“Mallory, Sarah, and now Colleen,” I said. “Three young ladies from Belmont, all missing or dead.”
He took a few beats before answering. “Stockton belongs in prison, don’t get me wrong. But as much as he disgusts me, he clearly had nothing to do with Colleen Grantham. He’d been locked up for at least seven years by that point.”
I was pretty sure he was willfully misunderstanding me now. “Right,” I said. “But given the obvious connection between the three cases, what if someone else committed all three crimes? What if Brad Stockton is innocent?”
“He’s not.”
“You’re so sure?”
“Yesterday you were sure that you found Sarah Cook’s body, so I don’t know who you think you are, to be perfectly honest,” Lassiter said.
That was a valid criticism. I ran a hand through my hair. “Are you trying to tell me you don’t see the connection, though?”
“I can see how Mallory Evans and Colleen Grantham could be connected, yes,” he said. “But I don’t see what that has to do with Stockton at all. Garrett and Elaine weren’t buried in those woods. Sarah wasn’t buried in those woods.”
“That you know of.”
He scowled deeply at me. “The area is private property. You are not to trespass there again, understood? And you’re not to bother the Grantham family, either.”
The phone on his desk buzzed, and a disembodied voice crackled through the speaker. “Sir, don’t forget you’ve got the mayor coming in a few minutes.”
“Ah, dammit,” Lassiter said, looking at his watch with dismay. He stabbed a button on the phone. “Thanks, Dee.”
Then he stood up again and calmly walked to the office door and opened it. “Okay, then,” he said to me, “this conversation is over.”
I didn’t care for the abrupt end to it, but I didn’t have a choice. He pointed out into the hallway like he was ordering a dog out of the dining room.
“Thanks for your time,” I said, as insincerely as I could manage.
He practically slammed the door behind me. It echoed through the short hallway, which was empty except for a middle-aged couple sitting on a bench a few feet away. The woman jumped at the sound.
“I’m sorry,” I told her as I turned to walk back to the photo gallery in the lobby.
“Wait,” she said. “Excuse me.”
I paused and looked over my shoulder at her.
“Are you Roxane Weary?” she said.
I turned to face her. She was a small woman with short silvery hair and she gave off the overall impression of grey: her skin, her sweater, her eyes. The man next to her was looking at me sort of sideways, like he was peering from behind himself.
“Yes,” I said, curious.
The woman stood up. “My name is Erin Grantham,” she said. “This is my husband, Curtis. Russ Meeks told me about you. That you were—that you were there.”
I went over to them and offered a hand. I didn’t offer my condolences though, unsure what was appropriate. Were they already in mourning, were they relieved, or were they still hoping against hope? My own hope was that she wasn’t going to ask me to describe what I saw.
“Do you think—” Erin started. “When you found her—” She stopped, her face twisted in pain.
I quickly glanced over my shoulder to make sure Lassiter’s door was still closed. I figured it didn’t count against his warning about not bothering the Grantham family if she initiated the conversation.
“Is there somewhere we can talk?” I said. “Do you live nearby?”
*
“She never smiled in pictures,” Erin Grantham was telling me thirty minutes later in the living room of her house. “Even when she was just a little thing. My sister-in-law used to tell me Colleen could model, you know, like for one of those kids’ clothing stores. She was so pretty. But Colleen just would not smile. She was happy enough for the most part, don’t get me wrong. But she wouldn’t smile.”
Colleen’s parents still lived in the same house they had when their daughter went missing, a small Cape Cod just on the west side of Belmont. We sat in the living room, Erin and Curtis on opposite ends of a reddish floral-print sofa and me in an armchair. Erin handed me what looked like a senior picture—Colleen in a blue hoodie, her blond hair cut into long layers and bangs, barely smiling on a park bench. She was gorgeous, and she clearly knew it but didn’t care, not even a little bit. She might have even resented it. Judging from her expression, she didn’t want anyone to look at her at all.
Erin had only wanted to ask me about what I had seen in the woods and what had led me there, and I had given her a G-rated version of it. Now I was hoping I could get another lead out of her. “For the most part?” I said.
“She got in with the wrong crowd, when she started high school,” Erin said. “We used to know all her friends, and all her friends’ families. But then all at once we didn’t anymore, and she was getting into trouble, shoplifting, cutting class.”
“It seemed like kid stuff,” Curtis added, speaking for the first time since we sat down. He looked like he very much needed to believe that kid stuff was an okay explanation for what had happened to his daughter. “I mean, we were upset with her, of course.”
“Disappointed, more like,” Erin said. “But you don’t automatically assume skipping class a few times means someone is going to turn into a drug addict.”
The Granthams looked at each other, Erin’s mouth pressed into a thin line.
“Was Colleen a drug addict?” I said next.
“No,” Curtis said.
“Yes,” Erin said at the same time.
“I think I’m going to get a drink of water,” Curtis said, and got up without another word.
“It’s still hard to talk about,” Erin continued when he was gone. “You’d think it would have gotten easier. And it did, up to a point. Then it just didn’t anymore. But yes, Colleen had a drug problem. Have you heard of DXM?”
“Dextromethorphan?” I said. “The cough medicine?”
She nodded. “That was the first thing. She was about fourteen. This was before there were the buying restrictions on cold medicine, you know, you have to show your ID now. But then, kids could buy it just like candy. I went into her room to look for something, and I found a dozen empty bottles of Vicks 44.” She paused and shook her head, smiling like something was almost funny but not quite. “God, I’ll never forget that. It was just this horrible realization. She’d been getting moodier for months, sleeping fourteen and fifteen hours at a stretch. But, like my husband said, we thought it was just a sullen teenager phase.”