Chapter 3
THREE
Ashley Rose, our office manager, was waiting for me when I came into work the next day. She was relatively new, taking over from her aunt Geraldine who had kept the Benton County Prosecutor’s Office running for the previous three decades. So far, Ashley was a competent replacement.
She had a chunk of dark hair in front of her eyes. She also had rebellious lime-green streaks in both front pieces, framing her face. At twenty-three, she could get away with it.
“Are you going to be here or upstairs today?” she asked. “Your morning hearing got cancelled.”
“Upstairs then.”
I sorted through the few pieces of mail Ashley set aside for me. Most were paper copies of hearing notices I had coming up over the next month. Nothing I didn’t already have on my calendar. I tossed them into the pile for the shredder.
“I took two messages for you from Detective Dennison,” Ashley said. “I don’t know why he didn’t just text you directly. He knows if you don’t answer your landline in there, I’m not gonna have some secret way to get a hold of you.”
“What did he want?”
“Said something about getting a bunch of files you’re supposed to look at. He sounded kind of cranky.”
I checked my smartwatch. It was only five after nine in the morning.
“How long ago did he call?”
“Oh, it’s been going on for the last hour.”
I tossed the rest of my mail on my desk in my office kitty-corner to Ashley’s desk. “Well,” I said. “He didn’t tell me. Last I heard we were supposed to meet at ten. Let me just grab a coffee and I’ll head up.”
“Oh,” Ashley said. “That’s another message. Came in a few minutes after eight. A voicemail. Said he wants to start at eight thirty.”
“Fat lot of good that does me,” I said under my breath. I tossed my coat onto my chair and grabbed my digital notebook beneath a stack of papers on my desk.
“You want me to call up and tell him you’re on your way?” Ashley called after me as I strode toward the door.
“Don’t worry about it,” I shouted back.
One slow elevator ride later, and I walked into the conference room.
I was taken aback to see it had already been converted into a bona fide war room.
Roy had four whiteboards set up along the wall.
The large oblong table in the center of the room barely had a clear space on top of it.
Instead, I saw six large open banker’s boxes.
Files, reports, and photographs were strewn all over the table.
“Glad you could make it,” Roy said. There was sarcasm in his voice, but a twinkle in his eye. He meant no harm in chiding me.
I pulled out my cell phone and waved it at him. “You could learn to use one of these.”
“I hate ’em,” Roy said. He insisted on using an ancient flip phone with no access to the internet. He could call, text, and take pictures on it, nothing more.
“Is it just us this morning?” I asked.
“It’ll just be us most days. I may not like cell phones, but I know how to use my computer and the internet. We’ll touch base with the rest of the group after we’ve all had a chance to get up to speed on these.”
I went over to the small coffee cart along the wall. I poured myself a cup of coffee and walked up to Roy’s shoulder.
“What’s all this?”
By way of an answer, Roy went to the whiteboards. He pulled out a black dry-erase marker and wrote out a different name on the top of each of the three of the boards. I read them out loud as he did it.
“Lara Pasko, Jade Darby, Gretchen Small.”
He went to the fourth whiteboard and wrote Corrine Egan’s name but drew a big question mark beside it and circled it. He tossed his pen onto the table then grabbed four large photographs. He taped each one under the names he’d written.
“These three,” he said. “That’s who we’ve got. All went missing within the last two years. All solicited through WhisprMatch in the month before they disappeared.”
“And then Corrine Egan,” I said.
Roy tapped the question mark. “Hence,” he said.
“What do we know?” I asked.
He picked up the dry-erase marker and went to Lara Pasko’s picture. She was pretty. A long-haired brunette, a sweet smile. In her picture, she wore purple scrubs and an ID badge I couldn’t make out.
“She was a nursing assistant working at an elder care facility out of Sparrow Hospital in Okemos,” he said.
“Most of what we know came from her sister, Amy. Lara started using WhisprMatch about two months before she went missing. A detective in Ingham County sent copies of her files over. She found the credit card transaction from when Lara opened her account with the app. According to the sister, Amy, Lara was meeting some guy who told her his name was John Bennett.”
Bennett. It was as if I had a gremlin in my mind. Some small, mischievous creature who repeated the name over and over. Bennett. The name of Lock’s dead brother. No. It was just another random coincidence. I could not let my mind spin like I had with Corrine’s interview.
“Probably fake,” Roy said. “Amy, the sister, said they went on three dates. Then she disappeared. Her car was found in the parking lot of a supermarket in Chelsea, Michigan, three days after she went missing. It was clean. No foreign DNA. No blood. No fingerprints that shouldn’t be there.
Her keys were in the ignition, but the car was locked. ”
“Anything in her phone?” I asked.
Roy shook his head. “We’ve got her profile from WhisprMatch, but any chat history she had automatically wiped itself. Just like it was supposed to.”
“That’s awful,” I said. “How could anybody develop something like that and not realize how quickly some psychopaths could abuse it? Is there anything else?” I asked. “Any red flags that tie this girl’s disappearance to any of the others outside that app?”
“A couple. They could be nothing. They could be everything,” Roy said. “First, there was a red ribbon found in Lara’s abandoned car.”
I kept my face neutral. Roy pulled a photograph from the file.
It showed the floor on the passenger side of a car with a tan interior.
Poking out under the floor mat was the frayed end of a red ribbon.
The next photo showed the same ribbon in an evidence bag.
I couldn’t tell from the photo if it was similar to my own.
This was just a tiny piece of fabric. No more than an inch.
It could be nothing. It could be everything. I took a breath. I would not do this. I would not jump to conclusions.
“Amy said her sister was smart,” Roy continued.
“Or tried to be. The first date she had with this Bennett guy, Amy tagged along in secret. To spy on him for Lara. She met him at a bar in East Lansing. Lara and the date sat in a booth and had dinner. Amy sat at the bar and observed the whole thing. She got a good look at the guy. Was able to provide enough details for a police sketch.”
Roy picked up a piece of paper from the table. He grabbed a magnet and stuck it to Lara Pasko’s whiteboard.
“White guy,” he said. “Tall. Handsome. Well-groomed. Thick head of dark hair. The sister said he looked like he might have money.”
I stepped forward to get a closer look at the sketch.
I tilted my head slightly to the right. The drawing was of a handsome man with wide-set eyes, a strong jaw, and a cleft in his chin.
Dark hair, long enough for a part on one side, and brushed neatly out of his face.
I could think of at least ten men I knew and maybe twenty actors who bore a resemblance to this likeness.
I spun my engagement ring on my ring finger.
That same chill from yesterday ran up my spine.
“That’s about as generic a description as there is,” Roy said. “Hell, if you make the complexion just a shade darker, that could be Sheriff Rafferty.”
I turned. He was right. I shook off the little gremlin. This was ridiculous. What was I even thinking? And yet, the red ribbon felt suddenly tighter around my wrist. What was wrong with me?
“What about the others?” I asked.
Roy slapped pictures up of the other two missing women.
Jade Darby was beautiful. The photo Roy had was from what looked like a professional session, not an ID badge like Lara Pasko’s.
Jade was black. She had long, tight braids coiled into a thick bun.
Dimples in her cheeks. Impeccable makeup. She’d been just twenty-four years old.
“Disappeared eighteen months ago,” Roy said. “Fort Wayne. A licensed massage therapist. Husband said he knew she was on WhisprMatch for about six or so weeks before she went missing.”
“Husband?” I asked.
“Yeah. Sounds like they both had extracurriculars. Her best friend said she started dating someone she met on WhisprMatch. The friend never knew his name. There was no way to retrieve any of that from the app, of course. But the friend knew she’d gone on at least two dates with her mystery guy.
Gone totally without a trace. We don’t even know where she was taken.
Her car was still in the garage. Purse. Wallet.
Phone. Keys. All inside her house. The last signal on the phone was at her own house.
The working theory is that whoever took her picked her up at home.
If it was the guy she was cheating with, she might have left her phone at home on purpose. ”
“No security cameras?” I asked. “Not even from neighbors.”
“Nothing,” Roy said. “Her husband was a person of interest, but he had a solid alibi. There have been no new leads.”
“That’s odd,” I said. “If we’re dealing with some kind of serial killer, don’t they tend to stay with a victim type? Jade was the only African American.”
“Sometimes these guys go by opportunity over appearance. Then Gretchen Small,” Roy said.
“Ann Arbor. Six months ago. It took a while for the WhisprMatch connection to show up. Gretchen was in an abusive relationship for years. She had recently ended it and started dating again. Her ex wasn’t too happy about it.
She filed a stalking report on him about three months before she went missing.
He was actually arrested at first. But there was no physical evidence of any kind.
Then Gretchen just didn’t show up for work one day.
Gone totally without a trace. Never found her purse, her wallet, her cell phone, or her car. ”
I picked up the police report. “How’d they clear the boyfriend?” I said.
“Turns out he was in rehab after a drug overdose. They were wrong about the time window of when she disappeared. Another witness came forward who saw Gretchen at a bar with some other guy a day after they initially thought she disappeared. The guy? Same description. Thick dark hair. Good-looking. Well-dressed. Wearing an expensive suit,” Roy said.
The conference room had a corkboard along one wall. Roy went to it and unfolded a large map showing Illinois, Indiana, Michigan, and Ohio. He put pushpins over Ann Arbor and Okemos, Michigan, then another over Fort Wayne, Indiana.
“That’s what we have so far.”
I shook my head. “I can’t be the only one thinking about it. Do I need to say it?”
I’d been leaning on the table. I pushed myself off and stood in front of the whiteboards. “The timing is way off. Corrine Egan said her mysterious Mr. Woodson stopped harassing her over five years ago. So, three years go by, then Lara Pasko goes missing.”
“We don’t even know that,” Roy said. “There could be other women. We’ve got inquiries out to every jurisdiction.
” He drew an imaginary circle with his index finger over the map, including the intersecting quadrants for the three states we served.
“That’s the main thrust of what the rest of us on the task force will do.
We want every solved or unsolved missing woman case going back a year before Corrine Egan’s story and Gretchen Small’s disappearance. We’ll build it out from there.”
I shook my head. “But these three. Roy, you don’t have a body. Not in any of them. You have no physical evidence. No DNA. No blood evidence. No signs of a struggle at any of their homes. Not so much as a partial fingerprint you can’t identify, right?”
“So far,” he said.
“If you find someone,” I said. “Do you know how hard this will be to convict? If that’s all you have?”
“So far,” he repeated.
Any hope I had of a speedy clearance of our first case evaporated as I stared at those boards. Right now, we barely had a haystack to search, much less a needle.
“We have the descriptions,” Roy said. “White male. Handsome. Maybe rich or knowing how to fake that. The WhisprMatch developers are a dead end. They’ve got payment info about their users, but that’s it. Nothing gets stored beyond that.”
“What a mess,” I said, plopping down into a chair.
Roy went to the cart and grabbed a Danish off the platter Belinda had set out. He bit into it.
“Welcome to police work,” he said. “You’re used to having cases handed to you practically gift-wrapped.”
He walked over to the police sketch under Lara Pasko’s picture. He cocked his head to the side, just as I had. When Roy turned, he had a smile on his face. “White guy. Thick hair. Good-looking. Probably rich. Hell, Mina. Maybe we should start by interrogating your husband.”
The gremlin came roaring back. My head started to pound. Roy took out his phone and pulled up a photo of Lock. I looked back at Amy Pasko’s police sketch. Its eyes seemed to follow me.
This is not Lock. This could not be Lock. This was just me. My own intrusive thoughts. My need to constantly think the worst thing would always happen. That little gremlin in my head reminded me that in my life, it usually did.