered (22 page)

***

After looking over the copies of the newspaper reports on Tanya Little that Guy Dennison had left the night before, Derrick Long spent an hour and a half on the phone with the Gulf County police, who had been in charge up to the point the body was found, and the state police, who had taken over then.

Though the body, like that of Mickie Anderson, had been subjected to predators and natural deterioration before it was found, several things had been determined on autopsy.

The girl had been subjected to torture with a knife. Finger tips and toes had been sliced away and there were cuts on her breasts, thighs, and genitalia.

She had been strangled to death with a narrow leather cord.

She had been killed elsewhere and the body dumped in the cypress swamp. She had been dead less than a week when she was found.

A positive i.d., both visual and dental, had been made. There was no possible way that Tanya Little could have called Carol Dennison two days ago. She had been dead for two years.

There were far too many similarities here between the death of Mickie Anderson two days ago and Tanya Little two years ago; chilling similarities that all seemed to revolve, somehow, around Kelly Dennison.

It wasn't until he received the case file, which was faxed to him as a simple courtesy from the Gulf County Sheriff's Department, that the most disturbing similarity of all arose. He might not have noticed it right away, if at all, had he not had an opportunity to read Kelly Dennison's file in the past few days.

But just to make sure, he pulled Dennison's file and placed the two photocopied sheets of paper side by side. Kelly's note read: “I am fine. I'm going to Hollywood…”

***

“... so you won't hear from me for a while. I have money. Watch for me in the movies. Love, Tanya.”

Carol looked up from the sheet of lined paper in her hand with a stunned, pinched expression around her eyes and mouth.  Yet her hand was steady and her voice calm, as she passed the paper to Guy. “The note we got from Kelly, a little over a week after she disappeared, was worded exactly like this. Exactly.”

Henry Little stepped forward and snatched the paper from Guy. “That's absurd. The state police investigated this case thoroughly. They would have known if...” And he trailed off, his skin a sickly color, his eyes filled with confusion and disbelief. “Are you suggesting that the two girls were in collusion?”

Carol glanced at Guy, as though for reassurance against her own rising tide of helplessness and confusion. But he had none to offer.

He said quietly, “You should know that another girl disappeared from St. T. this week. She was found murdered and—tortured—in the same way that your daughter was.”

Little frowned. “We've been seeing it on television. You surely can't be thinking there's a connection.”

“Before she disappeared, she claimed to have met a man in town who was going to put her in a movie, or a commercial or something. The Hollywood filmmaking connection seems pretty strong. It could be the line he uses to lure girls to come with him.”

Sandra Little reached behind her until she felt the support of the arm of a chair, then sat, slowly and gracefully, with stiff back and legs, and folded her hands in her lap. Her expression was locked into composure, frozen.

Carol said hesitantly, “Your daughter was very pretty. So was Kelly, and this—the Anderson girl. They all looked kind of alike, actually. Long dark hair and ... well, girls that age are naturally vain. Even sensible girls can be moved by flattery, tantalized by the possibility of fame…”

Sandra Little nodded slowly.

Henry Little said sharply, “So now you're telling me that the same man who tortured and murdered my daughter two years ago also took your daughter, and this girl who washed up on the beach, and made them all write the same note to their parents—”

“Except for Mickie Anderson,” interrupted Guy. “For some reason, he didn't keep her long enough...” The sentence sounded horrible even unfinished, and he let it hang. In a moment, he said simply, “I don't know. I honestly don't know. It's just—a lot of coincidence.”

“You seem to be an educated man, Mr. Dennison,” said Little sharply. “You should know there's no such thing as coincidence.”

“No,” said Sandra Little softly. She raised her head slowly to look at them, eyes dark and pained, and she said, “There isn't. And what Mr. Dennison is trying to tell us is that this—monster—who took our Tanya, and their child, and who murdered that girl they found on the beach ... that he may have done it before, many times. And that he's there, in St. Theresa County, walking around free, looking for his next victim. That's what he's telling us.” And she looked at Guy. “Isn't it?”

The silence before he answered seemed to go on forever. But Guy didn't flinch, or evade her gaze. In the end, he replied simply, “Yes.”

~

Chapter Thirty-two

L
ighthouse Point was the finger-shaped strip of land that had been left jutting out into the ocean when the channel was cut. It was so named because it was here that, if one stood at the end of the jetty, the optical illusion was such that the lighthouse, an easy mile away, looked close enough to swim to. The road ended some five hundred yards away from the Point; there was a narrow dirt-and-gravel turnaround where one could leave one's car and follow the sand path through thorny vines and sandspurs to the rock jetty, but few bothered. The fishing was better on the other side of the Point, and the lighthouse could, after all, be seen from almost anywhere on the beach.

Twilight was falling when Laura got out of her car, and she started thinking of a dozen reasons why she shouldn't have come. She knew she was acting foolish, crazy, she should have at least tried to call the police. But the one reason she should have come—what if it was Kelly?—kept her trudging on down the path, tripping over vines and snagging her clothing on shrubbery, clambering over the spill of granite boulders that reinforced the jetty, stumbling through the undergrowth on the other side.

Sea grasses grew tall around the construction shack, which looked empty and, not surprisingly, somewhat sinister. The sound of the surf crashing against the rocks was loud, and that made her nervous. She started toward the shack, calling loudly, “Kelly?”

She thought about Carol's theory, that Kelly was being held against her will somewhere. Could it be here? No one could hear her scream above the sound of the surf, even if anyone ever did come here, which no one did. But how could she be here? There was no telephone here and she had called....

Laura slipped her hand into her pocket and felt the reassuring weight of her keys, threading her fingers through them tightly. She pushed open the sagging door of the shack. “Kelly?”

The interior was dark and humid, smelling of sea rot and neglect. There were shadowed shapes in the far corner, boxes of rusted and forgotten equipment, but the interior was too dark for Laura to make out much of anything else. She took one careful step inside, worried about snakes and spiders and now all but convinced the place was empty. “Kelly?” she called again, but with less hope this time.

The movement came from behind her so swiftly she didn't sense it coming until it was all over. Something caught around her neck and jerked hard, digging into her skin. She gave a choked cry and, in her confusion, thought she had walked into something—a rope or a length of fishing line—that was tangled around her throat. Instinctively, she stepped back, trying to wrench away even as she brought her hands up to free the cord, and that was when she felt the human body pressing against hers, felt the hands tightening the cord around her neck. All this was no more than a few seconds.

She tried again to scream, but the sound came out as a choked gurgle and lights exploded behind her eyes, there was a rushing sound in her ears. Blindly, she swung her hand up and back, raking down with the keys that were gripped like brass knuckles between her fingers, and her blow met flesh.

She heard something, perhaps a cry of pain; the pressure on her throat gave way as she jerked the cord free and whirled toward the door.

“You're not Carol!”

That was what she heard him say, but she was moving. He grabbed at her hair but caught only a handful of strands. She screamed with the fury of renewed effort as she jerked free and didn't even feel the pain. He had her shoulder by the shirt, but she was almost at the door. She kicked backward, and struck out with the keys and he ducked his head and she had a glimpse of a face, hideously distorted and twisted in on itself, a monster face from a nightmare, a face that would cause her to wake up gasping and sweating in the middle of the night for years to come. And then, with a mighty wrench, the material of her shirt gave way and she was through the door, running, free, sobbing and gasping and running.

She fell once on the thorny path, but didn't look back. She crossed the rocks by sliding on their slippery surface. She was sure he was behind her, she could almost hear him breathing, and when her shoe got caught in a crevice, she tore it off and left it there. She saw her car and only then did she dare to look back. She was alone.

She flung herself into the car and locked all the doors and for a moment, she couldn't do anything except rest her head on the steering wheel, shaking, gasping, trying not to lose consciousness. Then she became aware of the keys in her hand, and of smears of blood on the tips of two of them. His blood. In her other hand, she still clutched the cord with which he had tried to strangle her.

She fumbled until she got the correct key in the ignition. She started the engine and slammed the car in gear, spinning the wheels wildly as she turned away and drove off with a spray of gravel. She did not look back.

~

Chapter Thirty-three

“I always felt real bad about Kelly,” John Case said. His tone was quiet and reflective, his pose that of a man who was thinking out loud. “I've known Guy Dennison for fifteen years, we go fishing together, and though I can't say we haven't had our disagreements about what he prints in the paper, I've always known him to be a fair man. A good man. His family, too. That kid, she was bright as a new penny. You could tell just by looking at her she had a future. Then it all started to come apart and I felt bad, real bad. But hell, it's not an unusual story, especially these days. The family breaks up, the kid gets in trouble, ends in tragedy.

“The trouble with this job, especially in a little place like this where you know everybody, is that you start to feel like your neighbor's keeper. You're more of a caretaker than a law officer and I don't know, maybe that's the way it should be. So when Kelly Dennison ran off, I felt responsible somehow, like it was my job, with her daddy living in the capital, to keep a better eye on her and I'd let them all down. I remember thinking, after we interviewed everybody we could interview and nobody had seen her, and when the days went by and she didn't show up, I remember thinking, please, Jesus, don't let anything have happened to that girl, not on my watch. That's what I was thinking. Not on my watch.

“So when her mother got that note saying she was running off to California, I was relieved. Too relieved. Case closed. It was bad, but it wasn't tragic. I could live with that. Maybe if I hadn't been so eager to live with it, maybe if I hadn't been so quick to grab the first out... But that was what he was counting on. That we'd all believe what we wanted to believe in the first place if he just gave us a little push in that direction.”

He swiveled his chair from the window with its deep-twilight view of the parking lot and turned to face Long across the desk. “So what we've got here is a genuine, no shit, smarter-than-your-average-bear serial killer. Is that what you're telling me?”

“There's no evidence that Kelly Dennison has been killed,” Long was quick to point out. “But”—and he shifted his gaze—”it looks that way, yes.”

Case nodded slowly. “I guess you know we're way out of our league.”

“The state police will have an investigator down here tomorrow.”

“Meanwhile,” said Case, leaning back in his chair, “we've got a killer wolf prowling our shores and a thousand or so sheep just waiting to be taken down.” He rubbed the bridge of his nose. His voice dropped. “Jesus, I should have called in the state police when we first found out about Saddler.”

“By that time,” Long said quietly, “Mickie Anderson was probably already dead.”

Case gave a brief shake of his head, as though to throw off unproductive thoughts, and drew a breath. “Okay, do me a favor. I know the state boys will check it out if they haven't already, but just for my information. Call the investigator in charge of the Melissa Conroy case—you know that kid from Georgia State who never came back from spring break in Panama City last year. Somebody said she was here in St. T. right before she disappeared. I just want to make sure that's the only similarity between her and Mickie Anderson.”

Long made a note, nodding. “I'll start seeing what I can find out about the place Tanya Little worked while she was here that summer, too. Could be there's a connection between her and Kelly Dennison.”

“Good thinking. Meantime—” The sheriff's phone rang. He picked it up, listened intently, then said curtly, “Give me the address.”

He wrote it down and hung up the phone. “Come on,” he said to Long, pushing up from his chair. “It's Laura Capstone. Carol Dennison's partner.”