“They’re saying that she was a runaway, that the police didn’t even look for her.”
Now I pulled the phone away from my ear and stared at it for a second before responding. “What are you talking about?”
“They identified the body,” she said impatiently, “her name is Colleen something and she’s been missing for the last eight years.”
I automatically jumped to my feet. “What?” I said. Thinking that eight years ago, Brad Stockton was already in prison. What the hell was going on? My heart was pounding. I immediately went into the office and booted up my computer. “Where did you hear that?”
“Kenny just called to tell me,” Danielle said.
I paced the length of my office. There was still some whiskey in my system but my confusion felt separate from that. What did Kenny Brayfield know about this?
“I’m sorry, I know it’s early,” my client continued. “But I just, look, I know I was kind of harsh the other day, when I acted like you didn’t know what you were doing. Basically, I thought you were nuts. But now—I don’t know. You might be on to something.”
I slumped into my desk chair and leaned hard on my hand, waiting for the wireless to connect. “Yeah, I thought so too,” I said.
Promising to check in with her later, I hung up. I had become the worst detective in the world. Good detectives—or even okay ones—didn’t go around erroneously implicating their own clients of additional crimes. The body wasn’t Sarah. This realization was like a bomb blast. The location. The blond hair. I’d been so certain. And furthermore, whoever it was, Brad couldn’t have killed her. Although yesterday I’d wanted to be wrong, now I just felt guilty. I navigated to the Dispatch’s Web site, breezing past what felt like dozens of articles about the Ohio State football team. Then, I found it:
Human remains found by police in Belmont development site.
“Right,” I muttered.
I scanned the article. Yeah, yeah, the future site of eight hundred luxury apartments, whatever.
Police Chief Jacob Lassiter says the discovery might be linked to a missing Belmont teen, but it’s too early to tell. Acting on a tip from other law enforcement, investigators located the human remains in a wooded area late Sunday afternoon. Lassiter said dental records will be collected from the missing 18-year-old woman’s parents to confirm if the remains are hers. The results won’t be returned for weeks.
Other law enforcement. I guessed that was me. I was sure there were other ways that Lassiter would have preferred to describe me. The short article didn’t say anything more, no mention of any Colleen. It could be talking about anyone. But it certainly wasn’t talking about Sarah Cook.
*
The Belmont police station resembled a motel that had been built to look like a castle, an L-shaped brick building with tall tinted windows perched under dramatic notched eaves. I went in and asked to see Chief Lassiter, having assumed—correctly—that he’d be working overtime, given the developments of yesterday. I was telling myself that I was actually doing Lassiter a favor by dropping in to tell him I was in Belmont. But, of course. I just wanted information from him, a last name to go with Colleen, for starters. He probably knew I wasn’t just offering a professional courtesy, and that was probably why he kept me waiting for close to an hour. I drifted from one end of the small lobby to the other, half looking at the framed pictures on the walls of various uniformed officers doing various good works in the community: teaching self-defense classes, posing with the graduates of Junior Police Explorers and opportunity youth programs, painting over graffiti on the siding of a Lutheran church. It was all very touching. Finally, the chief escorted me back to his office without saying anything.
Once he’d closed the door, he turned on me. “What are you doing here? Didn’t I tell you to stay away from my town?”
“Look, you can’t actually tell me to stay out of Belmont, you know that, right?”
His silence confirmed that he did.
“Believe it if you like, but I am not interested in making any kind of trouble for you,” I went on. “I work for Danielle Stockton. She thinks her brother is innocent, and since his execution date is in less than two months, she wants to give it one last try. Now, I’ll admit that yesterday, I didn’t think that was looking too good for her because the whole reason I even went to Clover Point was something Brad told me, that it used to be a make-out spot.”
“It did,” Lassiter allowed.
I tried to sound as harmless and open as possible by laying it all out for him, in the hopes he’d relax and just tell me what I wanted to know. “He told me that the rumor used to be that Mallory Evans was not just buried there, but killed there. That she went up to the overlook with somebody. And yesterday, especially after finding those bones in just about the same spot that Mallory was buried, I was thinking that person must’ve been him. That’s why I thought the body was Sarah. That he had killed both women.”
“It’s not Sarah.”
“I know that. How’d they make the ID so fast? Tentative ID,” I said, so that we didn’t get into a semantic debate.
He leaned back in his chair and sighed, resting a hand over his midsection like something hurt. My act seemed to be working, because eventually he started talking instead of telling me again to get out of his town. “Yesterday at the scene, one of my guys noticed that it—she—the body—there were pins in the ankle joint. Screws. Surgical screws. Right ankle. He recalled an old missing-persons report he took, young lady, a runaway. She also had screws in her right ankle from a bad fracture. The medical examiner gave some rough guesses as to how long the body had been buried there as well as the victim’s height, both of which were consistent with Col—with the young woman my guy recalled. The word got out after that.”
“What was her name?” I said. But his slip already confirmed what Danielle had told me.
He shook his head.
“Sir, if there’s a missing-persons report, you know I can find it.”
He started shaking his head again, but this time it was a sad, existential commentary rather than a refusal. “Colleen Grantham,” he said. “The report’s from eight years ago, filed by her mother. But by her own admission she had no reason to believe her daughter had not left willingly. Troubled kid, history of drug use. But eighteen years old, you’re allowed to leave home.”
“Everyone thought Mallory Evans left willingly too,” I said.
“Yes.”
“But she didn’t. And she was buried in the same woods.”
“Yes.”
“You can see the connection.”
“Possibly. But what does this have to do with Brad Stockton?” He blinked at me, giving away nothing. I found it hard to believe he still didn’t see the connection, but he seemed like the type to be unhelpful on principle.