On a normal day, I drove a red 1982 Dodge Ram pickup truck I had purchased at a used-car lot after college for eight hundred dollars cash. At the time I bought it, the engine had over four hundred thousand miles, the transmission didn’t work, and the headlights dimmed whenever somebody pushed on the brake pedal. The car dealer thought he was getting something over on me when I bought it, but I had done my research. I liked the truck, and I knew I could fix it.
Back then, I was a cadet in the police academy, and I lived with my adoptive parents in Glendale, Missouri. My adoptive father—Doug Green—found my choice of vehicle amusing. My adoptive mom—Captain Julia Green of the St. Louis County Police Department—understood.
I spent every moment of free time I had for an entire summer on that truck. When I had questions or came across something I didn’t know how to fix, I watched videos on the internet, read books at the library, and once even visited a retired mechanic who had worked on my truck back when it was new. There were days I felt as if I were wasting my time, and sometimes I felt like an idiot, but I rebuilt the engine, patched the electrical system, cleaned up the transmission, replaced the brakes, installed a new exhaust, and reupholstered the interior.
For the money I put into that truck, I could have bought a reliable used one, but I didn’t care. I had an affinity for broken things. The world would be a better place if more people recognized that a lot of broken things could be fixed again.
Since I was driving to St. Louis on a case, though, I needed something more official than my pickup truck, so I went by my station and signed out one of our marked SUVs. It was big and comfortable, but even more important than that, it had a laptop with an unlimited 4G data connection similar to the one on my cell phone. That would come in handy today.
My victim’s driver’s license told me her name was Kiera Williams and that she lived on Manchester Road in Rock Hill, a suburb west of St. Louis. Even at a glance, though, I knew that was bullshit. Manchester was a major commercial thoroughfare. I doubted my vic lived in a grocery store’s parking lot. Still, I had to check it out.
I headed northwest and drove for about an hour before I hit the suburbs south of the city. Within another half hour, I pulled to a stop in the parking lot of a small strip mall in Rock Hill. If I could believe Kiera Williams’s license, she lived in the lobby of Postal HQ. That was a problem.
I parked in the fire lane out front and pulled the SUV’s laptop toward me. Time to earn my paycheck. I called up the license bureau’s database and searched for other women named Kiera Williams in the area. That gave me nine results, none of whom looked at all like my victim.
Kiera—or Megan—was young enough that she had grown up with social media, which meant she should have had a presence somewhere. I looked her up on Facebook and then Twitter. Both websites had hundreds of users named Kiera Williams, but none matched my victim.
Then, I Googled her name, hoping she would have shown up somewhere in the paper in the past twenty-six years. Again, though, I found nothing that matched my victim. After striking out once more, I searched the Missouri court system for cases involving women named Kiera Williams. I got fourteen results there, most of which involved a woman who loved speeding and driving while intoxicated.
The world had all kinds of people. Some liked to live under the radar while others loved the spotlight. Everyone, though, left footprints in his or her wake. Even a hermit who refused to grace civilized society with his presence would have left a record somewhere. My victim hadn’t, though. Travis might have been right—the woman killed in St. Augustine might not have been Megan Young—but she sure as hell wasn’t Kiera Williams.
Unlike me, Megan Young wasn’t an only child. She had an older sister and a half brother. If she had been alive and in hiding for the past twelve years, she had help. Unsurprisingly, Emily Young, Megan’s older sister, didn’t have a license in her own name, so I looked up names Emily had used on fake IDs when we were in high school.
For most of us who grew up in the foster care system, it was hard to escape our pasts. I considered changing my name and joining the Navy. Others ran to a new city. Some killed themselves. Emily became Jessica Martin, a twenty-nine-year-old woman who lived half a block from Lafayette Park in south St. Louis. I recognized her picture in the license bureau’s database. Though her hair had changed, and she no longer had the angry, haughty smirk she wore when we were teenagers, it was Emily. Some people were hard to forget.
I put her address into the GPS on my phone and headed out. St. Louis had changed since I had left. With a high crime rate and poor schools, the north side of town was still an unpleasant place to live, but the south side of town was gentrifying.
When I reached Emily’s neighborhood, I found dumpsters in front of at least one house on each block. There were vans for plumbers and trucks for carpenters and handymen on each corner. Based on the upscale housing and the well-dressed people walking the sidewalks, this neighborhood wasn’t just up and coming; it had arrived, and Emily owned a very nice French Tudor row house facing Lafayette Park.
I parked about a block away and walked to the home. It was three stories tall and had a wrought-iron fence and a well-landscaped garden out front. Her neighbors had well-maintained gardens and neat front doors. I didn’t know much about the local real estate market, but the cars that lined the street were pricey. This was a neighborhood for doctors and lawyers and accountants—professionals with money to spend.
Of course, even as a kid in foster care, Emily had money to spend. Intelligent, ambitious drug dealers did well for themselves.
I unlatched the wrought-iron gate, walked up a brick pathway to her front door, and knocked hard. Immediately, the heavy oak door swung open. It looked as if someone had shut it tight, but the lock must not have engaged. Oak parquet floors led down a long hallway to the rear of the house while a doorway opened to a dining room on the right. A carved staircase led to the second floor. The house’s woodwork was gorgeous and looked original.
“Hello?” I called.
No one answered, so I knocked hard and then called out again. Still, nobody answered. As much as I wanted to walk in there and search for signs that Emily knew her sister had been alive, I had no cause to search the house. I took a pen from the inner pocket of my jacket and a business card from my back pocket and wrote a quick note.
Emily—call me.
I’d come by later, but I slipped the card into her mailbox and reached into the house to shut the front door. I stopped when I saw the dining room. There were two chairs overturned and papers on the ground. Someone had fought in there.
I slipped my firearm from its holster and crept inside, staying close to the walls so I wouldn’t cause the hardwood floor to creak. The front hallway led to the kitchen and backyard. The kitchen was immaculate save a broken white coffee mug and a puddle of coffee on the ground. The butler’s pantry had glass panels in the cabinetry. Someone had broken one, so glass littered the ground.
The second floor had five bedrooms and three bathrooms. All were clean. Someone had even made the beds. I checked out the basement next. It was an open space with a bar, a giant TV, and a pool table. Emily must have been a baseball fan because there were St. Louis Cardinals decorations on the walls.
Blood spatter stained the carpet.
My heart beat faster as I crossed the room to one of two closed doors on the far wall. The first led to a bedroom with an attached bathroom, but the second led to an unfinished room that held the furnace and water heater. Someone had tied Emily to a chair in the center of that room. She was nude, and there were burns up and down her arms and legs. The room smelled like excrement and blood.
My chest felt tight, and bile crept up in my throat. I didn’t need to check Emily’s neck for a pulse. The moment I saw her, I had known she was dead; anyone still alive with those burns would have been screaming.