Chapter Thirty-Eight
Thirty-Eight
Leanne raced toward Madrone, manipulating the puzzle pieces in her mind and trying to make them fit together.
Hannah Rawls was his first victim, and phenidone was recovered from her clothes.
Phenidone was used in darkrooms, by photographers.
Leanne’s father had had the business card for a gallery owned by a renowned photographer clipped to his notes about the case. And that photographer, whose phone number was written on the back of the card, had been living and working in the area at the time of Hannah’s murder.
And he still was.
Leanne had assumed her dad had picked up that business card when he’d been to visit the gallery. But maybe he’d found it among Hannah’s possessions. Detectives had gone through her room and her car after her disappearance, searching for clues.
Zach Olmstead fit the profile well. He was tall.
And strong. And could easily have a size thirteen shoe.
At forty-one, he was the right age. Most important, he was local.
He worked outdoors—often at night—and knew the parks and canyons around here probably better than half the rock climbers and river guides who’d made this area their personal playground for years.
Also important—Zach was attractive and had the sort of smooth, low-key charm that might lure a woman in and put her at ease.
But he wasn’t left-handed, at least according to Freya. Should Leanne take her at her word? Or find a way to confirm for herself?
Or should she stop wasting time on Zach Olmstead and move on to other area photographers, who might be a better match? Just the idea was daunting. This region was a gateway to several popular parks. So many photographers passed through here, it was impossible to keep track.
But which of them were permanent residents and had also lived here sixteen years ago? That requirement significantly shrank the suspect pool.
Leanne clenched the steering wheel, brimming with frustration. If only she could comb back through her dad’s legal pads, looking for more clues with this new profile in mind. But his legal pads, along with most of his other possessions, had gone up in smoke.
She envisioned the cardboard box with all her dad’s notes from the Rawls case. She pictured the copies of the Madrone Sentinel he’d had sitting on top. She had assumed he’d saved those newspapers because of the articles about the murder. But maybe it was something else.
On impulse, she grabbed her phone and scrolled through her messages. She found the string of missed calls from Marty Krause at the paper.
“Hello, Mr. Krause? Leanne Everhart here.”
“Well, well, well.” His voice was gravelly from decades of smoking. “It’s about damn time.”
“I’ve been meaning to get back to you, but everything’s been so hectic.”
“Better late than never. I been trying to set up”—hoarse coughing—“an interview. How about tomorrow—”
“Possibly. I’ll have to see how the rest of today goes. Listen, I have a question for you about the Hannah Rawls case.”
“You have a question for me?” Now he sounded amused.
“You covered the story, right? I think I remember your byline in the Sentinel?”
“It was a shared byline. Me and old Dave Westinghouse. He was the editor back when—”
“Right, I remember. Listen, who was your photographer at the time?”
Leanne waited, gripping the steering wheel. As the seconds ticked by, she realized this was a complete long shot.
“You mean our staff photographer? On the paper?”
“Yes.”
“That’d be me.”
“You?” She couldn’t keep the surprise out of her voice.
“Yeah, back then I wore multiple hats.”
Leanne’s mind raced as she tried to force-fit what she knew about Marty Krause with the criminal profile.
Besides the fact that he was older than dirt, Krause was a short, wiry man, and she couldn’t picture him hauling a woman in and out of his car and stuffing her into an abandoned well, even sixteen years ago.
“Ya there?”
“Yes, sorry. So, besides yourself, was there anyone else taking photographs for the Sentinel back then?”
“Well, sure. We had a lot of folks. The stringers we got from the high school took photos.”
“The stringers?”
“Yeah, the yearbook teacher would send them over each year. Some of them came to work for us for a while after they graduated.”
“Stringers, as in—”
“Part-timers. They covered some of the small stuff. You know, Friday night football games and whatnot. Sometimes community events.”
“Like, you mean, maybe picnics and Fourth of July parades?”
“Sure. Whatever was going on. We’ve got a shoestring budget, and we’ve been using cheap labor forever.”
“Thank you. You’ve been a big help.”
“Now, about that interview. What say—”
“Let me get back to you on that. I’ll call you.”
· · ·
Another day off wasted.
Izzy slid into her car and unlooped the camera from around her neck. She set it on the seat beside her and pulled out her phone.
Nothing good today, she told her boyfriend. The light’s all wrong.
A gray bubble appeared as he responded.
You headed back then?
Yeah. You? she answered.
I’m leaving now.
She slid her phone into the pocket of her fleece jacket and started the car.
She had time to not only shower and change but pick up something for dinner.
They could spend the evening on the sofa together binge-watching a show.
She’d been exhausted lately. Her energy was drained again, and the only thing she felt up for tonight was some mindless TV.
Izzy pulled out of the lot, surveying the cars parked near the trailhead. Ever since her interview with Detective Malcom, she’d been noticing all sorts of details she’d never picked up on before.
Things that had previously escaped her interest—everything from faces to cars to bumper stickers, even people’s pets—now stuck in her head and refused to go away.
Anything suspicious caught her attention, and she’d even started taking notes on her phone.
Why? She wasn’t sure. It wasn’t logical, really.
What were the odds that she would stumble over another dead body while she was out hiking with her camera?
It was a freak thing, completely unlikely to happen again, ever.
And yet, the possibility haunted her wherever she went.
A man emerged from the trail, and Izzy tensed. Tall, heavyset. He wore a camo baseball cap and a black sweatshirt with jeans. As he crossed the lot, the taillights of a pickup truck flashed.
Izzy jabbed her door locks. The man glanced over at her, and she held her breath as he slid behind the wheel of his truck. Every muscle in her body tightened as he reversed from the parking space and pulled out of the lot.
Calm down. Don’t be paranoid.
But paranoid was her default state right now, and she couldn’t help it. She couldn’t sleep or eat or focus on work. Images of those dead girls kept running through her mind. She couldn’t escape them, no matter what she tried to distract herself.
The pickup’s taillights receded down the highway, getting smaller and smaller until they faded to nothing. Izzy pulled out of the parking lot—the same lot that had been jammed with emergency vehicles the last time she was here just a couple of days ago.
Why had she come back? She wasn’t sure. Was it morbid curiosity?
Partly. But part of it was the idea that by coming here and retracing her steps, maybe she could replace the ugly visions in her mind with something else, something beautiful.
Or—if not beautiful, then at least something not grotesque and disturbing, like what she’d seen last time.
But it hadn’t worked. She was just as messed up now as before, and she’d wasted another one of her days off snapping an endless blur of mediocre photos. Not one of them was strong enough to add to her portfolio, much less put in front of Zach Olmstead or any of his influential friends.
Tears filled her eyes as she sped down the highway.
Time was closing in on her. With each day that went by, she felt every goal she’d set for herself slipping farther away.
If she didn’t make something happen soon, she was going to end up like her mom and her aunts and her two sisters, stuck in this do-nothing town, drowning in unpaid bills and babies and other people’s laundry.
Years ago, she promised herself she’d find a different path, and she thought she had, but now she was back here getting sucked in by the same forces that had trapped her aunts and her mother and her sisters, too.
Sunlight glinted over the mesa, and she flipped down the visor.
Glancing to her right, she watched rows of yucca trees rush by, mesmerizing lines that stretched toward a distant vanishing point.
She passed the sign for Lost Mine Road. The old mining cabin came into view, a jumbled pile of rocks that only vaguely resembled the shape of a house.
Izzy tapped the brakes. Pulling onto the shoulder, she parked and dipped her head to look through the passenger-side window.
She stared at the crumbling house for a moment, then grabbed her camera and slid from the car.
Keeping her attention on the run-down structure, she walked around the back of her car and looped the camera strap over her head.
This old mining cabin was at the far edge of the yucca field near the base of a canyon. The abandoned mercury mine was somewhere around here, too, if she remembered her local history right.
Izzy glanced around, lifting her hand to shield her face from the late-day sun. Quicksilver Canyon, she was pretty sure this was called. She slid the phone from her fleece and consulted a mapping app. Yes, Quicksilver Canyon, which cut through the west side of the yucca farm.