Three days passed before Dan visited Amelia at the house again. It was Saturday, which meant Meg and Adam had stayed up till all hours and were now sleeping in. From appearances, Dan had done the same. His eyes were bloodshot from lack of sleep, and dark circles hung beneath them.
Another body was discovered near the drainage ditch where the last five had been found. It wasn’t on the news. It wasn’t in the paper.
“She’d been dead for a while,” Dan told Amelia. “M. E. says she probably died some time between the last two girls, but for some reason, he waited to dump her. We did get a faint footprint, but even that is a long shot.”
“But what about the truck? Can’t you get a warrant to search it or the house?”
“It isn’t that easy.” Dan yawned as he shuffled behind Amelia into the kitchen. “Judges are reluctant to put a lot of faith in the testimony of hookers. Just because she said she saw that truck doesn’t mean that’s our killer. Could just be a dude with a crappy truck. So, I need your help again.”
“Another covert operation?”
“Not quite.” He scratched his head. “Would you mind dropping in on an old friend with me? I thought if I brought you along it wouldn’t look so suspicious.”
“Sure. Who are we going to see?”
“The owner of that truck. My old partner, Lars Hegan.”
Amelia froze. “Your old partner? You don’t think he has anything to do with the murders, do you?”
“My gut says no. But I can’t shake the feeling that there is something there. I don’t know, Amelia. This case has me dangling by a thread.”
“Go take a shower and lie down. No one is up this early on Saturday morning. When you wake up, we’ll go. Okay? I’ll make some breakfast for you, and you’ll have something warm in your stomach before we head out.”
Again, Dan stepped up to Amelia, slipped his arms around her, and pulled her into him for a tight hug. He held her there for what felt like a long time.
“What would I do without you?” Dan said.
“I can say I honestly don’t know.” Amelia squeezed him tightly before letting go. He kissed the top of her head and headed for the stairs just as Meg started to come down.
“Good morning, Dan,” she said, standing on tiptoes to give him a peck on the cheek.
“Good morning, sweetheart. You sleep okay?”
“Yeah.” She rubbed her eyes while shuffling up to her mother.
“Hey, kid.” Amelia kissed Meg on top of the head.
“Hi, Mom. I had the weirdest dream.”
“You did? Tell me while I make some pancakes.”
“Maybe I should call Dan down to hear it. It was pretty strange.”
“No, honey. Dan just got off work. He needs to rest, and then we are going to run a couple errands today before he goes back to work.”
“What errands?” Meg asked innocently.
“Oh, you know. He’s a man, so he’s out of toilet paper and hasn’t picked up his dry cleaning and has nothing but frozen dinners in his fridge,” Amelia lied, although from the way Dan was working this case, she was fairly confident she wasn’t far off.
“Dan should just marry you, and then he could stay here. We always have that stuff,” Meg chirped as she poured herself half a cup of coffee, which she topped with half a cup of milk.
Amelia didn’t say anything.
“Wouldn’t that be a good idea?” Meg said after taking a sip of coffee. She batted her long lashes as she looked at her mom over the rim of her mug.
“That would be a great idea, but it’s an idea that is up to Dan. And right now, he’s got more important things to worry about like solving this case.” Amelia smoothed Meg’s head. “He doesn’t need any distractions.”
“It’s the arsonist, isn’t it?”
“I think so,” Amelia lied again. But she didn’t dare tell her daughter that a lunatic was out there murdering young prostitutes who were close to her age. It was too much for Amelia. Meg probably would have been all ears if she told her what Dan was really working on. She could just imagine her eyes wide and her mind churning out question after question. But Amelia couldn’t tell her the truth, if for no other reason than to protect herself. That girl Missy was just a child. A beautiful girl who was lost and alone. No one was looking out for her, and so that was what happened.
“Well, if anyone can nail the jerk, it’s Dan,” Meg said confidently.
“I think you are right about that.” Amelia smiled before she poured herself a cup of coffee and started breakfast.
By the time Dan woke up, the kids had already had lunch and left the house. Adam had plans with his friend Amy Leonard from down the street. Swooshies skateboard shop was having an unadvertised sale that they’d been looking forward to. Amelia could only imagine what they were going to come home with this time.
Meg was spending the day with Katherine and her family for a barbeque. That left the house quiet with the windows open, a cool breeze blowing through, and nothing but the birds disrupting the silence.
“You look better,” Amelia said when Dan finally emerged from the guest bedroom upstairs.
“I feel better,” he grumbled.
“There’s a little coffee left.”
“That’ll do the trick.”
“And are you hungry?”
Dan looked up at her and smirked.
“That was a stupid question,” she replied as she pulled a chair out at the kitchen table and motioned for him to sit. Within minutes, a plate of pancakes and bacon was in front of him, along with a cup of coffee and a glass of orange juice.
“So, what I was thinking, Amelia, is that we go over to Lars’s house as if we were just in the neighborhood. I’m going to talk to him away from his wife and…”
“He has a wife?” Amelia gasped.
“Yes. And I believe he’s got a couple of kids too,” Dan replied nonchalantly. “If you would talk to his wife while I drop a few hints, that would…”
“Oh, Dan.” Amelia held her stomach. “I don’t know why I just thought that the guy responsible for this was some loner. A man with no ties to anyone. No family. Especially not children.” She gulped. “I’m not a cop. I don’t think of people any other way.”
“I wish we could spot the bad guys that way. I wish they all looked the part. But they don’t,” Dan said. His voice wasn’t harsh, but it had taken on a hard tone. “Unfortunately, sometimes they look like Boy Scouts. And sometimes they look like cops.”
Amelia looked at Dan. The idea that a fellow brother in blue could be responsible for this made him pull his shoulders down and strain the muscles in his neck. This was harder for him than Amelia. So she squared her shoulders and took a deep breath.
“Well, I don’t know what we are speculating for. There could be a completely reasonable answer for everything. But we’ll never know if we don’t get going.” She picked up her purse and went into the fridge for a couple of leftover cupcakes from the truck that the kids hadn’t found. They were simple orange and ginger cupcakes with vanilla frosting. “You can’t go to someone’s house empty handed.”
“Good thinking,” Dan said as he stood up and tugged at his tie. “How do I look? Am I too wrinkled?”
“I hate to tell you this, Dan, but you always look wrinkled,” Amelia teased as she smoothed out his lapels.
When they got into Dan’s sedan, Amelia sat on half a dozen pieces of paper scattered across the front seat.
“I’m sorry about all that. It’s the case file, and I hit the brakes when some jack-wagon stopped short, and everything went flying,” Dan muttered, aggravated all over again by the incident.
“It’s okay. I’ll put it all back in the folder while you drive.”
She skimmed over the documents. A lot of them were comments and diagrams that made little sense to Amelia. But the police photographs of the girls in the drainage ditch were all too easy to make out. There was blood. Their bodies were bent. These were not their mug shots. They were dead.
Amelia shuffled them into a stack along with all the other documents and closed the file folder.