Murder Road (21 page)

We took Robbie’s car, because the metallic smell in Eddie’s Pontiac was so bad we couldn’t bear it. I took the first hour driving while Eddie slept in the passenger seat. Then we switched. When I woke up, we were more than halfway to Midland. Eddie was silent in the driver’s seat, his jaw set.

“What’s the matter?” I asked him.

He tapped one finger to the rearview mirror. “See for yourself.”

I leaned to look in my side mirror. Driving behind us, not bothering to hide, was a police cruiser. There was a single driver inside, a cop in uniform. Officer Kal Syed.

“Are you
kidding
me?” I said.

“I spotted him right after you fell asleep. He must have been farther back before, but he’s been following us all the way from Coldlake Falls.”

“Does he have nothing better to do?” I rolled down my window, letting the summer wind blow into the car, and adjusted my mirror. Kal didn’t move, but he would clearly be able to see my hand. I gave him the finger.

Beside me, Eddie cracked a reluctant smile, the first one I’d seen in a long time.

I let my rude gesture linger for a moment, just so that Kal would get the message. Then I brought my hand back into the car and rolled my window up. “Do we just let him follow us?”

“I don’t see why not. We’re not doing anything wrong. If he wants to waste his time, we may as well let him.”

“What is he thinking?” I looked in the rearview mirror again. “Maybe he thinks we’ll kill a hitchhiker right here on this road while he watches. Shouldn’t he be questioning Max Shandler about Rhonda Jean? Looking for evidence? Arresting drunk kids? Doing some kind of police work?”

“I don’t know,” Eddie said. “Where is Max Shandler? Did he confess? Are they processing the evidence they found? If they’re doing all of that, why is he following us? I’m tired of having questions. Maybe we’ll finally get some answers of our own.”

“Maybe Detective Quentin sent him,” I said.

The silence in the car grew heavy, and then Eddie said, “April, I need to know. How much of what you told me was a lie?”

He meant about my mother, about the story I’d given him. I owed him the truth.

“I was asleep,” I said. “My mother woke me up and told me we had to run, just like I told you. I packed my things, just like I told you. But the house was too quiet, and Mom had just had a shower.
I wondered why, if it was such an emergency, she had taken the time to have a shower before getting out of the house.”

Eddie was quiet, driving and listening. I glanced at Kal in the rearview mirror.

“We left in the dark, and their bedroom door was closed.” I made myself say the rest, made the words keep coming. I owed Eddie this. “Mom only told me it was over, but that we had to run or we’d be in trouble. She was jumpy and her hands were shaking. She smoked one cigarette after another. As we drove away, I saw the flames through the windows. She’d set the fire right before waking me. It was only later that I wondered how much blood there had been if she felt the need to take a shower. It must have been a lot.”

“Jesus,” Eddie said softly.

“I didn’t let myself think about it for a long time,” I admitted. “I didn’t ask questions. I probably should have, but I was twelve. She was all I had. We moved around like we were scared Dad would find us—changed identities, changed states, changed jobs. That was the story—that we didn’t want Dad to find us. That was the story I told myself, at least for the first few years. After a while, I admitted to myself that I wasn’t scared of Dad tracking us down, and I never had been. It was the police we were running from. Because Dad had been dead since that first night.”

“Did you ever talk about it with her?” Eddie asked.

“No, and she never confessed to me. She never confessed any of it, because the more she told me, the more I could tell the police if I got picked up. Maybe I would have forced it at some point, but when I was eighteen I came home and she was gone. I knew the
police had caught up with her, that she’d been arrested, and I knew what she’d been arrested for. Part of me always knew. From the moment I saw her damp hair and her fresh clothes, I knew. So I packed my things and ran again.”

There was a long moment of silence. Behind us, Kal Syed followed steadily, never out of patience.

“You could have told me,” Eddie said.

I blinked back the tears that lurked deep behind my eyes. “I thought you would be disgusted. I thought you would leave. I was planning to tell you—honestly I was. I had it all planned out. Then you proposed before I could get my nerve up, and I said yes. And it felt like it was too late. I couldn’t make the sacrifice. I couldn’t lose you anymore.”

“You could have told me,” he said again, his voice rough. He was torn. “It wasn’t your fault, what happened. I would have understood.”

Maybe. Maybe not. Maybe he didn’t understand, even now. I rubbed a hand over my face, thinking of all the mistakes stretching back through my life, a long chain of them. “You’re the opposite of my mother,” I said. “She was all I had for a long time, and it was killing me.
She
was killing me. I was becoming something I didn’t want to be. You’re everything she’s not. I think that’s why I fell for you so fast. What would I do if I told you and you hated me?”

Eddie frowned, his eyes still on the road ahead. “That visit from Quentin was deliberate. Showing up at Rose’s, dropping information on us. He was trying to rattle us. Maybe there’s a reason Max Shandler couldn’t have killed Katharine O’Connor. He’s solved Rhonda Jean’s murder, or at least it looks like it, but when it comes to the others, he has nothing except us.”

There was no discussion of telling Quentin the truth, of what I’d seen on Atticus Line last night. We had nothing concrete to tell. If the Snell sisters found Trish, would she even remember what had happened? If she remembered, would she confess to trying to kill me? It would be my word against hers, and if it came to that, which one of us was untrustworthy, a liar, and possibly crazy?

Me. Only me.

Even if Quentin bought my story, I didn’t want Trish to get in trouble. I hadn’t meant to involve her, or anyone. She’d had no choice in what she’d done. She was innocent. It was strange to say that about someone who had tried to smash in your skull with a tire iron, but it was true.

“So he was trying to rattle us,” I said. “Trying to turn us against each other.”

“Trying,” Eddie said grimly.

I turned and looked at him, focusing on every line of his body. Trying to read his thoughts. If I could put my hands on him right now, I would know everything, as if he telegraphed his feelings to me through his skin, through my palms. As if he always had.

“Is it working?” I asked him. Because I was done going along with things, not asking questions. I needed to know.

“April.” Eddie reached to my lap and took my hand. He raised it to his lips and kissed the back of it, like he had that first night. Then he let me go. “I don’t hate you,” he said roughly.

I couldn’t speak. I didn’t know why I felt like crying.

A sign for a gas station appeared ahead, and Eddie switched on his signal. “We’re almost out of gas,” he said. “Let’s see what Kal has to say.”

He was waiting for us when we came out of the gas station kiosk after we paid for our gas. The police cruiser was parked at the edge of the lot, away from the pumps, and Officer Syed was leaning on Robbie’s car in full uniform, his arms crossed. The other people at the pumps gave him wary looks and a wide berth.

Eddie and I had both put our sunglasses on, and I felt the heat wafting off the sunbaked pavement as we walked toward the car. “Are you taking a day trip?” Eddie asked Kal.

Kal watched us approach, his expression stoic. He wasn’t wearing sunglasses, and I could see his handsome brown eyes perfectly clearly. “Just doing my job,” he replied.

“Your job is to follow us around?” I asked.

He didn’t answer that. “According to my information, you two live in Ann Arbor. Yet you’re not going in the direction of Ann Arbor. Can you tell me where you’re going?”

“Midland,” Eddie said. There was no point not telling Kal; he would know soon enough if he followed us.

“Okay. And what is so important in Midland?”

Eddie’s tone was matter-of-fact. “We’re looking for the Lost Girl. We have a lead.”

Kal’s expression went slack with shock. “What are you talking about? That case from ’76? The unidentified girl?”

Unidentified girl
. I thought of all the times I’d seen her—in the back of Max Shandler’s truck; screaming for help at our passenger window, pulling my husband across the front seat; in the back seat of Trish’s car. I might not be sure of her name yet, but she didn’t feel unidentified to me.

“We have some information,” Eddie said. “We’re checking it out.”

“You have information, and you didn’t pass it to the police?” Kal looked from Eddie to me and back. “You didn’t pass it to me?” When we didn’t answer, he said, “Where did you come across this so-called information?”

The Snell sisters had gone to lengths to stay secret, so I said, “We’re not going to tell you that.”

Kal’s expression turned grim. “And what is this tip?”

“We’re not going to tell you that, either.” Eddie was firm. “You can follow us and waste your time if you want. Can we get back into our car now?”

Kal looked between us again and shook his head. “I don’t get it. I thought for sure that when I picked you two up this morning, I’d see you go home. That’s what I was doing—making sure you went back to Ann Arbor, so I could tell my superiors that you were gone for good. You could walk away from this mess if you wanted, and we wouldn’t be able to stop you. Both of you know that. So why? Why are you doing this instead of going back to your lives? What are you looking for?”

“We got a visit from Quentin and Beam last night,” Eddie said. “Quentin has spent a lot of time and energy looking into both me and my wife. He’s even had the phone line from Rose’s place monitored somehow. He’s gone to a lot of trouble. Why do you think that is?”

Kal didn’t answer. He looked frustrated.

“I was on leave from Fort Custer the day Katharine O’Connor was killed,” Eddie went on. “From what I remember, I checked into a cheap hotel, ordered room service, watched TV, and slept for three days because I didn’t want to go home to my parents. It’s pathetic, but it’s true. Quentin thinks that makes me a murder
suspect. I know I didn’t murder any of those people, and neither did my wife.”

“Because you know who did?” Kal asked. “Or you think you do. You think you’ve solved these cases that have been happening for nineteen years.” He sighed. “Please don’t tell me you think Quentin is a serial killer. We’ve had that tip called in more than once, always anonymous. It sounds like a great theory if you’re an armchair detective, but I can assure you, it’s bullshit.”

“If we thought Quentin was the killer, why would we go to Midland?” I asked.

Kal looked frustrated again. “Goddamn it. You’re not going to tell me anything, are you?”

“No,” Eddie replied.

“And you’re not going to turn around, or change course for Ann Arbor.”

“No,” I said.

Kal pressed his lips together. Then he moved away from our car. “Fine. I guess I’ll see you in Midland.”

Kal was as good as his word. As Eddie and I drove through Midland, looking for the address Beatrice Snell had left us, he followed politely in his cruiser. Eddie shook his head as I studied the map in my lap.

“Turn left up here,” I said.

“What should we do with him?” Eddie asked.

“I don’t know,” I admitted. “Maybe it isn’t the worst thing in the world to have a little help.”

“He’ll never believe us.”

“Then we don’t tell him everything.” I followed our progress on the map. “We tell him the less crazy parts.”

“Which parts are those?” Eddie’s tone was dry. “I can’t decide.”

“The house is on this street. Number forty-seven. Just up there.”

We were pulling up to a town house complex, a string of small homes attached by the garages. The complex wasn’t new, and the
small yards were weedy, with bikes and kids’ toys abandoned next to the porches. An old man smoking a cigarette on his porch watched us as we drove by.

Eddie drove past John Haller’s house and parked farther down the street, next to the curb. Kal Syed’s cruiser parked behind us. I glanced in the rearview mirror and saw the old man promptly stub out his half-smoked cigarette and disappear into his house.

“Haller isn’t going to talk to us,” I said. “Not with a cruiser here. He probably won’t even answer the door.”

Eddie sighed.

Kal got out of his car and walked up to my window, which I rolled down. “Hello, Officer,” I said with one of my fake smiles. “Fancy meeting you here.”

“I’m not leaving,” Kal said. “Are you going to tell me what you’re up to? I can sit here all day.”

I pushed my sunglasses up on my head and took the folded photocopy of the missing person’s report from my purse. I handed it through the window to Kal.

He unfolded it, reading in silence for a minute. “Goddamn it. How the hell did you get this?”

“Check the date,” Eddie said.

“I know, Mr. Carter. I know. A year and a half after we found the body in Coldlake Falls. So there wasn’t a missing person’s report at the time.”

“There’s more,” Eddie said. He took a folded paper from his pocket and handed it over. It was the copy of the classified ad Carla Moyer had placed in 1977.

Kal read that, too. “Do you have any leads on this Carla Moyer?”

“Already talked to her,” Eddie said. “She’s in the phone book.”

“I hate you both.” Kal sighed. “You make me look bad. Were you planning on knocking on John Haller’s door and asking questions? Because I assure you, I’m not going to let you do it. From this point on, I’ll ask the questions.”

“Be our guest,” I said. “We’ll wait right here.”

Kal ducked and looked in my window at us. “You think this is going to get me closer to finding a serial killer? Or do we even have a serial killer? Do you want to give me a clue?”

“From this point on, the clues are your problem,” Eddie said.

“I hate you both. Please turn around and go back to Coldlake Falls now. Or better yet, go home to Ann Arbor.”

“No,” I said.

Without another word, Kal stood and crossed the street to John Haller’s door. We watched him knock, then knock again. The door opened and a man with gray hair in a ponytail opened it. He wore old sweatpants and a T-shirt, flip-flops on his feet. He gave Kal a hostile stare as the policeman spoke, and then his expression changed. He said something back to Kal, an argument of some kind, and when Kal persisted, he stood back and let Kal in.

Twenty minutes later, Kal emerged from the house, putting his hat back on his head. He strode across the street to our car. “John Haller answered all of my questions,” he said. “His daughter, Shannon, left home in 1976, wanting to travel and find herself. She was an addict and an alcoholic with mental problems. He never saw her again. He waited over a year for her to come home, and then he filed a missing person’s report. Nothing ever came of it.”

“Can Shannon be connected to the unidentified body you found?” Eddie asked.

Kal sighed. “The dental records would do it, if we still have them. We’d have to track down Shannon Haller’s dentist and find out if he still has nineteen-year-old records. If that’s a dead end, I’ll check if any blood or tissue samples were taken from the body and kept all this time. If not, the unidentified girl was buried in one of the graveyards in Coldlake Falls. We’d have to exhume her, which takes a ruling by a judge and a lot of money. And even if we do have samples saved from the postmortem, we’d have to run DNA tests, which take a lot of time and cost a lot of money. We’d also have to run DNA from John Haller to match the results, if he even agrees to give a sample. All of this is above my pay grade. But I’ll try.” He looked at us. “This is in the right hands now, and there’s nothing else the two of you can do. You can turn around and go back to Coldlake Falls now.”

I glanced at Eddie. He had turned to look at John Haller’s house, which was quiet. He seemed to be deep in thought, so I turned back to Kal.

Our eyes met. We were thinking the same thing: Even if the body could be proven to be Shannon’s, her murder still wasn’t solved. Max Shandler was a child when Shannon was killed. I knew now—or had an idea—how the others had been murdered, if not who the killers were. But who killed Shannon?

“You could help, you know.” Kal’s voice was low. “If you tell me what you know, or what you think you know. We’re no further ahead than we were before—you know that. You could change that situation.”

Right. Go into the Coldlake Falls police station again? Sit in that little room with Quentin and Beam and tell them what happened to me last night? Tell them that their serial killer was a literal ghost? That wouldn’t help anyone, least of all me.

“I can’t help you,” I told Kal, because I owed him something that wasn’t a lie.

His brows drew down in concern. “Is someone threatening you?”

What a loaded question that was. “In a way,” I said. Shannon’s ghost was definitely threatening me.

He tried not to look defeated. “I have to go back,” he said. “I’ll write a report and start the process of identifying her the best I can. That poor man lost his daughter. I ask that you please don’t bother him.”

“Of course we won’t,” I said.

Kal gave a reluctant nod, and then he got back into his cruiser, started it, and drove away.

Eddie was still staring at the house, unmoving.

“Eddie?” I asked. We’d been sitting in this hot, still car for too long. Sweat was soaking my back.

“Just wait.” Eddie’s voice was calm, detached. He didn’t move.

I opened my mouth to say something else but stopped. For once, I agreed with Kal—we should go back to Coldlake Falls. I wanted to see if the Snell girls had found Trish. I wanted to know if she was okay, if she remembered last night. I wanted to know if there was a way to find out how the case against Max Shandler was progressing.

But Eddie was so still, it was scaring me. He was watching for
something, for someone. For a second I pictured him just like this in the desert somewhere, waiting for the enemy, and despite the heat in the car, I shivered.

A minute ticked by, then another. The front door of John Haller’s house opened and he came out. Without looking left or right, he got in his car and pulled out of the driveway, heading in the opposite direction from Kal.

“Perfect,” Eddie said, his voice still as detached as a robot’s. “Now.”

“Now what?” I asked.

“Now we go in.”

He couldn’t be serious. “To the house? What are you talking about?”

Eddie turned and looked at me. “She lived in that house, April. Grew up there, maybe. Had a bedroom there. He probably still has her belongings, old photos. There’s still a lot more to find.”

“That’s breaking and entering!” I hissed. “Eddie, we’re done here. We need to leave.”

But he didn’t hear the end of my sentence. He was already out of the car, moving swiftly across the street toward the house. I had no choice but to get out and run after him.

He was fast—army fast. He moved down the attached row of houses with silent speed, his feet making barely a sound on the pavement. Around the corner was a gate opening to the narrow lane behind the houses’ backyards. As if he’d been here a dozen times, Eddie unlatched the gate and slipped through.

I followed, trying to keep pace. I had never seen Eddie move like this, as if he was on a mission. He knew exactly what he was doing.

We passed the back gates of several houses, and Eddie stopped at one, pressing his hand to it. It was locked from the inside. He gripped the top of the wooden fence, hoisted himself over, and dropped down. A second later, the gate opened for me as he unlocked it.

“Eddie, stop,” I tried to whisper, but he was already gone.

The screen door creaked as Eddie opened it, trying the handle of the back door. Locked. He moved to the nearest window, which looked into the kitchen. He ran his hands over the edges of the screen, feeling with his fingertips. He popped the screen off and dropped it to the ground, leaning it against the house. He fiddled with a latch in a way I couldn’t see, lifted the window, and disappeared inside.

The whole operation had taken seconds.

My heart was pounding, and cold sweat had replaced the heat from the car. This was wrong, all wrong. We weren’t supposed to be here. Eddie wasn’t a thief; I had never seen him act like this. I hadn’t thought he knew how to break into houses. Why was he so determined to break into this one? What did he think he was going to find?

I hesitated, glancing around. What if a neighbor saw us from a window? The police could be here in minutes. I walked to the window and pulled myself over the sill, swinging my feet down to the kitchen floor inside.

The house was dim and quiet. It was small, untidy, run-down—the house of a man who lives alone as he grows older, year after year. Empty beer bottles lined the kitchen counter, and my sneakers touched something sticky on the yellowed linoleum floor.

I couldn’t see anything unusual. There were auto magazines
on the kitchen table, an ashtray with cigarettes stubbed out. An empty can of baked beans in the sink. John Haller had no wife, no photos on the fridge. His daughter had left long ago, and Carla had said that Shannon’s mother was dead.

Eddie had moved to the front room, where he was looking at a shelf of dusty old books. He bypassed the sparsely filled liquor cabinet and opened a cabinet door, peering in.

“Eddie, we need to leave,” I said.

“This will be fast.” He was still peering into the darkness of the cabinet. “We’ll just find Shannon’s things and go.”

“She left years ago. How do you know he still has her things?”

“Where else would they be?” He closed the cupboard and looked around the living room. “Nothing here, I think. Probably upstairs.”

“Eddie!” I tried to keep my voice low in case the neighbors could hear through the walls. But what could I do? He was already moving up the narrow stairs, taking them two at a time.

I looked around the living room, debating whether to follow him. There were no photos in here, either, no framed family pictures on the end tables or above the TV.

My eye caught on something—a cabinet below the TV, the door partly open. Inside I could see the thick pages of a photo album.

I crouched down, sliding the door open. The album had been pulled to the front of the cabinet, as if it had been taken out and carelessly put away. Despite the urge to run, I opened it.

There were loose photos inside the album, along with some stuck to the pages and covered with cling film. I picked up the top loose photo and looked at it.

The photo was of two young women of maybe twenty, their arms around each other’s shoulders. I immediately recognized Carla Moyer, though her hair was cropped just below her ears in the photo and her face was round, babyish, carefree.

The other girl had brown hair, worn past her shoulders. She was smiling widely at the camera, grinning in the sunshine, but I immediately went cold.

It was the Lost Girl. It was Shannon Haller.

I didn’t need Kal Syed’s evidence—dental records, DNA, blood tests. I already knew that the body on Atticus Line was Shannon’s because I’d seen her last night in Trish’s rearview mirror.

The album had been moved recently because Kal had just been here, talking to John Haller. He had probably asked him for a photo of Shannon, and John had picked one from this pile. Then he’d hastily put the album back.

I picked up the second photo. Shannon carried a small boy on her hip. She was pointing to the camera, trying to get him to smile at the lens. She wore a ringer tee, and she was too thin, her cheekbones sharper than in the other picture, faint shadows under her eyes. The boy had been caught as he turned his face away from the camera, and his features were blurred. He looked about four or five years old.

I stared at the picture for too long. I’d thought Shannon had a baby when she disappeared, not a little boy.
Shannon had a baby she wanted to dry out for
, Carla had said. But she hadn’t specified when that was, what year. I’d just assumed she was talking about the year Shannon had disappeared, and so had Eddie.
The math doesn’t add up
, Eddie had said
. Shannon had a baby, not an eight-year-old in 1976. That was some other kid. Not me.