Vanished (19 page)

Eighteen

F
our hours later, Evelyn shivered in the balmy night air as she stared down into the hole the cops had dug. It was about five feet deep. Beside her, when she could focus enough to take it in, she realized Kyle hadn’t left her side. Greg stood across from her, beside Carly. Both of them looked grim.

Down in that hole was an open coffin. ERT agents had carefully put some of the dirt from immediately around the coffin into a vial for testing. Then they’d sifted meticulously through more of it for any item that might have been left behind by killer or victim until Evelyn had wanted to scream at them to hurry.

Now the coffin lay open, revealing little more than bones. Evelyn didn’t have the expertise to be able to tell anything about them other than that they’d been there a long time. No clothing remained except a zipper and a metal button someone had photographed and bagged. The body itself had no soft tissue at all anymore, although there were teeth, which might provide an identity. The bones were small, definitely belonging to a child, but Evelyn couldn’t tell the gender.

The button and zipper kept flashing through Evelyn’s mind, telling her even if the skeleton was eighteen years old, it couldn’t be Cassie. Cassie had gone missing in her pajamas during the night. No zipper. No button. It wasn’t her.

She looked at the coroner, who’d just gotten Brittany’s body back to his office when they’d called him and asked him to turn around. Her voice came out barely above a whisper as she asked, “What can you tell us about the body?”

He frowned at her from where he’d been perched at the edge of the hole, his knees not touching the ground. Standing, he dusted off spotless pant legs and pulled off his glasses with long, bony fingers. “It’s old.”

He gestured to his assistants, who’d been patiently waiting for the past half hour. The coroner moved away from the grave and they stepped forward, beginning the meticulous process of removing the body from the ground for transportation to the coroner’s office for autopsy.

The coroner strode over to where Tomas had been talking to a pair of cops, and Greg and Carly followed.

Feeling as if her feet were encased in lead, Evelyn trailed after them. Kyle stuck to her side, obviously afraid she might faint and he’d need to catch her at any instant.

It occurred to her that he’d probably have to leave soon—it was three in the morning and he’d said he was flying out today—but she didn’t have the energy to ask. Instead, she kept walking, letting herself lean on the arm he’d wrapped around her waist. She had no idea when he’d done that.

Tomas stepped away from his officers and met them midway. “What can you tell me, Owen?” he asked the coroner.

Owen shoved his glasses into his pocket, his lips pursing. He seemed to be collecting his thoughts for a frustratingly long time. Evelyn had the impression he spent more hours trying to get dead people to tell him things than relating to live ones.

Even in the middle of the night, the tall, gaunt coroner wore a dark suit and dress shoes. Blue eyes, so pale they appeared almost white, squinted in his pale, droopy face.

“I’m taking the body back to my office, but you’ll need a forensic anthropologist to look at the skeleton. From the teeth and pelvic area, I can tell you the victim was prepubescent. That means I can’t make a good guess at the sex.”

Tomas nodded. He looked like he’d aged in the past few hours, and every new piece of bad news made his shoulders sink even lower. “What else?”

“Cause of death is also a problem to determine. I see no fractures at this point that speak to a violent death, although the manner of burial certainly doesn’t suggest death was natural.” He tapped two pale fingers against an equally pale cheek. “With no soft tissue to work with, it’s possible we may never know cause of death.”

Tomas rubbed bloodshot eyes. “Can you give me an estimate on how long the body’s been here, Doctor?”

“Years.” Owen’s eyes flicked upward as he nodded thoughtfully. “Many years. All indications are that the tissue decayed naturally. In this climate, that would only take a few years. Accounting for the moisture level, I wouldn’t expect to see any soft tissue at all after five years. I can’t tell you anything more specific, but my guess is that the body’s been here longer than that.”

With a loud exhalation, Tomas demanded, “How long? Are we talking fifty years here or eighteen?”

“You’d need a forensic anthropologist to say for sure, but my guess—and that’s all it is, an educated guess—would be closer to eighteen.”

Evelyn closed her eyes to hold in the sudden tears. The image of a young blonde girl rose in her mind, an uninhibited laugh she hadn’t heard in eighteen years ringing in her ears.

Before she could will that image away, the frantic voice of a cop shouted from somewhere behind her, “Chief! I think we have another one!”

She didn’t want to, but she pried her eyes open and turned toward the cop waving his arms frantically at them. Owen’s face wavered in her peripheral vision, a frown on his lips but curiosity in his eyes.

The cop hurrying toward them was carrying a shovel and behind him were three more cops, digging fifty feet away from where they’d found the last victim.

“Make that two more!” one of those cops yelled.

The violent pain in her stomach caught Evelyn off guard. Before she could move away, she was hunched over, spilling the meager contents of her stomach all over Owen’s shiny dress shoes.

Three, she thought mindlessly. Besides Brittany, that made three more victims. Veronica, Penelope and Cassie.

Her vision blurred, Owen’s ruined shoes swimming in front of her eyes. Then she became aware of Kyle’s steadying hand on her arm, and Evelyn straightened, wiping a hand across her mouth and muttering an incoherent apology to Owen.

“Mac?” she heard Greg say from what sounded like a great distance.

“I’ve got her,” Kyle responded, and then, somehow, instead of moving toward the graves like she’d planned, Kyle was leading her back to the street, back to her car.

“I need to go...” Evelyn started.

“There’s nothing you can do here just now. Greg will call with an update.”

He was right, but it didn’t stop her from feeling she was somehow betraying Cassie all over again by walking away. Even though she tried to make herself turn around, her feet kept plodding beside Kyle’s as he propelled her toward the street.

The next thing she knew, she was in the passenger seat of her rental car, heat blasting out of the vents onto her chilled skin. As Kyle drove, Evelyn shut her eyes, willed the tears not to fall.

And they didn’t. There was just a strange mixture of numbness and this unending cold in the still-warm night, as if her body temperature had plummeted like Cassie’s all those years ago. Pinpricks danced along her nerve endings, and it hurt to breathe, but there was a layer of numbness over everything. It felt as if she were watching someone else’s pain.

She’d known how slim the chances were, of course. She’d known it even when she was twelve, when too many months had gone by and the number of searchers had dwindled. She’d known it when her grandma had gotten sick and she’d moved to a new state to start college early so she wouldn’t have to move back in with her mother. She’d felt so lost then, like she was losing her last connection to Rose Bay, like she was truly leaving Cassie behind.

She believed she’d genuinely accepted it once she’d begun working for BAU, thought then that she’d made the transition from hoping Cassie would return one day to planning simply to find the truth. After spending more of her life with Cassie gone than she’d spent knowing her, Evelyn had thought that if she hadn’t moved past it, she’d at least turned it into a kind of fuel—a determination to save other victims.

But she’d been wrong. The knowledge that Cassie was probably in the ground back in that field made pain, anger and frustration swirl inside her until she felt it would burst through her skin.

It would take time to identify the bodies, but what was the likelihood one of them
wasn’t
Cassie? Three known victims from eighteen years ago and three bodies.

It felt so terribly wrong that Cassie had been here, not ten miles from where she’d grown up, for the past eighteen years.

The search parties could’ve been here back then, could have walked right over Cassie’s grave and never been aware of it. Had her abductor taken joy in that, in denying them more than just Cassie, but closure, as well?

“Evelyn. We’re here.”

It took her a minute to hear Kyle’s voice, and then she realized the car was parked at the hotel and he was holding her door.

Evelyn stared up at him blankly, still seeing the open grave back in that field as she climbed out and followed him inside.

She tried to remember the day Cassie had gone missing, the day she’d spent eighteen years wishing she could forget. The details came back with surprisingly ease—the yellow dress covered with white flowers Cassie had worn, the too-long laces on her own red tennis shoes, the tang of Mrs. Byers’s lemonade on her tongue. The scent of lilac in their backyard, a scent that made her anxious even now, although she couldn’t say exactly why.

Eighteen years ago, had she had any sense that she and Cassie were being watched, being stalked, being scrutinized for the right moment to steal them away? As hard as she tried, she didn’t remember anything but happiness in the days leading up to Cassie’s disappearance. Those details, the ones that might have mattered, still eluded her.

She could feel Cassie’s hand in her own as if it were yesterday, but she couldn’t remember ever feeling vulnerable in Rose Bay. An outcast, sure. But never unsafe. Not with her grandparents looking after her and Cassie by her side. It had been the first place she’d ever felt safe, those precious two years between the time her grandfather had picked her up and Cassie had disappeared.

The memories from those years had all been good, filled with the sound of Cassie’s laughter, the brand-new sense of belonging and a friendship she was sure would last the rest of her life. Instead, it had only lasted the rest of Cassie’s.

A sob that Evelyn couldn’t suppress welled up as Kyle pushed her silently along, opening the door to a room and ushering her inside. It wasn’t until she was sitting curled up on the chair in the corner, staring sightlessly ahead of her, that she realized it wasn’t her room.

“My plane goes wheels-up in a few hours,” Kyle said. He sounded far away, even though he was kneeling directly in front of her. “Give me ten minutes to take care of it and I’ll be right back.”

She must have responded in some way, because he promised again, “Okay. I’ll see you in a little while.”

And then she was alone in the room, with Kyle’s open bag of HRT gear. Fifty-plus pounds of equipment, guns, flash bangs and anything else he might need to take down a violent threat. If only her job came with such simple solutions.

The whole room wavered as she forced herself to think back eighteen years, to search desperately for any memory that could make a difference now. To search desperately for any hint of Darnell Conway skulking at the edges of those memories, waiting for an opportunity to snatch her and Cassie away to his underground dungeon.

Eighteen years ago, if she’d done some small thing differently, would Cassie still be here? Or would Evelyn be lying alongside her in that field, in a fourth grave?

* * *

“Why would he do that?” Evelyn asked as Kyle came back in the room.

She didn’t know how long he’d been gone, but she’d slowly come out of her stupor and started thinking again. Mostly about Darnell.

She was still curled up on the chair in the corner of Kyle’s hotel room. She was still ice cold, despite the fact that the temperatures were in the upper seventies outside.

Kyle closed the door behind him and turned off his air conditioner, then yanked the comforter off the bed and settled it over her, tucking it around her shoulders. “Why would who do what?” Kyle asked, sitting on the ottoman in front of her.

“Darnell Conway. Why would he run through that field, knowing we were following him?”

“Well, he did try to lose us,” Kyle replied. “And when we first spotted the empty car, he was hiding in that field.”

“Yeah, but then he got up and ran. We never would’ve found that cellar if he hadn’t run into the field.”

Kyle shrugged, studying her too closely. He was probably looking for signs that she was going to collapse under the strain of knowing one of those old graves likely belonged to Cassie.

She shivered, drew the comforter more tightly around her and pushed the thought out of her mind. She needed to distract herself with Darnell, with her job. Like she always did.

“Maybe he wanted us to find her?” Kyle suggested. “Brittany’s death might have been an accident, right? Maybe it freaked him out and he didn’t want Lauren anymore. That could be why the whole place was wiped down—because he planned to lead us straight to her.”

Evelyn nodded slowly. That actually made perfect sense in a way. “But why would he leave the search parties so abruptly? And why would he decide to give her up?”

The last questions weren’t really for Kyle, but he said, “Maybe he knew you’d get a call about his strange behavior at the search parties. Maybe that was his plan. Meeting him in the dunes that day, I got the impression he’s crafty as hell.”

“Yeah, he is.” Evelyn’s mind still felt fuzzy, from lack of sleep and from being too preoccupied with Cassie. “But I’m pretty sure he’s killed before, to cover up sexually assaulting a girl. So, why the hesitation now?” She shook her head, trying to clear it. “None of it fits.”

“Could the last time have been an accident, too?” Kyle asked.

“No. But I guess there’s a good chance it wasn’t premeditated. It was probably a gut reaction—needing to stop the girl from telling anyone what he’d done.” She tried to grasp the psychology that would mesh Darnell’s actions twenty years ago with now.

That was particularly hard because she couldn’t
prove
he was guilty of any of it. The reality was, he might be innocent of Charlotte Novak’s murder. But finding her body could’ve been the impetus for him to take action on his own fantasies.