Chapter 78
Music pumped out from The Shamrock as she went past and Deputy Pete’s cruiser was parked outside, but Anna couldn’t see any sign of the deputy himself.
Maybe he was inside drinking instead of doing his job, but between the party atmosphere and the police presence, she wouldn’t be able to find a corner in there to look at the file anyway.
The diner was out, as she’d called in sick and Jeannie was too nosy anyway.
She needed somewhere totally private, and she couldn’t face going home yet, even knowing she’d left Grandma alone.
If she wasn’t at home, she couldn’t die in the basement.
Almost on autopilot, she found herself heading toward the Cornerstone Motel, silence settling around her as she left Main Street behind.
The porch lights were still on outside each room as if there was hope of customers arriving and giving their abandoned spaces purpose.
It felt like something between The Shining and Psycho as she leaned her scooter against the wall, and that should have been frightening, but somehow the familiar fictional horrors were comforting.
She didn’t go inside Jamie’s room—not now that she’d had the half memory of finding him in there and not in the swimming pool—but sat in one of his chairs outside, the buzzing bugs that darted around the caged bulb above the door her only company.
She lit a cigarette and took out the file.
The air was so pregnant with a coming storm that the few thin pages inside started to warp as she freed them, the smoke hanging low as if it too were curious.
There was a small stack of printed photos she looked at first. The pictures that had been on the posters and then less-pleasant crime-scene ones.
The dead girls splayed naked in the fields, no vibrant shine left.
She moved on, not wanting to add to their lack of dignity by looking too long, then laid out the images of the backs of their heads side by side, more gruesome but easier to look at.
Both girls’ skulls had been brutally dented—Lily’s more ferociously but in a more concave shape, whereas Bonnie’s injury was narrower, angular.
Sharper. She didn’t need to read any report to know that these weren’t made with the same weapon.
So much for the sheriff insisting the murders were totally identical.
She looked again at Bonnie. She’d been hit with something weighty, with harder edges. And she had a pretty good idea what it might have been. The shelf of awards at Butterflies Dental. The heavy obelisk award she’d held. That could do it.
She imagined the scene. Bonnie and the sheriff after hours in the clinic, but not their usual sex and romantic fantasies.
Bonnie hadn’t had the abortion she’d promised she would.
Him clearly not going to act on empty promises to leave his wife.
Reality hitting hard for both of them, and then in a moment of panic, with Bonnie threatening to tell, he grabs the award from the shelf as she turns to leave and hits her hard with it.
Then, it being only the day after Lila’s three-year anniversary, the murder no doubt having been a talking point again, he strangles her.
Yeah, Anna thought, inhaling hard, that worked.
The clinic was the last place Bonnie had been seen.
The sheriff must have cleaned up, put the award back on the shelf, and then, late at night, taken her body someplace else, washed her in Sailor’s Choice, and then left her out on Melissa’s farm, a chunk of skin cut from her back.
It was a lot for one man to do, but fear could give you the strength of ten men; wasn’t that how the saying went?
And while the doc might have covered for him with the pregnancy, he wouldn’t have helped cover up a murder.
The old man was too weak to carry a corpse anyway.
Even in the news clips after Lila’s death, he was using his walking cane.
Most of the notes in Bonnie’s report were basic—given how quickly Michael Cairns died afterward, taking the blame—but one line stood out.
No autopsy required. It had been signed off by the coroner, who was of course Dr. Burdett.
Why wouldn’t he want one done? A naked girl murdered.
Of course he should have ordered an autopsy.
Bonnie’s mom had said there’d been one. They must have lied to her.
Anna looked back down at the file. She’d expected to find evidence to prove Bonnie’s pregnancy, but the evidence was actually in the absence of evidence.
The lack of an autopsy told a story of its own. The doc’s collusion with the sheriff.
She sat back in the chair, staring out at the night.
The sheriff and Dr. Burdett went way back to when the doc treated him for all those long months when he was a kid.
So how would the doc have felt when the sheriff came to him, begging him for help?
She played it through in her mind, just like she had with Bonnie’s murder.
Dr. Burdett thinks the sheriff’s a good man.
So maybe when they find Bonnie’s body, the sheriff tells him about the affair.
Tells him about the pregnancy. How bad it will be for him if that came out, because of course he didn’t kill her, and it’s obvious from the bashed heads and the soap and the cuts in their backs that both Bonnie and Lila were killed by the same man, and that man isn’t the sheriff.
Dr. Burdett believed the best in people.
He’d have believed him. Yes, it could have played out like that.
And before the doc had time to rethink his choices, Michael Cairns was shot, there was evidence against him, and the case was closed.
The doc had no reason to draw attention to the sheriff’s mistakes. Why ruin the man’s life?
Anna’s cigarette was down to the filter and she ground it out under her Converse.
So the sheriff, now somewhere having a romantic dinner with his wife, had to have murdered Bonnie.
He was sleeping with her, she was pregnant, the last place she was seen was where they used to meet, and then suddenly a serial killer takes her out?
Too coincidental. That left her with one more new piece of information.
If Bonnie wasn’t murdered by a serial killer, then Lila probably wasn’t either. And if the sheriff was having a night at home with his poor wife tonight, then it was Lila’s killer she needed to be afraid of, and she was pretty sure that wasn’t the dead Michael Cairns.
If Cairns had killed Lila but not Bonnie, why would he have come back to Harper’s Creek for more seasonal work?
There were plenty of other farming towns with more work available, and far enough away that if another young woman turned up dead in a cornfield, there wouldn’t be any links to Lila.
No, she could understand why Michael Cairns had run in the aftermath of Bonnie’s death.
All those pictures on his phone and he was clearly a bad guy, so tongues would no doubt have been wagging about him at the diner and The Shamrock, so he must have figured the police would look at him at some point, but it wasn’t like they were actively chasing him.
Whatever the reason he robbed that store, it didn’t have to do with Bonnie’s death.
Bonnie’s death was personal, so logic dictated that Lila’s was too.
Personal, and then made to look like the work of some kind of psycho.
Anna looked over at the empty chair. “Who murdered Lila, Jamie?” She waited for an answer on the whisper of a breeze.
“Who murdered you?” There was nothing but the buzzing of the flies and her own breathing.
Jamie was gone. There were no ghosts. If there were answers to be found, she’d have to find them herself.
She needed to get back home soon. Grandma wanted her out of the house for her own safety, but she couldn’t leave the old woman alone all night.
She’d bolt the door again. Maybe lock them both in Grandma’s room overnight.
Although the first floor was the easiest to break into.
She looked back down at the photo on the top of the notes, Lila smiling out at her.
It was the same picture that was on her headstone.
Hair up all pretty like a movie star, bare shoulders, the red patterned scarf draped just below their curves and dropping at her arms.
She sat up straight as if she’d been plugged directly into the bulb overhead, her whole body fizzing, electric. The scarf. She knew where she’d seen that scarf before. Everything fell into place. She leaped back up onto her feet and grabbed the scooter.