Chapter 62
“So, as I was sitting there, another officer walked in the room and announced a break in the case, and they just let us go,” Beatrice said after she sipped her tea.
Annie’s heart skipped a beat. “What happened?” She sat up a little more in the hospital bed.
“There was a confession,” Beatrice said. “Evidently, the police were getting ready to make an arrest, and this other person—not the man they were going to arrest—steps forward and confesses. Do you remember Luther? The man who helped us with our tire?”
Annie shivered. “Yes. The man with the rune earring.”
“It was him,” Beatrice said.
“I need to get out of this bed,” Annie said. “Can you hand me my laptop and my cell phone?”
Beatrice handed her the items. Annie clicked on the computer and saw the story was breaking all over the Web. Damn. Here she was, scooped. This guy had been under her nose all along. She’d missed it.
Luther Vandergrift walked into Cumberland Creek Police Station, Tuesday, November 12, and confessed to the murders of Sarah Carpenter and Rebecca Collins, along with the attempted murder of Sarah’s infant child, now in the custody of Sarah’s parents.
According to the police report, twenty-eight-year-old Vandergrift has been a drifter since the loss of both of his parents eight years ago. A onetime medical student, Vandergrift relocated to Jenkins Mountain from Ambridge, Pennsylvania, after connecting online with a group called the New Mountain Order, led by Zeb McClain.
“We get together, hike, and meditate,” Zeb said offhandedly during a phone interview.
But according to the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), members of the group have records for various crimes. “We’ve not been able to find any concrete evidence that these folks, as a group, are up to no good. But you have to ask yourself why a young man would come all the way from Ambridge, Pennsylvania, to hike and meditate,” said federal agent Roger Delvechio.
Indeed.
“Vandergrift has a record of violence,” Detective Bryant of the Cumberland Creek Police Department added. “He spent some time in jail for assault. And one crime involved sexual assault. That’s all I am at liberty to say.”
I wonder if she had red hair, Annie thought.
Other than Vandergrift’s history of violence, his brief stint as a medical student at the University of Pittsburgh, and the loss of his parents in an accident, there doesn’t seem to be anything else on record about him.
“Ah, well,” Beatrice said. “There’s still more reporting to be done, I’d say.”
“Well, sure. And I’ve been on the case this whole time.”
“When are they going to spring you?”
“I don’t know. I still have a bit of a fever, and the doctors are afraid there’s an infection somewhere.”
“How do you feel?”
“Seriously? I feel, like, awful.” She couldn’t keep a clear enough head to piece one sentence together on her laptop.
Beatrice took another long drink of her tea. “You need to take care of yourself. I’m all for women following their passions, dear, but your health needs to be a priority. They have a confession. There’s nothing you need to do right now. And it turns out that we were right about Cookie. She wasn’t a killer, after all.”
“But you said that they were getting close to arraigning her.”
“What? Oh no, that wasn’t Cookie. It was someone else. I’m not sure who it was. Oh, wait. I think it was Zeb. I guess it doesn’t matter.”
“It matters to me. I mean, just because this guy confessed doesn’t mean he actually did it.”
“Why else would he confess?”
“A lot of people have confessed in the past and were completely innocent.”
“I heard they even had DNA evidence on this guy. They found one of his hairs somewhere or something. Sounds like a pretty tight case.”
“I’ll have to check all that out,” Annie said, mentally listing the interviews she wanted to line up. Hannah. Zeb. Luther. Roger Delvechio. Detective Bryant. If she could stomach that.