Threads of Suspicion

  Once the timeline was filled in with details pulled from police reports and witness statements, Evie settled back in a desk chair to study the information and unwrapped a roll of sweet-tarts. A bag of them had showed up at her home, gift-wrapped, with a Have fun on the task force note from Gabriel Thane. The sheriff of Carin County was a good friend who knew her well. She’d tossed the entire bag in her suitcase, figuring it might last the first week.

  Okay, Jenna. I’m looking for you now, and I’m going to dig in until I find you. What’s here to see? The items on the board showed a typical college student going about her life. Classes. Friends. Boyfriend.

  Jenna had gone out with a group of friends on that last Friday night, dinner first and then a concert. She had parted from the group just after 11 p.m. on the block where she lived. At 11:42, Jenna sent a text message to her mother—Back in apartment, received your message, will call you in the morning. After that . . . nothing. Jenna hadn’t been heard from or seen again.

  The missing-persons report had been filed on Monday afternoon. Jenna hadn’t been answering texts or calls, she missed church where she was a semi-regular, missed her classes on Monday morning, including a chemistry test worth twenty percent of the semester grade. The building manager had opened the apartment door for a worried friend, and her friend had then called the police. Jenna’s purse was there with her phone and keys. Her car was in its assigned parking spot. No sign of a struggle. Just no Jenna. . . .

  It was fairly typical for a missing-persons case landing on a detective’s desk. A few days of delay, friends and family getting worried, the realization they couldn’t locate her, so call the cops.

  On the surface, the case seemed straightforward. But it hadn’t been solved in the last nine years, so something was muddying what should have been an open-and-shut investigation and arrest.

  Evie reached over for a blank pad of paper, divided the page into two columns, and numbered the lines one through twenty. On the left side she wrote FACTS, on the right side THEORIES.

  Under FACTS, she listed:

  1. Good grades

  2. No history of problems with the law

  3. No history of excessive drinking

  4. Steady boyfriend

  5. No roommate

  6. Keys recovered in apartment

  7. Phone ditto

  8. Wallet ditto

  9. Car in her parking space

  10. No sign of struggle in apartment?

  Evie put a question mark on that last one because she’d want to study the apartment photos with a magnifying glass before affirming it.

  11. Last seen Friday night, 11 p.m., her block, walking to her apt building

  12. Last text sent, Friday, 11:42 p.m., to her mom

  13. Did not answer phone calls on Saturday

  14. Did not attend church on Sunday

  15. Did not appear in Monday classes

  16. Credit cards not used after Friday night

  17. Bank accounts not accessed after Friday night

  What had Jenna been wearing that Friday night? If it was a unique outfit, and those clothes were in the apartment, Jenna had been home long enough to change before whatever this was had happened.

  Evie scanned the reports. Friday’s attire: blue jeans, a red college sweatshirt, tennis shoes, maybe gray. If Jenna hadn’t had several close variations of that outfit in her closet, Evie would be surprised. Friends didn’t remember her wearing jewelry. That wasn’t helpful either.

  She would find more details in the police reports and witness statements as she got deeper into those thick files, but for now this looked like the opening set of operative facts.

  Under THEORIES, Evie started making another list. Her process was pretty simple: gather facts, speculate on possible theories, eliminate them with more facts, and eventually she’d find her answer.

  1. Killed or still alive?

  2. Missing by her own choice?

  3. Stranger in apartment, lying in wait?

  4. Robbery of apartment, she walked in on it?

  Evie lightly crossed off number two—Missing by her own choice, though it remained readable. What she knew about this college girl indicated that was unlikely.

  5. Boyfriend Steve Hamilton did something?

  6. Former boyfriend Spence Spinner did it?

  7. Abduction for ransom that went bad, with no ransom call made?

  8. Anyone out there who would want to cause Jenna’s family grief?

  She needed a deeper look at the family. Brighton College was a private school and tuition would be expensive, suggesting either numerous scholarships and grants or the parents had money. Evie made a note to research that topic. Cops would have looked at the boyfriends closely, but she’d take another look there too.

  9. If killed in her apartment, where did the body go? Hauled out when/how? Friday night? Saturday morning? Not a solitary sign of violent death?

  10. Killed in another apt in the building?

  11. Any other abductions, disappearances of women from this college?

  12. Someone else sent that last text, not Jenna?

  Evie stopped when she wrote down twelve, feeling an interesting tug. Maybe killed somewhere else and then someone takes her apartment keys, goes to the apartment, maybe to steal some cash (hard to know) or remove a connection that cops would otherwise find, photos on her phone or laptop, or to retrieve a gift given to Jenna. He (or she) sends text to her mother to misdirect when and where Jenna had been. I’m back at the apartment, sent at 11:42 p.m., only it’s not Jenna sending it. Evie circled number twelve. She’d learned through experience to find areas not yet explored, or only glanced at, and spend more time there. She thought the cops had probably not pursued this particular idea.

  13. Jenna was grabbed on the block before she reached her building, killed in some other building/apartment on the block? (But her keys were there—she would have had them with her . . . killer returned them?)

  Evie would need to know who had lived not only in Jenna’s building, but in every apartment in the neighborhood—a whole lot of data to dig up and a lot of backgrounds to look into. Evie felt hope begin to rise that this case could be solved. Cops already would have looked at guys living in the area, but had they really drilled down? Systematically, building by building, across that block and others nearby? She could dig in with the benefit of hindsight. There could be a record of something off about the person she was looking to find. Kill one girl, odds were good you had committed other crimes in the last nine years. Evie put a star beside that idea.

  What else? What other theories could fit the facts?

  14. A good student. Was she writing papers for other students to make extra money? Helping someone cheat, now wanting to stop? Or she’d said no to someone who asked for her help to cheat?

  15. She was a good student because she was the one cheating, buying papers and getting advance looks at tests from a TA?

  16. She saw something she wasn’t supposed to see and was killed to keep her from talking. A drug deal? A fight? What else happened that night in the area?

  Okay, now she was finding herself in the weeds. Evie put down her pen and read back through her lists. She’d add more in the coming days, but enough was here that she might already have brushed up against the answer to this case.

  Evie retrieved the photos cops had taken of the apartment and began to sort them out by area and room. She was interrupted by the front desk calling to say their lunch order had arrived. Evie walked down to get it, carried the sack to the conference room. “Mind if I join you?”

  David turned from his whiteboard, smiled, and pointed to the clear end of the conference table. “I’d welcome the company. I’ll be paused here in a minute.”

  It would be good to step away from Jenna for a bit. Evie divided the lunch order and pulled out a chair. Piles of folders filled the rest of the table, two laptops were open, and the PI’s phones were neatly lined up. She watched David writing more notes on the long whit
eboard, building his case overview. She started her lunch. “You’re not linear,” Evie remarked, intrigued by what he was doing. Client names, family members, neighbors, and friends all radiated out in various circle clusters.

  David paused to unwrap his sandwich, gestured to the board. “It’s people who interacted with him who can tell me his life story. And one of those people likely killed him. I’ll deal with the timeline when I’m ready to break the alibi that’s spun.”

  “You don’t think he could just be missing, that he took himself off the grid and disappeared for some reason?”

  David shook his head. “I find it easier to assume the worst. Then I ask the tougher questions.”

  “Interesting point.”

  He settled in a chair and opened a bag of chips. “You don’t make assumptions to narrow down a case?”

  “I run theories, play what-ifs, see how many different stories I can create out of the existing evidence. I try to simultaneously hold all of them as active possibilities as I explore for more facts.”

  “We have very different brains.”

  Evie laughed. “I’m often told I’m simply odd.”

  “Yours works. I’m just more . . . well, let’s just say I shake the box of people connections and wait for the answer to fall out.”

  She wrapped up the second half of her sandwich for later and opened her own bag of chips. “I’m going to learn a lot just by watching you work.”

  David smiled. “With this case, I’m glad I prefer this approach. My PI disappeared sometime between Thursday morning and the following Tuesday morning. Throw a dart at a map of Chicago and its suburbs to sort out where it happened.”

  “Ouch.”

  “I chose a black hole for a case,” David replied with good humor. “Saul didn’t have someone he would check in with regularly. He used an answering service instead of a secretary. He was in contact with family, but not in a predictable pattern. There’s no steady girlfriend in the picture that I have so far. By this time tomorrow I’m going to know just how deep a mystery I’ve got here. Even his car is missing.”

  “Your reputation will be well earned when you solve it.”

  “Or this will take a bite out of it. Solve your case quickly, so you can come and help me out. I’ll need it.”

  Evie laughed. “Ditto. Do you like hard cases?”

  “Sure. It gives me something more to pray about.”

  Evie wasn’t sure if David meant that literally, so she chose to let the comment pass for now. “I’ve seen enough paper with mine I’m ready to get out of here, go see the college and where my girl lived.” She pushed back her chair and picked up the remainder of her lunch. “I’ll be back by dark to join you for dinner. I want to hear the story of you and Maggie.”

  “By then I’ll have opened all these folders and be ready for a break,” David said. “Good hunting, Evie.”

  “You too, David.”

  Three

  Evie drove over to Brighton College, thinking about her case, trying to push what she did know toward possible answers.

  At this point, it didn’t feel like Jenna had chosen what happened. She didn’t seem like the type of woman to take herself off the grid, walk away from her life, disappear of her own choosing. Not with a good relationship with her mother and the years she’d already invested toward getting her degree.

  Jenna had no roommate, so scratch a personal collision of values—no college-style domestic violence, roommate doing away with roommate and successfully covering it up.

  Jenna might have walked into her apartment to find unexpected trouble waiting for her. No indications of struggle could have been patience on the killer’s part. Tucked in, lying in wait. Comes at Jenna when she’s vulnerable, maybe after she turned in for the night, maybe after she went to sleep? Yeah. Maybe.

  Someone hides for a couple of hours, though, they have to hide somewhere. Were there dead spaces in the apartment floor plan? Rarely used closets? She’d need to find out.

  Evie reached into the console tray for another sweet-tart. Jenna Greenhill should, could and would be found. A real-life puzzle made this a good workday.

  She drove onto the college campus shortly after two p.m., found a parking space near the quad. The open space of snowy ground was surrounded by buildings she assumed were devoted to various study disciplines—economics, chemistry, business, engineering, to guess a few. She picked up the backpack she preferred to a briefcase, locked the car. She could pass for an older student with the backpack, casual coat and boots, and that suited her for now. She’d look like a cop easily enough when that would better open doors.

  From the groups of students crossing the quad, college hadn’t changed much since she’d attended—clusters of young people heading to classes, trying to fit in a personal life around their studies. The couples stood out, for they were laughing, chatting with each other, and basically not paying attention to the rest of the world. What had changed were the smartphones and the messaging and scrolling through screens for information—looking at their cells, reading as they walked, tied into their slice of the world, defined by the music they liked, the style of news they preferred, and the people whose opinions they chose to follow.

  The missing Jenna had walked this quad many times. She would have blended into this mass of humanity, not stood out. Some of her fellow students would have known her, most would not. Professors, teaching assistants, classmates in lecture halls, study groups, the social world of a dorm, then the apartment building, the hangout for pizza and the favorite mall—maybe three hundred people at the outside would have been in Jenna’s circles? Forty or fifty people would know her well, another hundred would be casual acquaintances, another couple hundred would be able to place where they often saw her, the rest would be, “Oh yeah, the girl who disappeared, her photo looks familiar from the news.”

  Time had passed, but it wouldn’t be that hard to roll back to when Jenna had been here. If someone around campus had caused her harm, that person likely had bothered someone else as well, possibly gotten kicked out of the college. Evie would check at the provost office for discipline problems, everything the campus security had worked on for the three years on either side of Jenna’s disappearance. Cops would have pulled that information in the past, but it never hurt to get a fresh copy of the data.

  Evie checked the campus map and headed toward the admin. building, hoping her badge would clear the way to some cooperation. First rule out the personal—boyfriend or ex-boyfriend at the time—then dive into the fellow-student pool of possible candidates and start eliminating names. That she would be walking the path other cops had taken before didn’t bother her. She’d see facts in a different order, maybe make a connection they had missed.

  Someone knew who had done this. Find him or her through Jenna or through other things he or she had done and connect back to Jenna. It was just a matter of working the angles to get the right one to come into the light.

  It helped having the governor interested in what the task force was doing. It took only three referrals to get to the person who could make a decision about what she asked to see. She wouldn’t get everything she hoped for, but she would get enough to be useful.

  Satisfied with what she had put in motion, Evie strode across campus toward the apartment building where Jenna had lived. If she was lucky, the current resident didn’t have afternoon classes and would be home.

  “Jenna lived here? The student who disappeared years ago? This apartment?”

  Evie tucked her badge back into her pocket and pulled in a sigh. The girl might be in college, but Evie’s guess put her on the very young side of being a freshman. “The locks have been changed many times since then, security tightened with numerous cameras,” Evie reassured her. “This block has had very little crime in the last several years based on data I’ve seen. I’d only like to step inside, look around, if you don’t mind, get a sense of the floor plan of the apartment.”

  The girl named Heather bit her
lip, but nodded. “Yeah, okay,” and stepped back to let Evie enter.

  It was a typical college student’s small apartment, decorated by a young woman away from home for the first time, free to enjoy her own style and colors, but clinging to family and the familiar with photos and high school memorabilia on the walls.

  “This is supposed to be one of the safe neighborhoods since the sorority houses, the sports stadium, and the bars are on the other side of campus. It’s mostly premed majors and science types in this area.”

  “We’re not even sure Jenna disappeared from here or if she had gone out again that night,” Evie reassured. “She simply wasn’t home when friends came looking for her.”

  The apartment was narrower than Evie had realized from the photos. A living room area to the left led out to a small balcony, to the right a small galley kitchen with a narrow counter, a table that doubled as a desk across from the counter at a window, then a short hall to a bedroom and bath. A guest stepping into the apartment would either have to step into the living room or into the kitchen-study area.

  Evie noted where they were both standing. Heather had stepped into the kitchen entrance to let her enter the apartment. Jenna would have done the same if she asked someone to come in, automatically moving back into the kitchen between the counter and refrigerator to clear the doorway. It was a contained space, hard to escape from—you’d have to climb over the counter, and there wasn’t much within reach to slow someone down—throw a toaster, a coffeepot?

  “Is there a lot of street noise when you’re sitting at the table studying?” Evie asked Heather, wanting to get her talking.

  “If the balcony door is open, or the windows, it’s steady noise, but you learn to ignore it after a while.”

  “What about the other apartments? Do you hear their music? Hear doors close as they come and go?”