Smith's Monthly #24 Page 12

  “And that wonderful new kitchen you put in as well,” Julia said, smiling.

  “So we start fresh?” he asked.

  “We start fresh,” she said, nodding. “But I’m hiring movers to move everything.”

  “Oh, thank heavens,” Lott said, laughing. “I’m way too old to be doing that.”

  Then as they were kissing again and Lott was about to pull Julia into the new bedroom, they heard Annie’s voice. “Anyone home?”

  “Back here,” Lott shouted.

  “Has she seen this yet?”

  Lott shook his head and smiled at Julia.

  “Oh, this is going to be fun,” Julia said.

  And it was as Annie praised the remodeling and then gave both of them a huge hug.

  And then she looked into her father’s eyes and said, “About damn time, Dad.”

  And that made it all perfect.

  FOURTEEN

  September 17th, 2016

  Las Vegas, Nevada

  JULIA AND LOTT were sitting in the kitchen nook, overlooking the yard, side by side, holding hands. Annie sat across from them and they were talking about everything but the case.

  Julia couldn’t believe she had just agreed to move in with Lott. And wasn’t even the slightest bit scared about it. Clearly Lott was past his deceased wife and Annie loved the fact that they were together. So Carol would not be forgotten, but Julia and Lott could now move forward into a new life together.

  In an almost completely remodeled home as well, one that Julia felt very comfortable in.

  So finally, with the tub of chicken smelling wonderful between them, they heard Andor’s car pull into the driveway.

  “I’ll go see if he needs help with files,” Annie said, standing.

  “I’ll get the plates and napkins,” Julia said, standing.

  “Silverware and water,” Lott said, standing.

  By the time Annie and Andor came in both carrying an armload of files, the table was set and the lid was off the bucket of chicken. And wow did that smell good. Julia had no idea how hungry she had gotten. It had been a very long day so far and from the looks of the piles of files Andor had and a couple small files that Annie had brought, the day was far from over.

  All four of them made it through their first piece of chicken in record speed and were working on second pieces when Andor finally brought the conversation around to the case.

  “The chief is very interested in what we are doing,” Andor said. “I filled him in a little and promised him we’d keep him up to date on everything. To solve this many unsolved cases at once would be a real boost for him.”

  “And give a lot of closure to a lot of families,” Annie said a moment before Julie could say it as well.

  Julia didn’t like the size of that stack of files, knowing that every file had a missing and most likely dead person that was the subject.

  She took out her notebook and opened it.

  “So we got answers to a few questions from lunch,” she said, looking at her notes. “We know that no one lives at Duane Thorn’s address.”

  “I checked,” Annie said. “That is the only property he owns under that name. He only reports his income from selling cars and best as we can figure, his Social Security number is fake. Duane Thorn basically doesn’t exist.”

  All of them nodded. That was no surprise at this point to Julia.

  “And we have a theory about why the four women in the other grave,” Lott said. He explained the idea they had about why the killer tried to tell people about that grave when Paul Vaughan died, but no one looked at the journal until they found it.

  It sounded very logical, but it was only a theory, so on her notes, Julia put down the theory and circled the word “theory.”

  “So any luck on surveillance of that turnaround area?” Lott asked Annie.

  She shook her head. “Can’t get anything better than what I have.”

  She quickly passed out high-altitude photos of the turnaround area on Duane Thorn’s land. There were a couple acres up there where bodies could be buried in that desert and rock.

  Julia stared at the picture for a moment and then felt her stomach twist a little. They really needed to look at that property up close, but if they got a warrant and went charging in there, more than likely it would warn off the murderer. Let him know they were on to him.

  “But I have an idea how we could get images we need without being seen,” Annie said. “We fly a drone over the place, high enough to not be noticed, but with good enough cameras to get the different forms of images we need.”

  Julia looked at Annie, who was smiling.

  “That’s got to be some pretty sophisticated drone,” Lott said, looking puzzled at his daughter. “Don’t tell me Doc and Fleet just happen to have one.”

  “Nope,” Annie said. “They don’t. But we have a team that works with us on different stuff that does. We all are meeting them tomorrow morning at 9 a.m. at the Bellagio Café to explain what we are looking for and what we need.”

  “And this team can be trusted?” Andor asked.

  Annie just laughed. Then she said, “When you meet them, you’ll know why I laughed.”

  FIFTEEN

  September 17th, 2016

  Las Vegas, Nevada

  THEY ALL ATE a second piece of chicken and Andor and Annie both started into their third as they talked, trying to even recognize pieces of a puzzle that they weren’t even sure fit together.

  Lott didn’t much like what they had so far. But at least they had a suspect.

  They did know for a fact that a man calling himself Duane Thorn had sold cars of women who had gone missing shortly after their disappearances. How he got those cars no one knew, but the theory was he killed for them.

  They knew that Duane Thorn’s official address was a mailbox at the head of a dead-end dirt road. The road was used regularly and had a suspicious turnaround at the end that was out of sight of anything around it.

  But other than that one license with the state, the picture on the license, and the one piece of property, Duane Thorn did not exist, did not have a history, and seemed to have come into existence about a year before Becky Penn vanished.

  They had four bodies in an old grave and four cars, so they were very close to putting together who the other three bodies in the grave were with Becky Penn.

  A couple other members of the Cold Poker Gang were running down the families of the missing women to see if they could get identifying information to at least identify the bodies in the grave. And Annie had promised that she and Doc and Fleet could get DNA preliminary testing done within two days if needed.

  Beyond that, they had nothing else but theories and questions.

  Lott was no longer sure that Paul Vaughan, Becky Penn’s boyfriend at the time of her disappearance, actually was dead. And if not, who had had his face blown away with a shotgun?

  And they had no idea how that journal got into Paul Vaughan’s things, but then was overlooked for decades. Or maybe even his sister planted it. Again, nothing solid, just questions.

  But they did have a stack of missing persons’ cases sitting on the kitchen counter that they had picked out because of cars sold by Duane Thorn. Every woman in those missing person’s cases had a car vanish as well.

  So after they were all finished with dinner, they took all the files out into the dining room area and moved all the chairs back from the big table and out of the way. Then starting with the three files from before Becky went missing and going from there in chronological order, they put the files on the table and Annie labeled the top of each with a big sticky note as to the day the woman went missing.

  Lott knew they were looking for patterns and it became very clear very quickly that there was a pattern.

  A very distinct pattern.

  Four women with cars sold by Duane Thorn vanished per year.

  And each vanished on the same date every year. The 3rd of March, June, September, and December. And they were all t
wenty-two years old.

  “Three months apart exactly,” Annie said softly when Julia pointed out the pattern. “And all the same age.”

  “Why the exact date?” Andor asked.

  Lott watched as Julia wrote that in her notebook as a question.

  “And what does he do in the three months between the kidnappings?” Annie asked.

  Lott didn’t want to say what he was about to say next, but he went ahead.

  “The real question is what he does with the women in those three months. Does he kill them instantly or keep them alive for months for some sick reason.”

  Annie pointed to the last car sold ten days before. “If he keeps the women alive for a month or so, this woman is still alive somewhere.”

  Annie opened up the file and showed them all the picture of the beautiful blonde college-age girl named Mary May.

  Lott stared at her picture and now knew that he wasn’t going to sleep much until they ran this bastard to the ground and stopped him.

  This was no longer a disappearance case for Mary May. This might be a rescue.

  At least he hoped it was.

  SIXTEEN

  September 18th, 2016

  Las Vegas, Nevada

  NINE IN THE morning in the Bellagio Café felt the same as ten at night. Julia loved that about the place. Time didn’t exist there.

  She and Lott and Annie and Andor were all there to meet the people with the drone. Annie had told them that they could trust Mike and Heather with their lives and she and Doc had a number of times.

  Lott knew them from the first case where Doc and Annie had met. He had told Julia last night before they curled up and fell asleep that he liked them a lot.

  Julia was a little surprised when Mike and Heather walked up to their table, though.

  Mike Dans was a large, muscular man with a full beard and moustache. He wore a blue button-down shirt, bright Bermuda shorts and tennis shoes. He looked exactly like a tourist.

  Heather Voight had medium-length blonde hair and was dressed in a white blouse, jeans, and tennis shoes. She looked to be in stunningly good shape as far as Julia could tell.

  Mike was former special forces and his company hired special forces for security still. Heather was a former FBI agent and had been working with Mike for as long as Doc and Annie had been together. They were clearly a couple.

  Julia liked both of them at once. They seemed easy going and fun and very competent.

  Annie started off giving Mike and Heather the background on the case after they all ordered breakfast. And then she showed the satellite photos she had of the property.

  “So basically what you think might be there,” Mike said, studying the images and then sliding them to Heather, “is a body dump?”

  All of them nodded.

  Julia hated thinking of terms like body dumps, but she understood that was the correct way the military thought. And considering that if their worst fears came true, there might be over one hundred bodies in that desert. A body dump by any definition.

  “We can’t have the person who owns the land even knowing we are in there,” Lott said.

  Mike nodded. “We’ll do a security scan first to see if anything is watching that driveway and road. If there is no surveillance, we can go in there with better equipment and scan the entire area.”

  “If there is surveillance,” Heather said, “we can get a drone in at a thousand feet and take some damn fine images, including ground penetrating work.”

  “What about Bob?” Mike asked Heather, raising an eyebrow at her.

  She thought for a moment and then nodded. “This might be worth his time considering the scope of all this.”

  She turned to the rest of them to explain. “We both have a good friend who might be able to get some really detailed and ground-penetrating satellite images of that sight. I’ll check if we need to.”

  “Give us this afternoon to check what we are dealing with out there,” Mike said, “including the road in and out of the place from the highway.”

  Julia felt so much better that Mike and Heather were dealing with that property. She just hoped they didn’t find a really fresh grave there of a young woman by the name of Mary May.

  Julia really wanted Mary May to still be alive.

  SEVENTEEN

  September 18th, 2016

  Las Vegas, Nevada

  AFTER THE BREAKFAST meeting, Annie headed back to the office to work on more computer searches to see if she could get any patterns out of all the cases besides the obvious ones of dates and age.

  Andor headed to police headquarters to brief the chief on what they were doing and Lott and Julia went to pay a visit to Paul Vaughan’s sister. They had talked to her a year before and got the ledger that led to the one grave, but now they had a bunch more to ask her.

  They had called her and she had said she would be glad to talk with them again and gave them her new address.

  Lott pulled up in front of the suburban home in what looked like an upscale neighborhood. He had no idea how Jennifer Season afforded such a place. Her husband, a card dealer on the strip, had died twenty years before of cancer, fairly close to the same time as Paul had killed himself.

  Jennifer and Paul’s family had no money that Annie’s computer people could find either.

  But Lott knew that just the HOA dues on this house had to be high, considering the subdivision. So Lott made a mental note to have Annie really dig into Jennifer’s money source. At this point he was grasping for straws. Any straw.

  As they climbed out in to the morning air that smelled of mown lawns and wet dirt, Julia said, “Swanky digs.”

  “My thoughts exactly,” Lott said, looking around. The modern street was very silent, all the blinds closed. Everything was perfectly kept up and not even a child’s toy remained on the grass. Nothing actually was moving at all and it felt more like a tomb than a neighborhood.

  On the way from breakfast, he and Julia had decided they would approach Jennifer with the story that they were trying to clear her brother’s name. That the journal had been planted.

  Jennifer must have heard them coming because she opened the front door just as they stepped on the front porch.

  She was a woman in her fifties, dressed in jeans and a silk blouse. She was trim and slightly muscled. She had on what looked like fur slippers and had her hair up and tied back. She had on a little too much makeup, mostly in a failed attempt to cover some lines under and around her eyes. Lott thought it made her look more like a raccoon.

  “Welcome detectives,” she said, her voice slightly gravelly, more than likely from too many cigarettes. Lott remembered the last time they had been to her previous home, down off the strip, she had been chain-smoking. This home was a large step up from that house.

  She invited them in and offered them something to drink.

  Lott and Julia both declined.

  She indicated they should sit at her dining room table and they all did.

  The inside of the house replicated the outside. Everything in perfect order, best real-wood floors, best furniture, a massive chef’s kitchen.

  Lott decided he would lead off as they got settled.

  “Mrs. Season, we’re working on clearing your brother’s name on this case with the four dead women.”

  She seemed honestly surprised at that. “I always knew Paul could have nothing to do with the deaths of those women. He couldn’t kill anything and he never wrote a word in a journal in his life. That’s why I called you when I found it.”

  Julia nodded. “That’s what we now believe. But we are trying to figure out how that journal got into Paul’s things.”

  Jennifer shook her head. “He lived alone in a house down near the university. That’s where he killed himself and after everything with my husband passing, all I did was pack up Paul’s things that were there. The journal was down in the middle of a box of his stuff, so it had to have been in his things when he died. The police at the time never saw it I gues
s.”

  Julia wrote in her notebook. They had found that having one of them write stuff down, even though they already knew it, sometimes made a person being interviewed open up, feel more important. Human nature that when your words had enough value to be written down, you wanted to say more.

  “Are your parents still alive?” Julia asked.

  Jennifer shook her head. “Both died in a car wreck when I was twenty-two and Paul was twenty.”

  “Oh, I’m sorry to hear that,” Julia said.

  Jennifer shrugged. “Mother was driving, fell asleep at the wheel on the way back from San Francisco. I was in the car and barely survived. I was in the hospital for a month. It was very traumatic for Paul. For me as well.”

  “I can imagine,” Lott said.

  Something was feeling very wrong about all this, but darned if he could put his finger on any of it. His little voice was shouting that they needed to dig a lot deeper into this family than they already had.

  And figure out where her money was coming from exactly.

  After a few more questions, Lott and Julia stood.

  On the way to the door, Julia said, “We’ll let you know when we clear Paul’s name.”

  Lott was watching Jennifer’s face and just a twitch of a smile hit the corner of her lipstick-covered lips. Then she said, “Thank you, Detectives, for the good work.”

  As he and Julia climbed back into the Cadillac and he started it, he turned to Julia. “Did you get the sense she was laughing at us?”

  “That good work comment,” Julia said, “was superstar sarcastic levels.”

  “So what are we missing?” Lott asked as he headed down the rich, suburban street.

  “Everything,” Julia said. “Clearly everything.”

  EIGHTEEN

  September 18th, 2016

  Las Vegas, Nevada