SIX
Evie Blackwell
Evie knew she was ambitious, had given up trying not to be. She was unlocking the post office before five the next morning. There was somebody out there, living free and thinking he . . . or she . . . had gotten away with murdering a whole family. She was in competition with that person, looking for the truth, looking for the culprit. She wanted justice—for the Florists, for their extended family, for the law. And she wanted to win.
She put down the loaf of sourdough and package of cheese she’d brought with her from the house, along with a thermos of coffee. She walked over to the dozen photos of the family now on the wall and moved them around in a different order, a habit that let her see them in other contexts, look again at the details, see the people afresh at the center of the puzzle.
She stepped back, studying the photos, the timeline, the facts on the crime wall, pulling it back into her memory. By doing so many cases, she had learned how to work them, to pack the details down into her subconscious, then wait for that eureka moment, the one pivot that would connect things together, point to a question, a fact, and she’d have it. Like seeing the end of a chess match when there were still a dozen moves to be played. She could solve this case. Twelve years of collected evidence and interviews was a gold mine, and all she needed was to put her finger on the one thing. She was convinced it was here. She could find it. God had created her with the skill set uniquely suited for such work. She solved crime puzzles, and this one desperately needed solving.
She opened the next box of files and dug into the work. It wasn’t personal to her, and that distance helped her perspective—she didn’t have assumptions about the victims or others around them clouding her view.
She no longer apologized for liking her job, even though she was careful about saying aloud something of that sort. This family was missing and likely dead. That reality fueled her motivation to solve what happened, why, and who did it. But she couldn’t help but enjoy the hunt, the puzzle of it, the search to locate the key to solving the disappearance. She wanted to find a thread before the day was over, something that might lead to another “something.”
She poured her first cup of coffee and started reading, making notes.
Gabriel Thane
Gabriel slowed as he drove by the post office, seeing the lights, Evie’s rental parked at the curb. He glanced at the time. Early even for a dedicated cop. He doubted it was inability to sleep that got her up before dawn. She was in Carin to work, to solve these cases before her vacation leave was over.
Once Evie finished with the two cold cases, he reminded himself, she would be on to the next assignment. And back to what’s-his-name, he thought a bit ruefully. She’d give a friendly wave and smile, a how’re you doing? if she crossed paths with him at a conference, but she’d likely not be back in this county for a few years or more. He’d do well to remember that reality.
He had work waiting for him, deep enough to swallow his Monday morning—and the reason he also was rolling into work so early. If he wanted to help Evie this afternoon, he had to move a whole day’s worth of work this morning.
He glanced one last time at the lights in the windows and had to smile. He appreciated that she was focused on the job. He’d noticed the same thing about Ann on their first meeting. That friendship had become something rich and deep over the years, but it had begun because the way Ann focused on her work was not to be missed. Evie was showing him the first hints of something similar. Maybe a good friendship is something I can look forward to.
Several hours into his morning, Gabriel looked up at a tap on his office door. The woman who had lingered in the background of his thoughts while he worked was standing there. She wore dress slacks and a blue- and white-striped shirt, a jacket over her arm.
“Hey, Evie.” He noted the fresh bandage over the stitches showed the fading edges of bruising. Other than that, she looked fit, alert.
“Mind if I look through the archives?” she asked.
“Sure.” He dug out keys from his desk drawer and motioned toward the hallway. “Third door on the left marked Records. You want the side room labeled Archives.” He handed over the two keys she’d need.
“Thanks.”
He gave it an hour, then wandered back with some coffee. She’d made herself comfortable at a worktable in the middle of the filing cabinets. “What are you hoping to find?”
“I’ll know it when I see it. Anything interesting, helpful . . .”
He noticed the files spread out on the table, saw she was reading reports from the animal-control officer.
“No dead deer were picked up on the days in question, to my disappointment,” she said, shaking her head. “Two dead skunks, a dead fox, too many smashed squirrels for him to bother counting, just a check on many species—the daily reports are like that. He’d been on the job for six years at this point, liked his work, liked keeping tallies. He even sketched on the back of the report the roadways he cleared that day, where he found remains.”
“He was probably aggregating that data to find animal trails most in use,” Gabriel explained, “so he could follow them back through the woods during hunting season, have a leg up on his fellow hunters.”
“Okay . . . that’s helpful. I wouldn’t have thought of that answer, as I don’t hunt.”
He read the tabs on the files she hadn’t yet opened. “You’re looking at murders in Carin County?”
“As many as I can. Even solved ones, before or after the family disappeared, could be useful to me. Would you be able to get someone to generate a list? Murders in the county over, say, the last thirty years? Maybe another of particularly violent crimes, assaults?”
“What are you looking for?”
“You don’t start killing with a family of three. You start with one, and it’s probably an accident or due to temper. You don’t start on a deputy who has his family right there to protect. So if the person we’re looking for is from around here, where are his first kills?”
“That sounds depressing, Evie. And you can say it so calmly.”
“But do you think I’m right?”
“I think I’ll get you the lists. You’re going to need a bigger wall for your timeline.”
“I’m thinking the same thing. I don’t know what’s relevant. But once I see it, the timeline is likely going to be the key to understanding this case.” She looked over a file she was holding. “How’s that other list, the violent ones, coming?”
“With some deputies’ input, we’ve got the names. I’ll get you a copy. I’m heading out to talk to some on the list, see if I can find out who else should be on it.”
“You sound kind of doubtful.”
He shook his head. “No, I think it’s a solid way to approach the problem. But I’m thinking we won’t see the right name without something else to point us there.”
Evie nodded to her notes. “That’s where my side of this comes in. I have to find you a motive, something that would pull a name on your list to the top. We still need a trigger, a reason to carry out the crime. The one thing I’m confident of is the motive isn’t going to be something trivial. If this doesn’t turn out to be a random crime, the motive of the person who went after Deputy Florist and his wife and son is going to be huge. If motive is there, I’ll find it.”
Gabriel smiled at her confidence. “I’ll send you in some lunch. Anything you don’t like?”
She shrugged. “Raw onions. Sushi.”
“I’ll come up with something without getting near those. Don’t read too long without a break or your headache is going to return.”
He reached over and lightly touched her forehead. “You’ve got a tell when it’s there—the headache’s gone, but you’ve still got the ache around the stitches.”
“It feels like I’ve got fishing line knit through my skin,” she complained.
He chuckled. “It’s probably close to the truth. I’ll see you later. Call if you need anything.”
“Sure.”
Evie Blackwell
Evie watched Gabriel leave, looked at what he’d left behind on the table. Another roll of sweet-tarts. A bit of magician on his part, she thought, since she hadn’t seen him put it there.
She slipped one out and with new determination turned her attention back to the files. Gabriel had the list of names. She needed to find that why. She liked Gabriel’s smile—find something useful and she’d get another of them. Not that she was working the case for his smiles, but still, it was a nice side benefit.
So far, nothing in the files included the names of Florist’s wife or son. Was that a simple courtesy to the deputy if his son had been in on something that caught an officer’s attention, maybe vandalism at the school or petty thefts involving kids in Joe’s circle of friends? She’d begun compiling a list of names to investigate further. It would be hard to find a motive directly involving an eleven-year-old who, from everything she’d seen up until now, seemed to be a good boy.
Susan Florist had been a clerk at a bank. There’d been a heart-attack death there—a disgruntled customer denied a loan extension. Also a series of threatening letters related to the bank’s foreclosure on farmland. Since Susan was a part-time employee, nothing in the bank’s actions likely would have drawn attention to her. Evie hadn’t come across any reports of an attempted bank robbery, or a bank employee embezzling funds, or someone acting inappropriately toward female staff.
Evie moved her shoulders around to loosen them, started to think about missing Deputy Scott Florist, but then stopped and circled back to his wife, Susan. The bank was a hub of the community. She would know people’s financial business as a teller handling deposits, working a customer-service desk. Things like bank balances, bounced checks, church contributions, those behind on paying back a loan, those spending more than they could afford, child-support payments. Financial matters were always emotional flash points when there was trouble. Susan would be in a position to see and hear a lot of personal information about people in the community.
Evie thumbed through the case files she’d brought with her, looking for the write-up on Susan and her work history, took her time reading through it. Susan had handled opening accounts, provided access to the safe-deposit box area, and worked the front counter taking deposits and processing withdrawals. She hadn’t been involved with loans or business accounts or reconciliation of problems. But the general tasks she routinely handled would have been enough to learn personal information about the bank’s clients.
Evie circled Susan’s name on her notes, circled the bank, and wrote out a simple statement: You know my secrets, and I think you told someone, maybe your husband.
Evie tapped her pen against the notepad, intrigued by the places that possibility could take her. A couple had a joint checking account, but the wife kept a secret account as a just-in-case cache? One with statements going to another address for privacy? Someone worried about a violent streak in her husband? Maybe someone withdrawing a bunch of cash, cleaning out an account in preparation for bolting, and Susan was the person who assisted in the withdrawal. . . .
Yes. There might be something here. Whether it led to the family’s disappearance was a different question. But Susan would have known at least some of the community’s secrets, and someone could naturally conclude she’d told her husband some of those secrets. A good line to tug, Evie thought as she put a Carin Lake fishing spin on it—she was throwing out a line for ideas and had just hooked something that felt big.
Should she mention the idea to Gabriel? No. Not yet. Ideas were fragile things. There would be any number that didn’t get into her net before she found something worth sharing with him. She’d pursue this one on her own and see where it went. The fact she’d come up with one possibility told her she’d find more.
Back in the post office after a quick stop to buy a radio, Evie returned to the timeline. The music helped the place feel friendlier, echoing down the long room like a concert hall. Evie found herself moving in step to the rhythm as she moved back and forth between the files and the wall.
Susan Florist had been an organized woman. Evie fully appreciated that as she taped more calendar pages up. Susan had used a month-at-a-glance layout, one or two words capturing the daily schedule. Doctor. Baseball practice/Joe. Spanish class. Haircut/Scott. The woman had laid out the Florist family’s life in neat orderly boxes and archived the expired pages. Evie started with the month the family disappeared and went back in time. She fit almost two years’ worth of the calendar pages in towering columns on the wall. Finished, Evie pulled out a chair, put her feet up on another one, and carefully studied the results.
Susan Florist, tell me something interesting about yourself. I know it’s here, buried in these dates. Your son’s life. Your husband’s. Yours. What do I need to see?
She reached over for the roll of sweet-tarts, peeled off another. She scanned and absorbed month after month of the Florists’ lives. She wasn’t looking for any particular item. She was simply reviewing the routines, the interruptions. Car in for maintenance, the dishwasher breaking, a visit to the vet, the places someone would interact with Susan more often than Scott, and vice versa. A birthday party invitation for Joe, scout meetings, youth group, or places with just Susan and Joe, without Scott.
New notations appearing . . . Joe at Mike’s, Yates/dinner here, some coffee/10 a.m. reminders. The Yates had moved into the community? A new couple who also had a son, Susan is making time to get to know the wife, the boys are in school together, have them over for a meal to introduce them to her husband? That might be a useful thread—new people in town. A look at school records could give her a sense of who had arrived the year or two before the Florist family disappeared. You might tell new people something about your lives, what’s going on, invite them to your home. Sometimes disguised monsters came to visit—
“Evie.”
Her elbow popped against the edge of the chair, and her feet slid off the second chair and smacked on the floor.
Gabe smiled apologetically. “Sorry,” he said.
She rubbed her elbow. “Sure you are.”
“Look at the bright side. Maybe it will take attention away from the other aches and pains.” He laughed at the look she gave him. “I am sorry. Listen, I’m heading out to do more interviews. Want to come along?”
He’d interrupted a train of thought that was going somewhere, and she had to push down irritation at his reasonable question. She shook her head. “Thanks, I’m good.”
“Okay. You spook easy—that’s interesting to know. I’ll whistle my way in next time.”
“Fine. Good. I hope an interview goes somewhere.”
He chuckled and disappeared out the door.
She walked over to make sure the door was locked, fixed herself a sandwich while she was up, and returned to rescue the second chair, get settled again. She shook her head to clear the interruption, looked at the calendar pages, and pulled the schedule information back into place piece by piece.
New people coming into their lives, showing up in their schedule . . . someone new who has a dark and dangerous side. Would he maybe come in via Joe? A new coach for Little League, a new dad of a teammate? It seemed most likely through Joe. Or through Susan via a woman, a wife, a girlfriend. Not directly through Scott, not stepping into their personal lives. The door would open through Joe or Susan. Unless it was a new guy at work . . . She paused on that thought. Yeah. A nice cover. Scott brought someone new into their lives, someone new on the job. If it’s a cop, they think he’s safe and have no hesitation about letting the person into their lives.
Evie could feel when the moment of concentration peaked and the idea began to fade. She tried to get the feeling back, but it wouldn’t form. It didn’t mesh with the calendar, she realized. New people coming in via Susan and Joe were there, but not Scott. No fishing dates, no golf outing, no guy stuff—little markers that should be there. Evie wrote herself a note to check school records on the possibility of a new couple showing up with a boy Joe’s age, but the rest of the what-if wasn’t holding together.
She stretched, ate another sweet-tart, went to the last calendar month of their disappearance, month by month in reverse order, and looked for another possibility. Something else was here somewhere.
Evie heard the post-office door open, knew it was Gabriel, and didn’t look up. He was whistling the same tune as when he’d come in with an update on his interviews and when he brought in dinner. She didn’t mind the whistling, but the song fragment looping in her head was annoying.
“It’s eight o’clock. You need to call it a night.”
“Yeah,” she answered absently, just to acknowledge the remark, no particular inclination to follow his advice. She was just glad he spoke so he stopped whistling.
“What’re you doing now?”
Over the course of the day she’d been reviewing the contents of the various boxes collected from the Florist home. She read letters, flipped through notebooks, scanned a diary of Susan’s, looked at saved Christmas cards, found restaurant coupons and school flyers—the normal clutter a family collected over time and eventually discarded. At the moment she was deep in their financial, insurance, and medical paperwork, tracing where they sent checks, looking for signs of secrets, an affair, child-support payments, bailing out a family member who kept getting into debt, something. Even the boy had an account for his allowance and interesting purchases to his name. She condensed the last hours into a single word: “Finances.”
“Evie. Pause long enough to look at me.”
She glanced up. Gabriel was wearing a bright pink Hawaiian shirt and holding two glasses of crushed ice and something red with straws stuck in them. He handed one of them to her. “Sip it slowly.”
She complied, and smiled. Tart and fruity.
“Don’t ask what’s in it. It’s safe for cops to drink on duty, contains no alcohol, although it’s probably got a dozen other things—including a touch of lime juice and part of a can of cherry pie filling—from what I saw land in the blender.”
“You were at a party?”
“Good one too. A coming-home party for vacationing friends, three weeks in Hawaii. We didn’t want them to feel so much culture shock coming back to Illinois. Come on, take a break. You can drop in on the last half of the party with me.”
“Where is it?”
“Two blocks east, above the pizza place.”
Okay, meeting the town’s residents would be a decent use of her time, and she could use a break . . . and more of this punch. She pushed back her chair, tucked the phone he gave her into her pocket with her keys, picked up her drink.
“How many people were interviewed today?” she asked as they walked toward the door. “You told me earlier about yours, but were there others?”
“Between Dad, myself, and deputies who had the time, we interviewed thirty-eight. We added another six to the list based on feedback—people we all agree we should have thought of ourselves. How’d you do?”
She glanced back at the tables. “I’ve got some ideas.” She really wanted to pursue a couple of them for another hour or so . . .
He reached over and pulled her through the doorway. “It’ll still be here tomorrow. You’ll think better if you clear it out of your mind for a bit.”
She waited while he locked the place up, nodded to the retired deputy coming their way. Gabriel must have been confident he would get her to take a break.
“You need a warmer jacket,” he pointed out. “We can ride—”
“No, I’m fine for a few blocks. Come winter, I live bundled in layers that make me look like the Michelin Man. I’m stubborn about giving in to winter.”
He smiled. “A cute image. Tell me something else I wouldn’t know about you.”
She gave him a considering glance. “Okay, but I answer one, you answer one. Sure you want to go any further? I already gave you the easy answers.”
“Yes.”
She sipped at the drink and decided to make it interesting just to see how he would respond. “Let’s see, I build a snowman every February just to force away my increasing annoyance with winter. I vacation comfortably—land somewhere, rent a house, eat out, take a stack of books and movies, pretend I live there, and decide if I would like the area as someplace to retire one day. I’m trying to get up the nerve to take flying lessons so I can travel around as easily as Ann does. I like to run with my dogs, play Frisbee with them, enjoy tug-of-war with their ropes. I used to go to the gym to stay in shape, but now the dogs help me accomplish that and with a lot more fun. I’m single, never married, though I’ve been close enough a few times it would take a sharp knife to shave the difference. I take my birthday off. I sleep in, then put a hundred dollars in my pocket and go shopping for whatever catches my eye, write down a list of what I want most, and hand it to God as my birthday wish, have a special meal—steak, baked potato, asparagus, a richly iced cupcake—curl up on the couch to watch a good movie or reread a favorite book to top off the day.” She looked over and found him watching her. “Birthdays aren’t celebrated enough as they should be,” she finished, feeling a bit defensive.
“Define ‘almost married.’”
Trust him to catch that one. She blew out a breath. “Let’s see . . . not in any particular order. One got called off by the groom a few days before the wedding. Another, I returned the engagement ring. The third”—she grinned, cocked her head—“we’ll call it career-goal differences, but in reality his mom didn’t like me, and we mutually concluded she never would. That gets me to age twenty-six. I’ve since become wiser and stopped letting guys ask me the question.”
He was silent for a long moment. “I’m not sure what to say. That’s an . . . unusual history. Allow me a tactless question—how old are you now?”
“I’ll admit to thirty-five with a year of fudge. When I’m forty it’ll be three years of wiggle room, and I’ll work my way up from there.”
“Dad had told me, but I wanted it from you. Word is you’re seeing a guy by the name of Rob Turney.”
“That’s the word, is it? Accurate enough, I guess.”
“Don’t take this the wrong way, Evie, but that almost-married list is sad.”
She liked that he was willing to say such a thing. She agreed with him. With a shrug, she replied, “I was looking for something I thought a guy could give me, with the added edge of being a bit commitment shy. They were good guys with solid jobs, I wasn’t going to be marrying lazy bums, and any one of them would have made a fine husband. But I didn’t fight very hard to keep a wedding in view once things in the relationship began to go south. I’ve grown out of it, that need for a guy to fill the voids, make me complete. I grew up.” She shook off the memories and offered a smile. “And that constitutes my list of personal crashes.” She could tell he wasn’t sure what to say, and she was of a mind to let him off the hook. “Are we at the party? I see Hawaiian shirts in the windows above us.”
Diverted, he glanced up. “Yes.” He opened the door in front of them. “Stairs to the second floor, then take the door on the right. Hosting us are Glenda and James Fitzgerald. You’ll want to ask about their son, Mark, and their cat Sophia.”
“Got it.”
“The Florists’ extended family is mostly here. I counted six of them,” he mentioned as they topped the stairs.
She shot him a look. “You should have told me earlier. I need a Hawaiian shirt too.”
“In this crowd, someone is going to spill that punch on you—you’ll be nicely colorful. Hang around with me for a bit. I’ll introduce you to folks or you can peel off and see if you can corner a lady who likes to gossip. Either is going to make for a fun evening, maybe even productive.”
He opened the door, and the volume promptly spiked. Between music and conversations, it sounded as though the entire town had gathered in what could be at most a three-bedroom apartment. Gabriel stepped in first, drew her into the room behind him.
“Gabriel! You brought a date. How nice! Come in, come in. I see you’ve already gotten her a drink. What’s your name, dear? I’m Linda the librarian, but most people just call me the town crier. Come on, let’s get you a plate and some food, and you can tell me where Gabriel has been hiding you.”
Evie cast Gabriel a wicked look, and he grinned his reply. Linda was cutting a path for her toward the kitchen. This was going to be an interesting evening, even if it didn’t turn productive.
Evie glanced up at Gabriel on the step above her. She was sitting on the stairway they had climbed two-plus hours earlier, edged over to the side so people still leaving could get around her. She sniffed the drink Gabriel put into her hand before tasting it. “I’ve got a headache again.”
“It’s the music. Most of their friends must have hearing aids they can turn off,” he quipped as he sat down beside her.
“I learned that the Florists’ relatives know more about me than anyone other than my mother.” She took another sip of the punch.
“The small-town rumor mill can be very efficient when stirred up by something this dramatic,” Gabriel said.
“I’m guessing the banker in the family ran a credit check, probably even looked at my recently canceled checks, since I keep an account with the same state bank.”
“Want me to go slap him on the wrist?”
She considered it briefly, then shook her head. “No. If I get in a bind and need to know details about someone, he now owes me a favor.”
Gabriel’s shoulder pressed against hers as another person passed. “They mean no real harm. They’re just protective.”
“Don’t they understand I’m trying to find their missing family members?”
“You’re State Police, a not-so-favorite badge around these parts.”
Evie thought she could understand that. She went back to his original question. “I think they were in marriage counseling over in Decatur—Scott and Susan Florist. It wasn’t all a happy family, going back about two years before they disappeared. The aunt kind of confirmed it for me. And money is missing out of their family assets. Mr. Florist-family-banker didn’t realize what he confirmed as he complained about the problems of maintaining, then settling an estate when the State Police won’t rule it a homicide and the courts won’t issue death certificates for seven years. If you ask the right question and sound like you know more than you actually do, that guy can talk himself into some useful tangents.”
Gabriel took the drink out of her hand. “Trust you to have made that kind of progress. Okay, this isn’t the place for this kind of conversation.” He pulled her to her feet, steadied her so she wouldn’t fall, led her down the stairs and out the door.
“You seem bothered I’ve gotten answers from the Florist family.”
He shook his head, kept her hand in his, and moved briskly down the sidewalk. “Lower your voice, please. Take a look around.”
Groups of friends were saying lingering goodbyes around a few cars on the street. She shut up. Gabriel strolled along, gave her hand a friendly swing as he said, “Pretend you’re having fun.”
Evie caught a few smiles directed their way, indicating they thought it nice the sheriff had a date, and found it interesting she didn’t mind the assumption. “I am having fun.”
Gabriel finally slowed. “Okay. You can safely say whatever you would like now.”
“Give me back the drink. This version is the best so far.”
He handed her the glass. She sipped at it and nodded. Her throat was dry from having talked quite a lot. “I want the recipe for this, if you can pry it out of the blender guy. Anyway, it was easier to talk about the case than duck questions about being your date. And most everyone I met brought up the subject of the Florist family. So I went with it.”
“Which is why I pulled you over to the party—well, one reason.” He unlocked the post office, guided her inside. “You’ve got some thoughts running around your head.”
She was grateful to step into the heated building after her brave words earlier about nixing the car. “They were in marriage counseling, probably over in Decatur, and there’s between forty and eighty thousand dollars missing from what their banker relative expected to find in the estate.” She walked over and set her drink on the table, pulled her phone out to check for messages. “I’m not sure where they were siphoning away cash that smoothly from their accounts. I maybe had a whiff of something being off in their finances before you pulled me away to the party, but I haven’t pinpointed it. I need to get my head back into those numbers.”
She started to move toward the open files, and he reached over to put a finger lightly under her chin. “Not tonight,” he said firmly, turning her to face him. “That’s a task for tomorrow. You’re sure on the marriage counseling?”
“Sort of. Sure of the location—Decatur—and that it was a standing Wednesday evening appointment for both of them. Pretty sure it started about two years before they disappeared.”
“Why didn’t we have this?” He looked puzzled and extremely frustrated, a combination that was rather appealing. She had known she would get his attention with this idea, so she hadn’t mentioned it until she was reasonably confident.
She patted his arm in sympathy. “Because it’s not really there, Gabriel. Not in their schedule books, not in what they told their family and friends, not in their finances—no checks have a memo line saying ‘marriage counseling.’ It wasn’t only Susan keeping something covert, or just Scott—it was both of them. They worked together to keep it under wraps.”
She studied the crime wall and the month-at-a-glance calendar pages. She’d found something new, and she wasn’t above admitting to herself it felt really good. “The aunt knew something. I think they were using her to cover up what they were really doing. A friend says, ‘I called you Wednesday evening, but didn’t get an answer.’ And they would say, ‘Sorry about that, we were over at my aunt’s, and cell reception isn’t good at her place.’ Like that. They’d stop by the woman’s place for ten minutes, use the stop to cover a three-hour gap in their evening.”
Gabriel pulled out a chair, draped his arms across the back of another one. “Tell me what you’re seeing to get to that conclusion.”
Evie thought about where to begin, decided to simply walk him through it. She made herself comfortable in her chair and propped her feet on the next one over. “I’ve been looking for motive to harm the family, digging for something that would be a trigger, trying to track their movements, what happened in their lives. I’ve been looking at any schedule or calendar I can find, anything with dates on it. You’ve collected a lot of paper on this family, Gabriel. Name the subject, and an officer put together a file on it. That’s proved very helpful when I have a feeling something is there but hiding beneath the surface. I’ve been into the guts of those boxes today.” She looked around at the stacks.
“I found that Susan suddenly developed an interest in speaking Spanish. That’s what I first noticed. She audited classes over in Decatur at the junior college. Spanish I, then Spanish II, Advanced Spanish—two years’ worth of Spanish classes. Always on a Wednesday night. No grades, no exams, but merely auditing the courses. She started about three weeks into the semester, so it wasn’t something she planned and began at the term’s start—she just abruptly joined that first class. I figured they were planning a vacation to Mexico when I first noticed it, but that much Spanish over that length of time didn’t make sense. And I checked—she had four years of Spanish in high school and another year in college. She could have skipped all the classwork and simply bought a refresher set of audios to brush up.
“I figured maybe there was an affair on the side, with a standing appointment on Wednesday evenings when she knows her husband is at work. If she gets asked about the Spanish classes, she can rattle off a sentence and say how fun it is.
“I looked up Scott’s schedule to confirm he was regularly working Wednesday nights. What I found was the opposite. Scott never drew a paycheck for work on a Wednesday night. If he was scheduled to work that night, he’d arrange to swap with someone. Or he would work a double the day before and flex the time off the rotation. In the two years before they disappeared, Scott was never paid for work done on a Wednesday night. That’s just weird, isn’t it?” She paused and looked at Gabriel, and he nodded his agreement.
“So then it was like, huh, both doing something on Wednesday evenings. Are they taking tango lessons, then a room at a hotel, and don’t want humorous digs from family? They tuck Joe in with a friend or relative, have an evening away on their own, a date—they’re married, why not?”
She glanced again at Gabriel, but he simply signaled that she should keep going. She looked back at the crime wall. “Joe’s schedule, such as they had for him, says baseball coach, Decatur, on Wednesday nights. To work on his hitting, throwing, and field work? I’m thinking, wow, I wish my parents had sprung for private coaching when I was learning to hit a ball. So I looked at Joe’s game records—he kept information like that for himself. His performance over the two years in his actual league goes down, even with a weekly coaching session. Joe’s running a bluff, same as the parents.”
“They were covering up family counseling, or counseling for Joe. It fits better than marriage counseling,” Gabriel suggested.
Evie nodded. “That’s what I thought at first, but it doesn’t track. Counseling for a kid is triggered by something, and his school reports are fine. Good attendance, good grades, a rather popular boy. I checked his medical records. Precautionary X-rays after a bad fall and tumble on his bike are in file. The kid has fewer broken bones than I do, less stitches than I have right now. I checked for changes in his behavior the last two years—disruptive, grades changing, fights with a classmate—nope, it’s all good, the boy is cruising through life on a happy arc. There’s no sign of a trauma—walked in on a crime, got molested or did some molesting, walking in his sleep, developed a serious disease. The last one kind of made sense, actually. The kid is sick, got a childhood cancer or something, get him counseling to help along with the doctors.
“So I went looking at medical claims against Scott’s insurance, Susan’s. There’s nothing for doctors of any kind for Joe beyond normal checkups and shots for school and league play. There are single prescriptions written to Susan for anxiety, Joe for sleeping pills, issued once and not refilled. Issued two years before they disappeared, by a doctor in Decatur, a private practice, same date on the prescriptions. So I tracked down the prescribing doctor.” She pulled over her laptop and opened it.
“Some interesting things about Dr. Richard Wales,” she said as she typed his name into the search box. “He’s a psychiatrist, works with cops who have discharged a weapon in the line of duty or had to take a life in the line of duty. He does the general ‘you’re fit for duty’ psych eval most cops have to pass before they’re hired. One of the other things he’s known for is counseling couples after they have lost a child due to a tragic accident or a miscarriage.” She turned the screen so he could see the doctor’s web page.
“Deputy Florist never fired his gun on the job that I can find. But he no doubt got cleared by Wales before he was hired here. Dr. Wales’s business card is probably tacked on your employee human-resource board. Susan Florist is holding down her job, her friends see her as happy, the photos show a contented woman. Maybe they lost a child to a miscarriage. It hurt, made them sad, but it wasn’t crippling. They hadn’t told family yet that she was pregnant again.
“They want some counseling. Maybe they were trying to decide if they would try for another child, or adopt, and the decision was making the marriage a bit rocky, they wanted some help sorting matters out. But two years? It’s either a lot of small things or the issue has some size to it. Friends aren’t seeing problems in the marriage, neither Scott nor Susan are talking about troubles, neither expresses a worry about Joe. But these two are keeping Wednesday in Decatur on their schedule and hiding the fact they are both going over there.”
“Why do they take Joe along with them to Decatur if they’re the ones getting counseling?” Gabriel asked as he turned the laptop back to her. “Where is he during those hours? For two years, Joe doesn’t say anything about his parents seeing a therapist every week? That doesn’t fit any kid I know. A kid has a secret, eventually he has to tell at least one of his friends.”
Evie reached for the sweet-tarts roll, took one, gave the last to Gabriel. “I think Joe’s there at the office with them. Maybe they didn’t feel comfortable leaving a then-nine-year-old with friends, didn’t want to explain where they were going or why.” Evie pulled another folder out of the stack, thumbed through the photos inside, slid several over to him. “From the photos of his room, Joe had several well-thumbed books about how to play and win DDM. It’s a multiplayer online video game that charges users by the hour, the kind a young boy would relish playing. In one of the boy’s notebooks, there are pages diagramming levels and moves and ideas for how to proceed. But he doesn’t have the computer hardware to run the video-intense game, and there are no charges on his parents’ credit cards for game time. He’s playing the game somewhere. I think he’s playing it at the doctor’s office.”
“Interesting . . .” Gabriel said.
“Yeah. I think the kid was getting to play video games for two hours if he would keep his mouth shut about what the family was doing on Wednesday nights. A decent trade-off. If asked, say you were practicing baseball. Some weeks, one or the other parent might actually take him to that coaching session. Other weeks he’s at the doctor’s office playing video games while the parents talk with the doctor.”
“All right, we need to talk with this doctor,” Gabriel decided. “And I need to find out if anyone around the sheriff’s office had any suspicion this was going on. I sure didn’t. But others worked with him more closely.”
Evie nodded. “I’ve already called the doctor. We’re on his schedule for Wednesday lunch, the first decent-length interval he had open. I don’t want a ten-minute ‘I can’t say anything because of client privilege’ round robin with him. We need him to confirm the appointments were going on for that length of time and who in the family the sessions were with. It may tell us absolutely nothing about the crime, but if it tells us more about the family, that itself might point to something useful. What was it that caused them to begin going to counseling? I want to know that detail.”
Gabriel nodded. “This is big, Evie. We didn’t have this.” He leaned back, arms linked behind his neck as he looked over at her. “Nice job finding it.”
She appreciated the compliment but did her best to shrug it off. “If I can’t find something, I’m not looking hard enough. We see if and where this leads, then we decide how frustrated you should be at not having discovered it before.”
He looked from the crime wall back to her. “You’ve been searching for a day and you’re finding things. The cop in me is both impressed at that and bothered I didn’t have these results before. Seriously, thanks.” He nodded to the finance paperwork. “This will still be here tomorrow. It’s late. You need to get out of here and get some sleep. ”
“I know. Ann will be here in the morning. We’re going to put a pause on this one and shift over to the Dayton girl’s disappearance.”
“That won’t slow things down much. I’ve got names on my list to finish interviewing, and I want to talk with officers in the department about what you’ve found here. Wednesday lunch, you said, to interview the doctor?”
“Noon. For an hour.”
Gabriel smiled. “I’ll make sure it’s cleared on my schedule.”
“Let’s hope it’s worth the time.”
“It will be, one way or another.”
Evie got to her feet when Gabriel did. He was right—it was time to call it a day. She needed some downtime.
He locked up the building behind her, nodded to the security officer on his way over, and escorted her to the yellow convertible. “Drive careful, Evie.”
“Always do.” Evie settled in the driver’s seat. “I really like the car.”
Gabriel grinned. “I’m glad. It’s cold enough you should raise the roof tonight.”
“The heater is like a blast furnace. I’d put up the top, but what’s the fun in that?” She started the engine, lifted a hand in farewell, and headed back toward the house.
A good, productive day, she decided. She could feel this new lead had substance. It would tell them something, and hopefully that would point them in the right direction.
A few more days like this one and she’d be looking at solving the case. She smiled at the thought. She’d take it.