Sunnyside turned out to be a nice, quiet neighborhood on the southwest side of town, not too far from Damascus, where Elspeth had lived and Yvonne still did. The streets were winding, the lots middling to large, and there were a lot of trees. Bare now in the throes of winter, but it would probably be a nice neighborhood when spring came and everything was in bloom. And the houses were set far enough apart that breaking and entering might not be too difficult.
Property records are freely available online, if you know where to look for them. As a real estate agent, I have access to databases that makes it even easier. Digging up Lynn Jeffries’s address was literally a matter of thirty seconds.
I turned up the driveway and slipped the Volvo in behind the house. And sat in the car for a moment and looked around before I got out.
The house was a low-slung mid-century brick with a built-in garage on one end and a carport in the back, under which I was parked. Three bedrooms, from what I’d seen of the layout of similar houses. Two bathrooms, or maybe just a bath and a half. Not too dissimilar to Darcy’s rental, but a bit more rundown. It could use some new gutters, and maybe a good power washing. The brick could have done with some tuckpointing here and there, too.
Lynn had said her parents had moved out, but that didn’t mean she lived alone. She hadn’t been wearing a ring, but that didn’t mean she wasn’t involved with someone. She might have a boyfriend tucked away inside. Or a couple of kids. Maybe a Rottweiler.
There was no sign of a Rottweiler, or any other kind of dog. No pen, no doghouse, no water bowl by the outside spigot. Also no sign of children, or that anyone else shared the house with Lynn. Everything was quiet and looked deserted. After two minutes, when nobody had come to the back door to investigate, I decided I might as well get out of the car and look around.
I started with the back door. It had a big window in the middle, and behind it was a small laundry room with a washer and dryer on one side wall, and a utility sink on the other. A pair of rubber boots sat under the sink along with a bucket with a rag draped across the opening to dry.
I knocked on the door, just to be on the safe side, and while I waited, I peered deeper into the house. At the other side of the laundry room was a door to the kitchen—I saw a vinyl floor, and the edge of an upper and a lower cabinet, and the corner of a counter.
When nobody, animal or human, showed up in response to my summons, I moved on from the door.
Beside the kitchen was a high window that probably belonged to a bathroom, and beyond that a bigger window into a bedroom. After that I reached the corner of the house, and I decided not to tempt fate by peering through the windows on the side or the front, where someone would be more likely to see me. I was curious, but I’m not stupid. Or not stupid enough to tempt fate quite that far. Bad enough that I was here to begin with. I didn’t want to be caught peering through the windows in broad daylight. I could only imagine Grimaldi’s face if one of her squad cars had to drive out here to arrest me.
So I wandered back toward the Volvo, past the bathroom window and the back door to the garage.
Unlike the carriage house at the mansion, this garage was attached to the house, or more accurately, they were built as one building at the same time. One of the bays had been motorized, it seemed. There was no lock or handle, and no way to pull the door up from outside. Lynn probably had a remote.
The other bay hadn’t been touched. There was a shiny handle in the middle of the door, with a keyhole in the middle of that.
I tried it, having no expectations that it would turn. When it did, I did what anyone would do, and yanked.
The door rolled up with a roar like thunder. Or more likely it just sounded that way to me. When I looked around, with blood thudding in my ears, the sound hadn’t caused any of the neighbors to come running out of their houses to see what was going on.
Heart beating fast, I took a step forward, into the garage. It seemed safer, really, to get out of sight than to stay where I was, just in case someone happened to glance out their windows.
The garage was a two-bay, and both bays were empty—or at least empty of cars. Lynn probably parked on the electric side, where there was enough room for a car.
On the other side, a small lawnmower sat off to the side, along with a wheel barrow leaned up against the wall next to several rakes and shovels. One of the shovels was caked with dirt, and that seemed sinister to me, until I remembered that Katie hadn’t been buried, just dumped in the woods. The dirt was probably just from gardening.
A bag of fertilizer leaned against the wall underneath a row of hooks with things hanging from them. A coiled hose, small gardening tools with and without claws. An old raincoat, caked with mud, to go along with the rubber boots in the mudroom. I stuck my hands in the pockets, but found nothing except a wadded-up tissue, a couple of pebbles, and an oxidized penny.
A couple of makeshift shelves in the corner held tools of the handyman variety. Hammers—none of them with blood on them—ditto screwdrivers and wrenches. An old, round tin that sported a picture of Danish butter cookies on the lid and Danish landmarks around the sides—I recognized the Little Mermaid on her rock—turned out to hold a variety of screws and nails. I sifted through them with my fingers, but found nothing that didn’t belong there.
In the far-back corner of the bottom shelf, half hidden behind a stack of empty flower pots, was something that looked like a dark bundle of cloth, and I squatted to peer at it. And felt my heart start to beat faster.
Not a bundle of cloth. A nylon backpack, black and bulging.
Now, there was no real reason why Lynn shouldn’t have an old backpack in her garage. It might be a slightly weird place for it—a closet inside might make more sense—but there was absolutely no reason why she couldn’t have held on to her old backpack from high school, and this was it.
Hadn’t Rafe said that Katie had been carrying a black nylon backpack when she disappeared, though?
I reached for it, and then hesitated. And pulled out my phone instead. And took a picture of it. And sent it off to Rafe. Look what I found.
The response came back promptly. Where are you?
Lynn Jeffries’s house, I wrote back, and added the address. In Sunnyside.
There was nothing more, so after a minute I sent another text. Should I look inside?
No! The response came back in record time.
It might be Katie’s.
The phone rang. “All the more reason not to open it,” my husband told me when I answered. “What the hell are you doing, Savannah?”
“She’s waiting tables at the Wayside Inn,” I said. “Taking care of the whole Martin clan. She’ll be there a while. I figured it was a good time to check out her place.”
“You’re breaking and entering?”
“Of course not.” I sniffed. “You know I don’t have the skills for that. The garage door was open.”
I could hear the eyeroll. “Get outta there.”
I supposed I might as well. It wasn’t like the backpack would develop legs and walk away while I sat outside and waited. “Are you on your way?”
“Yes.” He bit the word off.
“Good.” And then something occurred to me. “What did you do with Carrie?”
He wouldn’t have left her home alone. But there was no one else living with us. So who did he give her to?
“She’s here,” Rafe said.
“In the Chevy? But you don’t have a car seat.” The only car seat we had was in the Volvo, and that was parked outside.
“You should have thought of that,” Rafe told me, “before you went out of your way to get yourself in trouble.”
I wasn’t in trouble—at least not until he got here—but by now I fervently wished I hadn’t called him. My voice shook. “Go back home. Or pull over somewhere and wait for me. I’ll come get Carrie. Then you can drive over here on your own.”
“Just get the hell out of the garage. We’ll be there in a few minutes.”
By this point I was hyperventilating, and he must have realized it, because he added, “She’s fine, Savannah. I’m being careful.”
Of course he was. She was his daughter, too. “I know,” I said. “It’s just…” Accidents happen.
“Yeah. But I’m taking care of her. I need you to take care of yourself. And that means getting out of the garage before someone sees you.”
“No one’s going to see me. The neighbors aren’t paying attention, and Lynn’s twenty minutes away, in Sweetwater.”
“Just do it,” Rafe said and hung up.
Fine. I made a face at the phone before I dropped it in my pocket, and gave the backpack a last covetous look before I straightened and headed out.
The car came up the driveway just a few minutes later. I heard the driver gun the engine to go up the hill, and got out of my own car preparatory to greeting my husband and daughter.
Rafe pulled the tan Chevy to a stop behind the Volvo, and got out to glare at me across the roof of the car. “Dammit, Savannah. You understand that I can arrest you for this, right? You don’t have to be inside the house for it to be a crime. What the hell were you thinking?”
I was thinking that I’d wanted to help. But as I watched him slam the car door and stalk around the Chevy with my daughter—our daughter—slung across his chest in one of her baby slings, the sight blew the thought out of my head. “Is she OK?” I asked instead.
His voice was impatient. “She’s fine. She fell asleep when we started driving. She’ll be hungry when she wakes up.”
Just like always. I indicated the open garage door. “The backpack’s on the shelf in the back.”
He stalked past me and into the garage, where he bent down, one hand on the baby, to peer at the backpack. It didn’t surprise me when he let loose with a ripe curse. “Did you touch anything?”
I shook my head. “It’s right where I found it.”
I had thought he might give me a pat on the back over that, at least, but he was still scowling. “This is the problem with letting yourself into somebody’s garage without permission. We don’t have a search warrant for this house. So even if this is Katie’s stuff, it’s inadmissible.”
“Can’t we get a search warrant now?” I asked.
“No,” Rafe said. “Not without some kind of evidence.”
I pointed to it.
He shook his head. “It don’t work that way. You can’t find the stuff and then get a search warrant to make the search legal. And I can’t start searching through people’s houses just ’cause I don’t like their attitudes. I need some real evidence to go on before anybody’d give me a search warrant. Do you have any evidence that Lynn Jeffries was involved in Katie’s disappearance other than her attitude? And this evidence we can’t use?”
I shook my head. “I’m sorry. I should have waited for you. It’s just that the garage door was open, and I figured, since time was of the essence…”
He arched a brow, and I squirmed. “OK, so the garage door wasn’t open. Not exactly. But it was unlocked. So it was sort of open. Just not standing open.”
“Lemme guess. Your fingerprints gonna be on the door handle?”
“Um…”
“I don’t believe this,” Rafe said. He ran a hand over the top of his head, which is his equivalent of running his fingers through his hair. Most of the time there isn’t enough hair there to run anyone’s fingers through. “Our first real piece of evidence, and you made it inadmissible.”
“I didn’t mean to!”
He took a breath, and I could feel him work to calm himself down. After a couple of seconds, he reached out and put an arm around my shoulders. “I know, darlin’. It’s just a shame, is all.”
It was. It really was a shame. “Do you think it’s Katie’s backpack?”
“Looks like it,” Rafe said. “It matches what the police report said she was carrying.”
He didn’t say anything else, and I waited. And waited. Until I couldn’t wait any longer. “What do we do now?”
He sighed. “It’s already inadmissible. We might as well take a look at it.”
Exactly what I was hoping to hear. “Would you like to do the honors, or should I?”
“I’ve got the baby,” Rafe said. “And you’ve got a pair of gloves in your pocket. I don’t want your fingerprints on the evidence, so put’em on before you dig in.”
Great. I shoved my hands into gloves, and tackled the backpack.
The first thing I pulled out was a pair of jeans. “Levi’s. Size 26.” She hadn’t been a big girl, if they were hers. “Striped shirt. Blue jacket with hood. And a pair of running shoes, size 7.”
Rafe nodded. “No underwear or socks?”
“Pair of socks stuffed into the shoes. No bra or panties.” And no jewelry or watch or anything like that.
“She might not have been wearing a bra,” Rafe said. “Some girls don’t.”
No. Katie might have been built small. The waist size of the pants indicated that she was a small girl. But even the most dainty of girls don’t tend to go commando. And I knew we were both thinking about the same thing. “The date of Katie’s pair of panties in the box…”
“Two weeks before she disappeared,” Rafe said. “If he killed her, he didn’t do it then.”
So Darrell Skinner hadn’t been the male equivalent of a black widow spider. Good to know.
“Anything else in there?”
I peered into the backpack. Along the sides and bottom were a binder, a couple of folders, a composition book, and some pens and pencils. I pulled out the composition book and held it up. “Katie’s name.”
Rafe nodded. “Put it back and zip it up.”
“Do we take it with us?” I asked, as I fumbled to do as he said. “Or leave it here so you can try to get a search warrant and come back?”
Rafe opened his mouth to answer, but before he could, another voice spoke, from behind us. “Take what with you?”
We both turned on our heels, and Rafe moved automatically to stand in front of me. When he realized he had Carrie strapped to his chest, and was exposing her to danger by trying to protect me, a look of frustration crossed his face.
Not that it looked like there was any danger. At least not at the moment. It was Lynn Jeffries standing in the open garage door, still in her waitress uniform with an unbuttoned down coat hastily thrown over top. She had her hands on her hips, but other than that, and the scowl on her face, she didn’t look threatening. “What are you doing here?”
Her eyes found me, and the scowl deepened.
“Columbia PD,” Rafe said, going for his badge, which was clipped to his belt. He had a gun, too, in an official holster next to it, but I guess he didn’t feel it was necessary to go for that.
“I know who you are.” Lynn turned her attention to from me to him. “What are you doing in my garage?”
“Just looking around,” Rafe said. “The door was unlocked.”
Lynn smirked. “Find anything?”
“As a matter of fact.” Rafe took a step to the side, exposing the black backpack. “You wanna explain this?”
Lynn looked at it, and for a second her face went absolutely blank. She blinked a couple of times, but that was all. As we watched, all the color leaked out of her face and left her ghostly pale. “That…” She stopped and ran the tip of her tongue over her bottom lip. “That looks like Katie’s backpack.”
“And Katie’s clothes,” Rafe said. “You wanna tell me how they got here?”
Lynn looked at him. And back at the little pile of evidence. And back at Rafe. “I have no idea.”
I didn’t know about him, but I was inclined to believe her. No way was she able to fake the pallor. The voice, sure. But not the way she’d turned pale at the sight.
And then all my sympathy vanished when she glanced at me and said, “Maybe she put them there.”
“I most certainly did not!” I said, offended.
“Prove it!” Lynn shot back.
I opened my mouth, and closed it again. Because of course there was no way I could prove, to Rafe or Lynn or anybody else, that the backpack had been in Lynn’s garage when I walked in. Rafe knew—at least I hoped he did—that I hadn’t put it there, but I couldn’t expect anyone else to believe me.
Grimaldi probably would, come to think of it. So the chances were slim that I’d be arrested. But if Lynn had killed Katie and hung on to the evidence all this time, I hadn’t made Rafe’s case any easier to prove.
Which was exactly why he hadn’t wanted me inside the garage to begin with.
“Why would I try to frame you for murder?” I asked, trying to be reasonable. “I didn’t even know Katie.”
“Maybe you were trying to help your sister,” Lynn answered. “I wasn’t the only one who slept with Darrell, you know. She did, too. And she wasn’t any happier about sharing him than I was.”
There was a pause.
“Any reason I should believe that somebody else put that backpack there?” Rafe wanted to know, and Lynn looked at him.
“I had no reason to want Katie dead. We were friends.”
“Friends who slept with the same guy,” I put in.
She gave me an unfriendly look, but Rafe asked a question, and she turned to him rather than bother with me. “Did you live here when Katie disappeared? In this house?”
Lynn nodded. “I grew up here. My parents moved to Florida a couple of years ago, and I took over the house. Before that, I was in a rental in downtown. And in college.”
She glanced at the door between the garage and the rest of the house. “If we’re gonna talk about this, you might as well come in. I’ve been on my feet all day, and I wanna sit down.”
She headed for it. I glanced at Rafe. He arched a brow, but nodded for me to follow Lynn, so I did.
The door led into a little den, with paneled walls and a fireplace. A drop zone was set up along the wall next to the door, and Lynn dropped her bag on a bench sitting there, and hung her jacket on a hook. “Can I take your coats?”
“I don’t imagine we’ll stay long,” Rafe said. He probably didn’t want to deal with trying to get the sling with the sleeping baby off, in case she woke up. I slipped out of my coat, though, although I kept it with me, just in case we had to beat a hasty retreat.
It didn’t look like such a thing was imminent. Lynn looked tired and sad, and she dropped heavily into the sofa group curved around the fireplace. “Have a seat.”
I perched on the edge of the chair opposite, with my coat on my lap. “You look tired.”
“I worked the late shift last night,” Lynn said, “and the early shift this morning. I didn’t get much sleep in-between. I was supposed to leave early, but then your family came in. And after everybody else had sat down, you showed up.”
So she’d been hostile because she wanted to get home and get off her feet, and I’d dragged mine about ordering lunch. “Sorry,” I said.
She grimaced. It might have been intended to be a smile, but I don’t think so. “I couldn’t deal with it anymore, so I left. I’m probably missing out on a nice tip.”
She probably was. There were a lot of us Martins (and McCalls), and we all—with the exception of yours truly—had good jobs.
“I don’t even care.” She leaned her head back against the sofa and closed her eyes. “I just want to sleep.”
“Answer a couple questions,” Rafe said, “and we’ll leave you alone.”
He’d sat down in the chair next to mine, with a big hand bracing Carrie. She was still asleep, in spite of everything that had gone on around her.
Lynn sighed, but nodded. “Shoot.”
“When was the last time you looked on the shelf where the backpack was?”
“I haven’t been in that corner since the end of gardening season last year,” Lynn said.
“Anyone else have access to your garage?”
She shook her head.
“You do your own mowing and your own landscaping?”
She nodded, with a look at me. “Don’t you?”
I don’t, actually. I grew up with landscapers and mowers being brought in, and now Rafe does it. With his shirt off, which is enjoyable as hell—heck—for anyone who happens to be around.
He gave me a ghost of a smile, so he probably knew what I was thinking. “I noticed your electrical panel’s in the garage. Have you had any updates recently?”
Lynn shook her head. And I must say I was impressed. It would never have occurred to me to notice that, much less ask.
“Do you always keep the door open?”
She turned to me. “The garage door? Of course not.”
“It was open today. Or unlocked, I guess I should say.”
“It’s not supposed to be.” A furrow appeared between her brows.
“When’s the last time you remember opening it?” Rafe asked.
“I go in and out of the automated side every day. Or almost every day. The last time the other side was open…” She thought back, “I guess it was probably New Year’s Eve. It’s the middle of winter, so I haven’t done any gardening. But there were a lot of people here that night, and it wasn’t very cold. I had both the doors open to get some air going.”
“Do you remember locking the door afterwards?”
Lynn thought about it. “I’m pretty sure I did, yeah.”
“Where do you keep the key?”
“By the door.” She turned to look over her shoulder. “See the little hook there? Next to the jamb?”
I saw the little hook. But there was nothing on it.
“I’m gonna need a list of everyone who was here that night,” Rafe said.
Lynn’s tired eyes opened wide. “You think someone who was here on New Year’s Eve took my key and put Katie’s things in my garage?”
“Unless you put them there,” Rafe told her, “someone else did. It wasn’t Savannah.” He glanced at me.
“But—”
She stopped and sunk her teeth into her bottom lip. We waited. “That means someone who was here, someone I know, killed Katie.”
Yes. It did. And it can be hard to rat out your friends. So I added some incentive, since I thought she might not have thought of it. “Someone who was here—someone you invited into your home, someone you trust!—didn’t just kill Katie, but he or she left Katie’s clothes and backpack in your garage to implicate you in her disappearance.”
Lynn flushed, and her eyes turned flinty. “I’ll get a pen and some paper.”
She left the den and went into the other part of the house. Rafe glanced at me and nodded in approval. I smiled back. Maybe I’d gone some little way toward redeeming myself from the mess I made earlier.
It took a couple of minutes, and then Lynn came back into the den. She was holding a yellow pad that she passed to Rafe. “This is all I can remember. There might have been a few other people, but this is most of them.”
I stretched my neck. The list had fifteen or twenty names on it, although several said “plus date.” I guess we—or Rafe—would have to ask around about those.
“Anyone we know?” I asked, and he handed me the pad. I glanced at the names while Rafe continued talking to Lynn.
“How many of these folks knew Katie?”
Lynn thought about it. “Maybe half?”
“Mark’em,” Rafe said, and I handed the pad over.
“I see Scotty Mason’s name on there.”
Lynn nodded, a few strands of her hair falling out of her bun and across her face as she made checkmarks alongside some of the names on the list. “We went to school together. I see him once in a while.”
“Sad news about his father.”
She nodded. “It’s been a tough six months for Scotty. Between his dad falling ill and dying, and the Skinner mess last fall, and now Katie… That’s why I invited him to the party. I thought it might cheer him up.”
“Did he know Katie? And the Skinners?”
“He knew Katie,” Lynn said, handing the pad back to me. “We all went to school together. And they lived near one another. Took the bus together in the mornings.”
I nodded. Scotty had told me as much.
“And we all knew Darrell. He was a couple of years older than us, but both Katie and I were involved with him, and Scotty knew him, too. We’d all go up to the Skinners’ to party on the weekends when we were in high school.”
“With Darrell providing the beer and weed,” Rafe said mildly.
Lynn shrugged. “I won’t deny there was some of that going on. Darrell always had a head for business.”
That was one way of putting it, I guess.
We sat in silence for a few seconds before Lynn asked, “Anything else I can do for you?”
I glanced at Rafe. He looked back at me.
“Doesn’t look that way,” I said.
Rafe nodded. “Thanks for your time. We’ll get out of your way now.” He pushed to his feet, one hand on the baby, while I ripped the list off the yellow pad. Once he was upright, he extended the other hand to me, to help me up. “If any of these people contact you for any reason,” he told Lynn, “give me a call.”
“And if any of them knock on the door,” I added, “don’t let them in.”
She stared at me.
“Better safe than sorry,” I added.
When we walked out, I heard her compulsively shut and lock the door behind us.