Chapter 3
“Do you see anything I missed?”
I read Gus’s search warrant for the third time, looking for anything that might cause problems down the road. But he’d written an airtight legal masterpiece. As usual.
“This is good,” I said. “I just got off the phone with Judge Saul’s clerk. She’s waiting for it. I expect she’ll sign it right away.”
The three of us stood in Sam’s office. Hayden Simmons was with one of the female deputies in a conference room down the hall. Sam scowled as he looked out the window.
Gus poked his head out into the hallway. “Jaffee? It’s ready. Take this straight to Saul’s courtroom. Don’t talk to anybody. Don’t make any other stops. Come straight back here when you’ve got it signed.”
“You got it, Ritter.” Nick Jaffee Chaney was one of Gus’s favorite deputies.
He knew the severity of the situation and we all trusted he could keep his mouth shut.
Even so, Sam waited until Jaffee left and disappeared down the hall before shutting his office door so we could talk in relative privacy.
Gus took a quick call on his cell while I joined Sam at the window.
“Got it,” Gus said. “Thanks. As soon as I get word back from the judge, we’ll be down there. Don’t let anybody touch anything. Don’t look at anything. How’s the girl? Good. Keep her there.”
He clicked off the call and walked over to Sam’s office couch, and sat down hard. He leaned over, assuming a crash position. I knew how he felt.
“What do you remember about this guy, Simmons?” Sam asked.
“Nothing,” Gus said, shaking his head. “Or next to nothing. The name doesn’t ring any bells but I interviewed a lot of Ellie Luke’s friends and classmates during that time frame.”
“What do you remember about the case in general?” I asked.
Gus looked up. If it were possible, I watched my friend age about ten years in the span of those few seconds. He rubbed a hand across his face.
“It was one of the bad ones,” he said. “Not like there could ever be anything good about something like that. But this kid? Ellie Luke? From everything I learned, she didn’t have a single enemy.
She was smart. Pretty. Putting herself through nursing school by working as a home health aide for dementia patients.
She was as close to an angel as a kid like that could get.
Good family. Good grades. Nobody said a bad word about her.
She just dropped off the face of the earth one morning. ”
“Her niece said her grandma reported her missing after she didn’t come home from a shift with one of her home health patients.”
“That was it,” Gus said. “We found her car abandoned on the side of Chalmers Road facing east like she was heading toward her house. The back right tire was flat. It had been slashed. The theory was somebody grabbed her when she pulled over.”
“You think the tire was slashed on purpose? She didn’t roll over a piece of glass or something?”
Gus shook his head. “It looked like a clean cut. We didn’t find anything embedded in it. I don’t know if that’d hold up in court as definitive that it was deliberate. But that sure was my gut at the time.”
“You think that somebody stalked her,” I said. “Knew she was going to have to pull over.”
“Chalmers was a dirt road at the time. There were probably eight houses on it back then. Only local traffic and barely any at that. It’s built up now. They put that subdivision back there. Hell, the woods where we found Ellie is a park now.”
“You think somebody planned it all out,” I said. “Somebody who knew her schedule. When the best time to nab her would be.”
“It didn’t feel random, no. We had the whole county out looking for her. Volunteers came in from Lucas County. Fulton County. Everywhere. We dragged the river. It went on for weeks. That girl was one of the first homicides I took after I made detective.”
“You never had any solid leads?” I asked.
Gus’s face darkened. “I didn’t say that. That’s what makes no sense, Mara. I thought I knew who did it.”
“What do you mean?”
“I said Ellie was well liked by almost everybody. But a picture started to emerge. There was a cousin of her mother’s.
Kid named Dane Fischer. He was maybe three or four years older than Ellie.
Troubled kid. Drug problem. His own mother kicked him out and he went to stay with Ellie’s family for a summer.
This was a couple of years before her murder.
Ellie’s mom was doing Fischer’s mom a favor.
The two of them were first cousins. At least I think that’s how it went.
Anyway, a few weeks after Fischer moved in, Ellie caught him stealing from her parents.
Cash out of her dad’s wallet. A gold watch.
Ellie had a ring that belonged to a great-grandmother or something.
A ruby. He stole that too. That’s how she caught him.
She came home from cheerleading practice or something early and found him in her room rummaging through her things.
She told her parents. There was a big fight.
Ellie’s dad kicked Fischer out. But he didn’t call the cops.
Ellie did that herself when her parents refused. ”
“Fischer knew that?” Sam asked.
“Yeah. He came back to the house high and threatened to beat the crap out of Ellie’s dad. It was a mess. They didn’t want to talk about it. Her parents thought it was in the past. Then Ellie went missing. It took some doing getting this story out of them.”
“You interviewed Fischer?” I asked.
“Hell, yes. His story was full of holes. He lied about his alibi. Said he was at some bar. Only it didn’t check out.
The bar he claimed to be at was closed that day.
Then he lied again and said he was home all night.
Only his roommate at the time wouldn’t back up his story.
Said he hadn’t seen him for a couple of days. Then, Fischer failed a poly.”
“Was there any physical evidence tying him to Ellie’s murder?”
Gus shook his head. “That’s the thing. Ellie’s body didn’t turn up for months.
There wasn’t much there. Bones. Some tissue.
Hair. Cause of death wasn’t even completely conclusive.
Her skull was caved in but there was no way to know if that happened post mortem or not.
It’s just a working theory. The most plausible thing.
Couldn’t even tell you whether there’d been a sexual assault. But she was posed.”
“What do you mean posed?” I asked.
“It’ll take me some time,” Gus said. “I’ll have to pull all the evidence boxes from the archives.
This thing was twenty-two years ago. God.
I can’t even believe that. Anyway, her body …
what was left of it … was found leaning up against a tree in a seated position.
Her hands folded on her lap. Her legs crossed.
The injury was to the back of her skull.
Coroner theorized she was hit while she was turned away from her attacker.
She was put up against that tree later.”
“So there were two crime scenes?” Sam asked.
“Probably. We searched Fischer’s apartment and his car. The apartment was clean. But there was blood all over the trunk of his car. But the lab couldn’t pull DNA from it. The best we could get was blood type. B positive. Same as Ellie’s. But same as Dane Fischer’s.”
“They’re cousins,” I said. “None of that’s conclusive.”
“No.”
“I thought I had probable cause to arrest him. But Halsey punted.”
Phil Halsey had been the prosecuting attorney in that era. He hired me twelve years ago. Now, he was long gone. His violent death still haunted my dreams from time to time.
“He wouldn’t have had a choice,” I said. “He never could have gotten a conviction on what you had.”
“I just don’t get it,” Gus said. “Fischer left town after this all went down. He pretty much had to.”
“Ellie Luke’s family thinks he killed her too?”
“I think so,” Gus said. “Her dad told me he knew it in his gut. I was worried he was gonna take matters into his own hands when I told him Fischer wasn’t going to be charged. That was one of the worst days of my career, having that conversation with him.”
“The case went cold,” I said.
“As ice,” Gus agreed.
“It wasn’t your fault,” Sam said.
Gus turned gray. He buried his face in his hands. “Unless I was wrong this whole time.”
“One thing at a time,” I said. I walked over to Gus and put a hand on his shoulder. He went rigid beneath my touch.
Sam’s desk phone buzzed. He went to it and picked it up. “Yeah, Stephanie.” He paused. “Good. Thanks. We’ll be right down.”
“Everything okay?” I asked.
“Jaffee got the warrant signed,” he said. “We can legally open the box.”
Gus bolted to his feet. I felt my stomach drop. The box. I’d already seen enough to understand the fear Hayden Simmons must have experienced when she opened it.
Gus flung Sam’s door open and charged down the hall. Sam and I had to practically sprint to keep up with him.
Five minutes later, we stood in the property room. Each of us wore latex gloves. Hayden Simmons’s box of horrors sat on the table in front of us. Deputy Jaffee had a digital camera, ready to photograph every phase of this.
Gus opened the box and pulled out the first item.
He laid it on the table. It was a gold earring.
An intricate, dangling circle with tiny heart cutouts and some kind of stone.
The second item was a plastic baggie with a lock of dark hair inside of it secured by a purple ribbon.
Next, Gus used a small set of tongs to pull out a pair of women’s panties.
Pink cotton with a daisy pattern. He laid those on the table.
“They look clean,” I said. “I don’t see any bloodstains.”
“We’ll have BCI analyze all of this,” Sam said.
“Of course,” I said. “Was Ellie Luke wearing underwear when she was found?”
Gus shrugged. “I don’t think so. I’ll pull everything I have. But the mate of that earring was found next to her body. That I remember vividly.”
“Christ,” Sam muttered.
But there was more in the box. Gus pulled out another baggie, this one larger than the one containing the lock of hair. This one contained a stack of 4x6 pictures. Maybe twenty of them.
I pulled out a chair and sat down. Gus opened the baggie. One by one, he laid the photographs face up on the table in front of us. Every picture was of Ellie Luke.
In the first few, she was sitting at what looked like a cafeteria table. She was laughing, her head thrown back. It was taken in extreme close-up so I couldn’t make out who she was talking to or whether there was anyone beside her.
Another few photographs captured her sitting behind the wheel of her car.
She had her head turned away from the camera at first, then in quick succession, she looked up.
The photographer caught her lifting her hand to tuck a lock of hair behind her ear.
Something might have drawn her attention.
In another shot, she looked in the direction of the camera, scowling.
In the next series of photos, Ellie was walking out of the main entrance of the county hospital. She carried textbooks in her arms. The wind lifted her hair. She was beautiful. Young. Vibrant. She wore pink scrubs and a student ID badge.
One of the last series of photographs was more disturbing. They appeared to have been taken from a high-powered lens through a window. She was in her bedroom, wearing a robe, her hair wet, probably having just gotten out of the shower.
Gus laid another photograph down. In it, Ellie Luke had slipped out of her robe. She stood in front of her bedroom vanity running a brush through her wet locks. Though taken from behind, the door to her closet had a full-length mirror. She was stark naked in the reflection.
“My God,” I whispered. “He stalked her. There are date stamps on these. This was going on for months.”
Gus held the final photograph in his hands. His jaw clenched. He shuddered.
“Gus?” I asked.
He squeezed his eyes shut for an instant. Opening them, he slammed the last photograph on the table with the others.
“The date,” Gus said. “March 11th. The day before she died. That might be the last photograph ever taken of that poor kid alive.”