We got out of the car and looked at the dorm: two residential wings, three stories each, framed by a trim green lawn where five college students were throwing a frisbee. Rachel gazed at them, her arms crossed.
"Nostalgia?” I asked her.
“Acid flashbacks.” She slammed her door.
I’d asked if she wanted to come with me to central Illinois for a case, expecting her to laugh. Instead she was in the mood for a road trip, even for work. So we’d packed and driven three hours, arriving on campus with the midafternoon sun shining down through the clouds.
Inside, a student sat behind a desk with a textbook and a laptop in front of her. She glanced up, nervous at the sight of strangers the age of someone’s parents. “Yes?”
“We’re here to see April Brown. My name’s Tom Jurgen. This is my associate, Rachel Dunne.” I showed her my card.
Her eyes widened. Probably she’d never seen a real private detective’s card before. “Oh. Just a minute.” She picked up a phone.
Five minutes later April Brown came down an east wing staircase, looked around, and spotted us. She led us to a lounge where a TV was playing a Star Trek rerun—original series—and two students were huddled in a corner studying. Or pretending to study. Whatever.
We sat at a table. “Hi.” April had short blond hair and shy blue eyes. “It’s about Kayla, isn’t it?”
“Yes.” I gave her my card. “Tom Jurgen, and this is Rachel. Kayla’s grandparents hired us to look into her disappearance.”
April flinched. “I already talked to campus security. And the state police.” She was the last person to see Kayla before she’d vanished from campus.
“I know. We just have to start somewhere, and Kayla’s grandparents can’t travel.” Her grandfather was struggling with Alzheimer’s and her grandmother couldn’t leave him alone, and they were both in their 80s. Kayla’s parents had died in a car accident three years ago, and her grandparents were paying for college. And they were close to panic about Kayla.
Kayla Barth. 20 years old. Last seen at 9:30 six days ago on the campus of Rackham College in the middle of the Illinois prairie. No body found, no ripped clothing or bloodstains, no note, electronic or otherwise. Just gone.
“You saw her Wednesday night?” Rachel asked. She helps me with my cases. She’s psychic, but she also puts people more at ease than I do. Not that I’m especially intimidating, but sometimes people like to talk to a cute redhead with hazelnut eyes more than a 40-something guy with hair heading toward gray.
April nodded. “We had a Lit class. Southern American Lit. We’re reading Flannery O’Connor right now.” She made a face. “Anyway, like I said, we were just walking back after class. It was raining a little, not hard. We were just at the part where we go different ways—Kayla lives over in Hanley—when we saw this, this guy standing on the grass, next to a tree.” She shuddered.
“Who was it?” I asked.
She shook her head. “I don’t know. I didn’t see his face. He was wearing this long raincoat with a hood. It wasn’t a plastic raincoat, it was cloth, black, almost to his feet. I got the feeling he had a cane. He didn’t say anything. He just looked at us. I looked at Kayla, and we walked faster, and then we came to the split, and she went her way and I went mine.”
Kayla had never reached her dorm room.
“How tall was the man?” I stood up. “Taller than me?”
She looked me up and down. “No. A little shorter, an inch or two, I think. Thin. He looked kind of old. Older than you, I mean.”
“Could you show us where he was?”
April sighed. “Sure.”
The frisbee players had dispersed. Students in T-shirts walked by carrying backpacks, looking at their phones, chatting. The day was sunny and warm. I kept my jacket on, but Rachel tied hers around her shoulders.
April led us down one sidewalk, turned, and up another until we were a few hundred yards from a classroom building. “About right here. About.” She pointed. “That’s the tree. I’m pretty sure.”
Rachel and I walked over. Rachel crouched, reaching down to press her hand against the grass and soil. She closed her eyes.
“Anything?”
She stood and shook her head. “It’s been too long.”
April was watching us, curious. “I’m psychic,” Rachel said. She giggled, as if she didn’t believe her, and then we turned to head back to the dorm.
In the lounge we sat down again, and she gave me a list of Kayla’s friends—all she could think of—as well as the prof of the Southern American Lit class. We thanked her, and she nodded and headed quickly for the staircase, looking relieved that we were finished with her.
“Cute,” Rachel said, watching her climb the stairs.
I didn’t risk a reply that would get me punched. We left the dorm.
Out in the parking lot, two campus security officers in uniforms were waiting at our car. They wore beige shirts with shoulder patches, and thick belts holding radios and cuffs and spray and whatever else they needed to keep unruly college students in line. Their own patrol car blocked us.
I’d been expecting this. Maybe I should have checked in first. “Can I help you?” I tried to offer a friendly smile.
A young woman, blond, stepped forward. “You have business here?” Her voice was firm, not hostile, but it hinted at trouble if I gave the wrong answer.
I slowly handed over my card. “Tom Jurgen. This is my associate, Rachel Dunne. We’ve been hired by Kayla Barth’s grandparents to look into her disappearance.”
She looked at the card and passed it to her partner, a tall Black man. “You’d better come over to see the chief,” she said. “Follow us.”
“Right behind you.” Rachel and I got in and buckled up.
“That was quick.” Rachel leaned back in her seat.
“Maybe the kid at the front desk.” I started up and waved to the cops. “Let’s see what they say.”
The head of campus security, Larry Stogue, was in his 60s, with thick shoulders, sparse white hair, and a grizzled chin. He peered at my card through horn rimmed glasses, then looked up at Rachel and me.
“We’ve been investigating the Kayla Barth case thoroughly.” He crossed his arms. “There’s no need for anybody from outside. We have all the resources necessary right here.”
And they hadn’t found her in almost a week. But I didn’t say that. “Her grandparents just want to make sure that everything is covered. We don’t want to interfere. Just ask some questions.”
“What kind of questions?” His shoulders were taut.
“Where she went, who saw her, what anybody noticed the night she disappeared.” I kept my tone calm and professional. “Kayla’s grandparents have a right to know as much as possible about what happened.”
“This college—and my department—takes every student’s safety very seriously.” Stogue lurched forward, his chair creaking. “We aren’t going to be a scapegoat. If that’s why you’re here—”
The college was worried about a lawsuit. Of course. I held up a hand. “Like I said, just asking questions. So far we’ve only talked to one person.”
“Who’s that? What’d they tell you?”
“April Brown. Friend of Kayla’s. She told us about seeing a man standing in the rain holding a cane the night Kayla disappeared.”
Stogue nodded, shifting in his chair. “Nothing new there.”
“Have you found him?”
“We are pursuing every viable lead. Believe me, both of you.” Stogue frowned at Rachel. “Do you speak? Or just sit there?”
She smiled. “When I’ve got a good question I’ll ask.”
“Fine.” He folded his hands on the desk. “We’re done for now. I want you to stay in touch with me. And let us know as soon as you’re finished here.” He looked at me without smiling.
Out at the car Rachel tapped my hand. “When you said ‘cane’? He reacted. I felt it.”
Having a psychic girlfriend comes in handy sometimes. “Felt what?”
“Scared. A little angry. Like something we aren’t supposed to know, maybe. One of those things cops hold back in case someone confesses?”
“Could be.” I opened the door. “Let’s split up. Drop me at Kayla’s dorm. I’ll talk to the roommate and some of her friends.”
“What about me, kemo sabe?” She crossed her arms.
“Go find the student newspaper. It’s a pretty big campus, they probably have a good one. Ask about Kayla. And anything else that sounds interesting.”
She cocked her head. “Do I flirt a little?”
“Just a little. Unless it’s really good information.”
She grinned. “Gotcha.”
Kayla’s roommate Julie was irritated when I knocked at her door. They were just roommates, she told me, not close friends, although they got along well enough.
“She was okay.” Short, with skinny arms, Julie avoided looking at me as she folded underwear on her bed. “She was quiet when I needed it. Didn’t mess with my stuff. She didn’t have boyfriends around. Or girlfriends. Not that she was gay or anything, as far as I know.” She held up a pair of pink panties as if deciding whether to throw them away. I tried not to look too closely.
“Did she say anything that day? Before she disappeared?”
She put the panties in the pile. “She had a big paper to write about somebody, some writer. And she forgot her laptop and came back for it. That’s it, I think.”
“When she didn’t come back that night—”
“I didn’t think about it, okay?” She straightened up to glare at me. “Everything thinks I should have called security right away! She didn’t always come home! She just—” Julie stopped and took a breath. “Like I said, she didn’t have boyfriends or hookups, but sometimes she stayed with friends to study. Or maybe get high. I don’t know. She just didn’t always come back, or she came back so late I don’t know what time she came in. It’s not my fault!” She picked up another piece of underwear. “I’m sick of people thinking it’s all my fault.”
“It’s not your fault,” I agreed. “You did your best.”
“I should have called sooner.” She sighed and sank down on her bed. “I waited until the next day, when she didn’t come back again. I should have called sooner.”
“Not your fault,” I said again.
After a moment she stood up and opened a drawer to put her underwear away. “Is that it?”
“Did Kayla notice anything around campus? Anybody? Something that made her nervous? Something unusual?”
Julie stuffed her panties into the drawer. “I don’t think so. We didn’t usually talk about stuff like that. I did see . . .” She hesitated. “There was a guy hanging around outside the library a couple of nights before—before.”
“What kind of guy?”
“I didn’t look at him. He was just standing there, and I was going to Josh’s room—he’s not my boyfriend, he’s just a friend—and I was walking past the library and there was some guy standing next to a tree. In the shadows. I thought he had an umbrella or something, which was weird because it wasn’t raining. I just looked away right when I saw him, and I walked faster.”
“Did you tell the police?”
Julie shook her head. “I didn’t think about it. They didn’t ask. Should I?”
“Maybe.” I gave her my card. “If you think of anything else, could you let me know? Any time.”
“S-sure.” She looked at the card. “Okay. Is that it? I’ve got studying—”
“When you said ‘umbrella,’ could it have been a cane?”
She thought for a moment. “Maybe? I didn’t really look that hard.”
“All right. Thank you for your help.” I left as she started sorting through her bras.
I headed over to a classroom building to track down Kayla’s Lit professor. She was polite, worried, and tried to be helpful, but she didn’t know anything about Kayla’s disappearance or the man with the cane. “Sorry.”
My next stop was a sorority house where Kayla had some friends. It was a big house with a wide porch, flowers and plants everywhere. No front desk, but I had to press a buzzer to get in. A big girl in sweats came to the door and looked me and my card over skeptically, but she let me in and told me to wait in the lounge.
As I was waiting, my phone buzzed. A text from Rachel: Where are you?
Sorority house. Find anything?
Wait there.
While I waited, one of Kayla’s friends came down. Liza Bowen was distraught, tugging at her long black hair as she talked, shifting in her seat with each question. She had lunch with Kayla the day she vanished, but didn’t have any idea what had happened to her—all she could think about was maniacs in slasher movies wielding boat hooks and chainsaws. But everyone liked Kayla. She didn’t have any creepy guys following her around, no jealous boyfriends, no disappointed would-be boyfriends, no crushes. She studied, partied a little, played volleyball, and didn’t do drugs. Maybe a little weed.
I was waiting for another friend when Rachel showed up, waving at me from the porch to come out.
We sat on a swinging bench. “What’d you find out?”
She had notes on her phone. “Seven years ago four students disappeared in one semester. All females. They were eventually found in a cabin outside of campus.”
Not good. “Dead?”
“Yes.” She grimaced. “He chained them up and kept them half starving, feeding them drugs to keep them under control until they died. Most of them.”
“Most?”
“One of them was still alive, chained up with the others. She went insane from the drugs and the torture. That’s the story, anyway. Sounds like a bad slasher movie.”
“Who did it?”
She looked at her phone notes. “A professor named Garner, Steven Garner. Anthropology. The cops shot him when they found the cabin. And get this—” She slid over to show me her phone. “He walked with a cane.”
The image showed a middle-aged man in jeans and a Rackham sweatshirt, leaning on a cane.
“So is he still alive?”
“Uh-uh. They shot him dead.”
I took her phone to scroll through her notes. “Where’d you get this?”
“Student newspaper, like you said. Most of them weren’t there back then, but a cute guy who works at the college hangs around to help them out with their computers.”
Cute? “How cute?”
“Very. I think he’s gay. But cute.”
My relief didn’t last very long. “So the obvious suspect is dead?”
“That hasn’t stopped us before.” She took her phone back.
She was right. My cases do tend to veer toward the supernatural more often than I’d like. Vampires, ghosts, the occasional demon—I can’t seem to avoid them.
I nudged my foot, swinging the bench back and forth. “But one of the victims was still alive. That means Kayla might still be alive.”
“If this is connected, yeah. Maybe. Stop that, it’s making me nauseous.”
I stopped. “Is the cabin still there?”
“Yeah. I’ve already got it programmed into my GPS.”
“Smart as well as sexy.” I stopped the glider and squeezed her hand. “Let’s go.”
“No more sorority girls to question?” She stood up and peered through the window. “Maybe I’m the one who should be worried.”
I laughed. “I never had much luck with college girls. Even when I was in college.”
“Good thing you met me.” She grinned. “Let’s go check out the cabin.”
No comments:
Post a Comment