Believe No One (8 page)

Shayla's body had been found by Deputy Hicks's fishermen several months after she was dumped.

‘We ID'd her through NamUs,' Hicks said. ‘It happened that her sister checked out the website for the first time just after I put Shayla's details on there – you believe that? Shayla had been out of touch. At first, her not being around seemed like a good thing, 'cos all she ever wanted was a handout. But it wasn't like Shayla to miss birthdays and Thanksgiving. She wasn't at her last known address, so her sister did an online search, found NamUs, typed in her distinguishing features.

‘There's a snapshot of Shayla with her sister's kids – it's in a buff envelope, near the back of the file.'

Fennimore rooted through and discovered an 8 x 5 glossy: Shayla, laughing, on her hands and knees with a toddler riding bronco on her back. He flipped the photo; the inscription read, ‘Shayla on Bobbie's fourth birthday. Happy times.'

Shayla had been living on a trailer park just off Interstate 44 in Creek County. Fennimore skimmed the rest of the report, and his eye snagged on a detail that Hicks had chosen not to mention.

‘There was a child,' he said.

‘I told you that.'

‘No,' he said, his chest tightening. ‘You didn't.'

‘Thought I did …' she said, lying badly, but covering fast. ‘I talked to the trailer-park manager. He told me there was three sharing that trailer: a man, a woman and a girl of about ten. Now, I told you I made a mistake getting her momma out of the water. But we had volunteers up and down that creek for three days looking for that child – even dragged a pond upstream that'd overflowed in case her momma had floated out of there. With the rain and floods, a lot of creeks and ponds had broke their banks; that little girl coulda been carried a mile by the floodwaters.'

Fennimore felt a prickling at the back of his scalp. Could that have happened to Suzie? She was always there, his little girl, like a dull ache behind his eyes.

‘You should've told me, Deputy,' he said.

‘I know.' She gripped the wheel hard. ‘But the young woman Mr Guffey found in his pond had a complete hysterectomy. The ME said internal scarring looked like a botched abortion. They probably had to do the surgery to save her life. She was no more than nineteen – doesn't seem likely she had a child, aside from the one she terminated. I thought if I told you that, then you'd say there was no link and you wouldn't look at the case, and I
really
need you to look at this case.'

He blinked, surprised. This wasn't about him – she wasn't trying to spare his feelings or draw parallels – this was purely about her case and her need for his help. Since last winter, he'd become so obsessed with Suzie that he saw the fingerprints of her abductor on every case involving a child. He couldn't help wondering, though, why Abigail Hicks moved from county to county the way she did, why she relied on jobs with low pay and no tenure. Could it be that, like the victims, she had no family support? Was that why she felt so strongly about Shayla Reed and this new victim?

Hicks's phone rang. ‘DNA results are in,' she said, cupping her hand over the mic. ‘Hold on, I'm going to pull over.' She drove to the roadside. ‘Go ahead,' she said. For several minutes she listened and made notes.

‘Can you mail me a mugshot?' Hicks thanked the caller and hung up.

‘The body in the Guffeys' pond is Ellen “Laney” Dawalt. We got lucky – she's on CODIS. She was charged with meth possession, which is a felony crime in the state of Oklahoma. She got a community sentence with supervision and treatment.'

Her phone buzzed. ‘That'll be the mugshot.'

According to the height board behind her, Laney Dawalt was five foot three. In the photograph, her hair was bleached, but darker at the roots. Her right profile revealed a nose piercing.

‘That's your victim, all right,' Fennimore said, checking the description against her file.

‘Right down to the chipped front tooth,' Hicks said. ‘She lived in a trailer park in up Stilwell, Adair County. Asshole dumped her over the county line, thinking we wouldn't bother to do a full search for her.'

Fennimore thought that if the local sheriff had his way, their killer would have been right. ‘Can we go and talk to people out there?'

She grinned. ‘You mean, you're in?'

He tilted his head, undecided.

‘Okay, I'll talk fast. Adair Sheriff's Department doesn't want the case, but the Assistant District Attorney fixed it for me to go talk to the trailer-park manager with an Adair County deputy.' She glanced at him from under her lashes. ‘Want to come?'

The manager of Country Roads Mobile Home Park in Adair County was a fat man of around forty, in motorcycle boots and jeans and a T-shirt with the arms ripped off. The modification revealed, not impressive biceps, but alarming underarm hair growth. He stood behind the reception counter under a cooling fan blowing at force ten, but he still sweated profusely. Against one wall a few shelves were stocked with sweets and snacks, and a large fridge held cold drinks.

No, he did not know Laney Dawalt personally, he told them, least, not to make small talk.

‘You might pick something up in the trailer,' Fennimore said.

‘I moved someone in there two days after she went off.'

‘When?' Fennimore asked.

‘Five months ago, maybe more.'

‘And you didn't think to tell anyone that this woman was missing?' Hicks said.

The man laughed. ‘You're joking, right?'

Deputy Hicks hitched her thumbs in her belt and gave him a hard stare.

The manager rolled his eyes. ‘They lit out owing me two weeks' rent. People move on owing money, you don't need to ask the reason why – and you don't call the cops.'

‘People?' Hicks said.

‘Huh?' He looked at her like she'd said,
Aliens?

‘You said, “they” owed you. You said “people”, which usually means more than one person.'

‘Well, yeah,' he said, tucking his right hand under his left arm and tugging thoughtfully at a tuft of underarm hair. ‘Her and her boyfriend, and the boy.'

‘The “boy”.' Hicks looked at Fennimore. There
was
a child. ‘How old was this boy?'

‘I don't know, your guess is as good as mine.'

‘Really?' she said, scratching the back of her neck. ‘I was hoping your guess would be
better
than mine.'

The manager frowned at the countertop. ‘If I was pushed to it, I'd say he was nine or ten.'

‘What about the man she was with?'

‘What about him?'

‘A name would be a good start.'

‘I don't remember.'

‘Well, what'd he look like?'

‘Ordinary, I guess.' He saw the look on her face. ‘Look, I only saw him close to the one time, okay?'

‘Okay. Was he my height?' She jerked her head towards Fennimore. ‘His?' Finally, she jabbed a thumb towards the Adair County deputy, who was midway in height between the two of them. ‘Or his?'

‘Taller than him,' he said, chin-pointing to Fennimore. ‘Brown hair.'

‘How old?'

He sighed like she was asking him to do mental calculus. ‘Uh, younger'n him.'

It seemed that Fennimore had become the template for comparison.

‘Was he the boy's daddy?'

‘I don't know – I never saw them together, 'cept in the car,' he added quickly, before she could give him that look again.

‘What kind of car?'

‘Some midget European piece of shit,' he said with startling venom. ‘Grey.'

She asked him if they had supplied proof of ID, but neither of them had. ‘How'd they pay the rent?' she asked.

‘Cash.'

‘Did you use a rent book?'

‘Uh, yeah.'

‘You got it?'

He nodded. ‘She left it behind at the trailer.'

‘Good. We'll check it for fingerprints,' Hicks said.

He shrugged. ‘Okay. But it'll only be hers and mine on there.'

‘Receipts,' Fennimore said, glancing at the snacks on the shelves.

The manager fixed him with a beady eye. ‘Mister, we sell potato chips and Cola, mostly. I don't write receipts for those.'

Fennimore recalled a locked wire cage outside the office, stacked with propane gas bottles. ‘Did he ever pay for cooking gas?'

‘Uh …' He stared past Fennimore's shoulder and scratched his underarm hard enough to draw blood. ‘Maybe one time …'

‘We'd like to see the registration forms, too,' Hicks said.

For a second, he didn't move, but when the two deputies and Fennimore stared at him expectantly, he gave a little start, and said, ‘Oh, you mean now?'

‘That would be real helpful, sir,' Hicks said, without a trace of sarcasm.

While he searched out the relevant documents, they made their way to the edge of the park, to the trailer formerly occupied by Laney Dawalt.

‘Where is that little boy?' Hicks said, half to herself.

‘He could still be in the pond up on the Guffeys' land,' Fennimore said.

‘Why wouldn't he come up when Laney did?'

‘It's to do with their size, and Body Mass Index. Often children don't float to the surface in the same way adults do,' Fennimore said, blocking images of his wife from his mind.

She stopped at the top of the rise, and the local deputy came puffing up behind them. Hicks took out her phone and moments later she was telling Forensic Medical Examiner Dr Janine Quint that they had a potential second victim: a nine-year-old boy.

‘Doctor,' she said, ‘I'm sidestepping my boss, coming to you. Sheriff Launer will not like the extra cost this is going to mean.'

When she closed the phone, she gave him a brief smile.

‘Good news?' Fennimore said.

‘She said she would talk to Sheriff Launer, tell him we need to send in a dive team.'

The mobile home where Laney Dawalt had lived was a good size – more chalet than trailer. The new tenants had planted a small garden and built a low brick wall at the front of the property. The grass each side was cut short and neat and the place had an air of respectability.

Hicks took a photograph on her mobile phone, slipped that back in her pocket, took out her notebook and began sketching the position of the trailer in relation to the road, the fence and a couple of other homes further down the slope. Every window in the place stood open, and a radio inside was playing country music, the screech of the cicadas outside almost drowning it out.

A curtain twitched and suddenly the door flew open and a woman stood glaring at them. She was large and blonde, and wore a cotton housedress and rubber gloves. She held a kitchen sponge in one hand and her face glowed as if she had been scrubbing floors.

‘What?' She looked from face to face with furious dislike.

‘Nothing, ma'am,' Deputy Hicks said. ‘We're just leaving.'

As they walked back down the hill, Fennimore said, ‘Where are we going?'

‘We need a warrant,' Hicks said.

‘Why don't you just ask if we can take a look around?'

She looked at him with frank surprise. ‘This is the United States of America, Professor – you need a good reason to search someone's private property. Protection against unreasonable searches and seizures is enshrined in the Fourth Amendment.'

‘So why go up there in the first place?'

She handed him her notebook and fished her phone out again to take a picture of the sketched position of the mobile homes. ‘Trailer parks are kind of fluid, and I would look pretty foolish if I gave the judge the wrong location. It would also make the search illegal and inadmissible.'

‘Okay,' he said. ‘I surrender – you need a warrant, and you've got to get your facts straight. But Ms Oxy-Clean is obliterating evidence as we speak.'

Her blue eyes sparkled with humour. ‘Being out in the backwoods and remote from the seat of justice, we are allowed a little leeway.' She handed her phone to the local deputy. ‘Think you could speak to the on-call judge, see if you can get a telephone warrant?'

Fennimore grinned. ‘Bloody genius.'

Lambert Woods Mobile Home Park,
Williams County, Oklahoma

Red stayed clear of the north-east section of the park after what happened with the pit bull. The other kids said the bald man took to patrolling that section with a baseball bat in his hand and after a week he took the dog with him on a chain. They said the dog walked with a limp and had one dropped eye, and it was meaner than ever. If you could believe the older boys, the man kept asking where the skinny ginger kid was at.

Red told them he wasn't scared, but he took to wearing a baseball cap and walked along the western edge of the park where the woods came all the way down to the highway, only hopping over the fence when the bus pulled into the lay-by. On the return trip he would leave the bus early, walking a couple miles extra to get home safe. Today the big yellow bus pulled in to pick up the kids for school at seven thirty on the dot. Red was about to break cover when he saw the big bald man turn left out the main entrance. He stood ten yards from the kids with his dog on a thick plaited leash. He did not carry a baseball bat, but why would he need one with seventy pounds of pure muscle and canine aggression by his side?

One of the kids threw a scared look towards Red and he stepped back behind a trailer. Looked like school was out today. Not that he minded that so much – only that the big boys' talk was true. He worked his way up the gentle slope again, not daring to cross the gap between the woods and the trailers till he could be sure the man had not followed him and could not see where he was headed. He did not think that pit bulls were good trackers, but he sure did not want to put that to the test.

At the north-west corner of the clearing, the distance between the trailer homes and woods decreased, and this was where the boy was headed when he heard a voice behind him. For a second he froze, but the voice was too light to be the pit-bull man and the words too friendly: ‘Miss the bus?'