ELEVEN

 

 

September 17th, 2016

Las Vegas, Nevada

 

ALL FOUR OF them sat there in silence for a moment until finally Lott decided he needed to get this moving. They had lost over a year when they found the other bodies, and if this guy was still around, and from the looks of it, he was, another woman’s life might be in the balance.

“So how did this guy kill himself as Paul Vaughan and still be alive?” Lott asked Andor.

“The supposed Paul Vaughan died from a shotgun blast to the face,” Andor said. “Set up to look like suicide. Nothing left to identify, so since the guy was in Paul Vaughan’s apartment, had Vaughan’s wallet in his pocket, and was dressed in his clothes, they assumed it was him and that he had killed himself.”

Julia took out her notebook and started writing as she talked. “So did this Duane Thorn take Paul Vaughan’s picture for his license, or is Paul Vaughan still alive and just faked his death?”

Lott stared at the list and the dates. Three women had disappeared and had their cars sold in the year right before Becky Penn’s disappearance. He pointed to the list. “I’m betting those three are the three buried under Becky.”

Andor nodded. “We need to visit families of those three, see if we can get anything to identify them from the family that might have been in that grave with the bodies. Clothing, hair length, necklaces, that sort of thing.”

“Better than waiting for DNA testing,” Lott said.

Julia wrote that down as well.

Annie hadn’t said a word so far and Lott knew that meant that something, beside the ugliness that they were uncovering, was really bothering her.

“Daughter?” he said. “You want to tell us what’s spinning?”

Annie laughed. “I can’t figure out why Paul would date one of his victims, then stage his own death ten years later and write down where he buried four of the women? Just can’t seem to come up with a reason for any of that.”

Lott sat back and took a deep breath and Julia wrote all that down.

Thankfully, the waitress showed up to take their orders to give him time to think. Annie was right. Not one bit of that made sense.

In fact, killing people for their cars made no sense either. There had to be something much deeper going on here. And with serial killers, something much sicker.

After the waitress left, Andor turned to Annie and Julia. “We know for certain that whoever wrote in that notebook knew where those women were buried and is the killer.”

Lott nodded to that.

“But we don’t know if it was this Paul Vaughan or Duane Thorn,” Annie said. “Or it could have been anyone who planted that notebook.

That made no sense to Lott either. “If you have been getting away with murder for thirty years, why tell the police where four of your victims are ten years later?”

Julia was writing all this down as fast as she could. There was no doubt they had far, far more questions at this point than even theories, let alone answers.

Again, they sat there in silence with the distant sounds of the casino echoing over them before Julia did what she was so good at and organized them.

“So what do we know for certain?” Julia asked.

“We know that all of these are unsolved missing person’s cold cases,” Andor said, jabbing his finger at the list of names. Lott could tell that list upset Andor. Lott felt the same way.

“We know that a man by the name of Duane Thorn sold all those women’s cars to a car dealer in Reno,” Julia said, writing.

“We have a physical address for this Duane Thorn,” Annie said. “We checked and the address is still valid on his reseller’s license and driver’s license as of last year.”

They sat there for a moment, all thinking. Lott could come up with nothing at all more that they knew for certain at that point. Every other bit of data they had was in question.

“So we give this Duane Thorn’s home a drive-by before we send in the youngsters,” Andor said.

“No stopping,” Julia said.

“No stopping,” Lott said. He had no intention of confronting a possible serial killer without major backup. His days of doing that were behind him as far as he was concerned.

“Then, if that’s a dead end, we see if we can figure out if that person who killed himself twenty years ago actually was Paul Vaughan,” Andor said.

“And how do you suggest we do that?” Lott asked.

Andor shrugged. “Figured we come up with a plan if we needed to.”

Everyone laughed and at that point, thankfully, the food came.