Alex Bennick was still alive as far as Everett could tell, and he’d been in the Herriman paper multiple times. Not for anything criminal, but he’d been an associate superintendent for the school district. That was incredibly creepy because instead of a cop investigating disappearances, he was a school employee obsessed with missing girls. Yikes.
Everett immediately opened his text app and typed out everything he’d found for Josephine.
OMG! Did these girls all go to school here??? she wrote back immediately.
Not sure. There are three high schools in the county??? I’ll try to check it out.
First things first, though. He looked up the man’s address online. He knew the names of only a few streets in town, and as he zoomed out, he didn’t recognize anything. After shifting the map around a bit, he finally spotted a highway down the road. From there, he found his own street.
Frowning, he glanced back and forth between the two spots, then requested directions from his address to Alex Bennick’s. Weird. It said the drive time was fifteen minutes, but on the map it looked so much closer.
He zoomed out again, tilting the map in a different direction, and suddenly he saw it. “Holy shit,” he whispered before racing into his mom’s room for the phone. “Josie,” he panted as soon as she answered his call. “This guy lives on the other side of my field! Less than two miles away! He’s right there!”
“No way. And he’s still alive?”
“I think so.”
“Everett, he’s so close to you! That’s scary! What if there are bodies in his house? Oh my God, what if there are bodies in the storage unit?”
Everett blinked in shock, then blinked harder. “No. There were some boxes, but I’d be able to tell, I think. There’d be a . . . smell?”
“Yeah, that’s true. We’ll find out more tomorrow, for sure. Send me everything you find on the missing girls. I’m in full detective mode now.”
He hung up the phone, then stood there, caught off guard by Josephine’s renewed insistence on helping investigate. He didn’t really want to go back into the locker. What if this man actually was a killer? But if he was, shouldn’t they find out? Tell somebody? They could solve a half-dozen cases. They’d be famous. Maybe there were even rewards.
When the phone blared in his hand, Everett dropped it, then jumped back when it hit the floor with a hard crack of plastic. “Oh no,” he whispered, crouching down to examine the damage. But only the battery case had popped off. The ringer kept going. When he turned it over, an unknown number appeared. It wasn’t Josephine. He snapped the case back on and set it on the charger. It finally stopped ringing, though it started again before he left the room. Everett closed the door and backed away.
That was weird. He’d just called his friend to talk about a murder, and now someone was being creepy.
He sat down at the computer, and when he searched for Lynn Cotti, he found the digital version of the exact article he’d hidden beneath his bed. He googled the next name he’d written down: Yolanda Carpenter. The articles about her were shorter, and he’d read most of them on Josephine’s phone.
He was pasting both links into an email for her when the phone began pealing again. Eyes darting toward the sound, he clicked SEND and then slowly rose to his feet to face his mom’s bedroom door. The electric chirp shrieked over and over. Finally it stopped.
He held his breath, waiting. Nothing happened. It was just a telephone call after all. “Wuss,” he scolded himself when he finally let out a breath. But when the phone rang again, he jumped, his whole body jerking into the air in shock.
Heart hammering, he took one careful step toward his mom’s door, then another.
When he heard his mom’s voice outside the window, talking to someone just before the gate squeaked open, Everett felt stupidly relieved.
He wiped his search history, closed the windows, and then retreated to his room to hide behind his closed door until dinner.
Tonight was game night, and they’d already agreed on Monopoly. For once, he felt glad his mom had read too many articles about quality time with kids. He wasn’t sure he wanted to be alone once it got dark.
CHAPTER 8
Lily had Thursday afternoons off, and she woke that morning with a desperate need to get out of the house and off this track of worry over Jones. She just wanted to leave behind her churning thoughts of what he might be up to and think about herself for an hour or two. She also had a half-price coupon for her favorite café, and that was as luxurious as her world got these days.
The Silver Spoon at 12:30? she texted Zoey.
When Zoey texted back with an enthusiastic YES!, Lily cracked a relieved smile and finished up her morning chores. She even sent Everett off to school in a good mood, handing him a couple of dollars for an extra slice of pizza at lunch.
Spring had definitely sprung, and the seventy-degree forecast inspired her to put on a yellow skirt and a shirt that wasn’t made out of sweatsuit material. To add to the excitement, the Silver Spoon had a new summer menu, and Lily was scrolling through the choices as she hiked a bag of office trash up and shoved her way out the front door.
“The face behind the ominous voice!” a man called, and Lily nearly dropped the bag when she whirled toward him. He looked respectable enough in jeans and a clean button-down shirt.
“It’s me from the other night,” he said.
For a moment she could think only of the barrage of calls from Jones. Then the guy said, “I lost the code,” and she recognized the flop of dark hair over his brow. The man from the gate intercom. He certainly looked harmless in the bright light of day. Thin and fit but only about three inches taller than she was, and he was keeping his distance so far, hanging back toward the pedestrian gate.
She offered a careful smile. “You made it back. I’m sorry about the other night. Security is tight around here.”
“No worries,” he said easily. “My uncle’s belongings are stored here, so the high security is comforting.” He walked closer to reach for the bag of trash, and she waved him off. This was her job.
“I’ll show you where the trash cans are in case you need them. We don’t allow any large amounts of garbage, but I can give you directions to the municipal dump if you’re cleaning out.”
He followed her around the corner, still keeping a respectful distance that inched her guard down a tiny bit. “Can I get the gate code from you now? I seem to have misplaced my sticky note.”
She grimaced at his request. “Are you an authorized user? If not, I’ll need your uncle to fill out a form and sign off on it.”
“I’m . . . not sure, honestly. And my uncle forgot the code again.”
She glanced at him. Midthirties, maybe. Cute despite the circles under his eyes and a pallor that spoke of too much office work. “Are you moving his stuff out? I can give you the termination paperwork too if you like.”
“Not quite yet. He’s moving from assisted living to memory care, so he’s stopped arguing that he’ll be getting back home soon.”
“Ah.” Lily winced. That happened a lot around here, especially with the demographics of this part of Kansas skewing older and older. “I’m sorry.”
“He has great caretakers and help, but I’m between gigs right now, so I figured this is as good a time as any to get a start on helping sort his belongings. I know how much regret people feel when they find amazing personal stories and it’s too late to ask any follow-up questions.”
She smiled at that, but didn’t press further. “I think that’s a great idea,” she said. “Let me get you that form.”
Aware of him following behind her, Lily felt suddenly grateful that she’d dressed in something besides ancient jeans. He was kind of cute and maybe not a creep, and even if she didn’t date, she still had an ego.
She dug out a form from the filing cabinet and handed it over. “You’ve been by already, you said? So you know the unit number?” When he told her, she typed it in and asked his name.
“Alex Bennick.”
“That’s odd.” She squinted toward him. “You’re the name on the lease.”
“That’s my uncle. I’m Alex C. Bennick. He’s Alex Q.”
“So you’re Alex Conrad?”
He looked surprised at that. “Yeah.”