One Scream Away (23 page)

“Don’t underestimate him,” whispered Waite, giving the old man a wink. “He’ll chew you up and spit you out.”

Neil smiled. Sure enough, the old sheriff’s eyes were sharp as tacks. “Sheriff Goodwin,” Neil said and shook his hand. He was surprised at the strength in it.

“You’re FBI?” Goodwin asked but didn’t wait for an answer. “You look like fucking FBI.”

“Not anymore, sir,” Neil said, “but I’m consulting with the task force. This is Lieutenant Rick Sacowicz, Arlington PD.” Greetings done. “You were working when Chevy Bankes was a kid?”

“His little sister disappeared on October 14, 1991. I got the call at two-thirty. It was a Saturday. I was cleaning up my yard, getting ready for a reception the next week for my daughter’s wedding.”

Neil glanced at Rick, then at Waite, who smiled: “Told ya.”

“What can you tell us about Chevy?” Neil asked.

“I can tell you he was from a fucking freaky family.”

“We just stopped by the house. Looked pretty normal to me.”

“That’s the point. Everything looked fine. A single mom taking care of her son and baby girl, and also her father for a while. Then the girl disappears one day while Chevy has her out in the woods. Mom whispers in my ear that she thinks Chevy hurt the baby; Chevy keeps saying his mother hated Jenny.”

“They pointed the finger at each other?” Neil asked.

“Like I said, freaky.”

“What about the grandfather?” Rick asked.

Goodwin shook his head. “He was a mean old bastard for as long as even I can remember. No surprise he scared Chevy’s father off, and any other boy who looked at Peggy twice.” He paused, his eyes searching for a memory. “You know, there was some talk Peggy had been pregnant once before, that Chevy was her second baby.”

Neil frowned. That was something they hadn’t heard yet.

“It was just a rumor. The Bankeses were pretty private, reclusive almost. Rumors went around.”

A third Bankes child, older than Chevy. The wisp of a thought that had flown through Neil’s mind while looking at the family Bible floated back into range:
That’s
what was usually on the first page of family Bibles. Dates of births and deaths.

Huh.

“At any rate,” Goodwin continued, getting back to Rick’s question, “the old man was sick a long time, cancer I guess, and died just after Jenny was born. Peggy went a little nuts after that—saying Jenny had inherited her problems from Grandpa. But she wasn’t much for doctors. Truth be told, I think Chevy’s the one who held things together after that, until his mom called it quits.”

“Did anyone ever suspect that Peggy’s death wasn’t suicide?”

“You mean could a fourteen-year-old boy have gotten away with her murder? Chevy was smart enough. There was a school counselor who actually suggested it. But from the evidence”—he shook his head—“it looked like suicide.”

“School counselor? Could we still talk to him, or her?” Rick asked.

“Her. Name was”—he scratched at a brow—“some flower, like Rose or Daisy. No, Iris. That’s it. Iris Rhodes. But she turned missionary in the Philippines or somewhere, traveled all over the place. I tried to reach her about fifteen years back when her cousin got killed in a car crash, and couldn’t do it.”

Dead end, Neil thought. But he’d check anyway.

“Wouldn’t matter, though,” Goodwin continued. “Chevy wouldn’t’ve shared any deep confidences with her. He didn’t like her.”

“Why not?”

“Before Jenny disappeared, Iris called Children’s Services to go check on her. She claimed the baby wasn’t being cared for properly.”

“Did Children’s Services ever look?”

“Yup. Jenny was fine. I mean, she was born early, was a tiny little thing and maybe not coming along as fast as most babies. But there was nothing to make authorities take her away.”

Neil glanced at Rick. There ought to be a record of that inquiry, anyway. “So it was a freaky family, but there was nothing that pointed to abuse or violence.”

Goodwin took a deep breath, a measured one, like he was trying to do it without coughing. “Look, believe it or not, Chevy Bankes was an okay boy. Pretty good student, quiet kid. When Jenny disappeared, he was devastated.”

“So what do you think happened to her?”

Goodwin sucked his teeth. “One of the thousands we’ll never know about.”

“Okay,” Neil said, but frustration gnawed at him. “One more thing: Do you know of any reason Bankes would have it in for Mo Hammond after all these years?”

The sheriff’s eyes narrowed for a split second. That was all it took. “Something happened to Mo?”

“Uh, we just found him shot to death up at his gun range.”

“Oh, Lord.” He rubbed his hand over his face then finally looked up. “Mo Hammond turns up dead, I think I’d look somewhere other than Chevy.”

“Like where?”

“You ever met Mo’s wife?”

C
opeland held off the task force meeting until Rick and Neil got back. When they walked in, the room smelled of stale burgers and french fries.

“It’s about time you got here,” Copeland said. “Did you get them?”

Neil handed over the Bankes family Bible and a receipt. After the interview with Goodwin, he’d called Copeland on a hunch and gone back for them.

Copeland opened the Bible. “Tell them,” he said and nodded to the room. With the exception of Juan Suarez and Lexi Carter, everyone on the task force had assembled. But tonight, everyone was sitting. The fun had worn off.

Neil took a seat, too. “The sheriff who worked Jenny’s disappearance said there was a rumor once that Chevy might have had an older sibling. The first page of the Bankeses’ Bible is missing. I thought the lab should look at the next couple pages, that’s all, see if there are indentations from something that might have been recorded on the missing page.”

“And the receipt?” Copeland asked, studying it.

“It was in the kitchen drawer. It’s for diapers. The ink’s faded, so I can’t read the date. But it was folded up with another receipt for gasoline from 1976. The date stuck in my mind because gas was only fifty-nine cents a gallon.”

Harrison frowned. “Nineteen seventy-six is—”

“Two years before Chevy was born,” Neil said. “So if the diapers receipt is from the same time…” He finished with a shrug.

“Any word on Chadburne?” Rick asked.

“Not yet,” Copeland said. “She doesn’t drive, so there’s no license. We’re checking Boise for a friend or family member who might have a picture of her. And I’ve got people trying to track down doll sales that might have been made to her husband. I don’t hold out much hope on that score—the collection she’s selling now could have been in his family attic for years. As for Hammond, we’ve cleared his wife—she was with a neighbor all day Wednesday, the day he died.”

Neil nodded; no surprise there. As charming as Hammond’s wife was, everyone knew Chevy had killed him. “What was missing from his store?”

“A shotgun and a twenty-two. And,” Copeland added, “there was one drawer that had been broken into, the lock jimmied. We don’t know what was in that.”

“Silencers,” Harrison speculated. “That’s why no one heard a shot at the church.”

Neil closed his eyes. Guns with silencers. That would change everything.

“Have a file,” Copeland said, pushing a folder his direction and another toward Rick. “Harrison looked up the attorney who handled Peggy Bankes’s will. It wasn’t just the acreage and the house Chevy inherited. His mother added a codicil, leaving something to Chevy buried near the edge of the river. He got it on his twenty-first birthday.”

“That’s the day he killed Gloria,” Neil said, straightening. “What was it?”

“We don’t know,” Copeland answered, “but a team will go look along the river in the morning. It’s been a long time…” He came forward in his chair, hands on the table. “What I wanna know is this: Why now? Bankes has been out of prison for over a year. What made him finally decide to hit Hammond? If he and Hammond had a history, say, Hammond knew something about Bankes from childhood—maybe about his sister’s disappearance—then why wait all this time to knock off Hammond?”

“Because Hammond’s disappearance isn’t about something from Bankes’s childhood,” Neil said, studying the photos he’d stuck to the whiteboard hours ago. “It’s now. Somehow, Hammond is the link between preparations Bankes has been making for all these months and the start of it all.”

“The start of what all?” asked Brohaugh.

“The
chivy
,” Standlin said, as if Neil’s theory fit perfectly. Everyone looked at her. “It means chase or hunt. It’s the root of his name. Reporters in Seattle used it as a hook for their stories and dubbed him ‘The Hunter.’ But it’s the chase he likes, not the kill.” She caught a nod from Copeland and stood up, sliding her own stack of papers across the table for distribution. “We’ve found two other unsolved cases in which women were stalked and then vanished. I spent the day talking to their families and the authorities who handled their cases.”

Neil straightened. “What?”

“They happened
after
Gloria Michaels, but before Bankes moved to Seattle. You were gone, Sheridan. And Anthony Russell was dead. And the bodies were never found, so there was no reason to connect them to the Michaels murder.”

“Son of a bitch.”

“They actually looked at these cases during Bankes’s trial in Seattle, but the gunshot to Chaney’s back seemed inconsistent with the work of a serial sexual predator. The DA focused on an execution-style killing, by a man they called The Hunter.”

Neil stared. Two more after Gloria Michaels? After he’d put her murder on Anthony Russell and left the country, left his family, left everything? “Who are the others?”

“Nina Ellstrom. She lived in New Jersey. Her parents say she was terrified before she disappeared, had been getting calls like Beth Denison’s for weeks: ‘Are you scared yet?’ ‘Let me hear your voice.’ ”

“In Jersey, though.”

“She traveled twice a year to Philadelphia for a businesswomen’s conference. Stayed at Bankes’s hotel.”

“Ah, God.”

“And Paige Wheeler, a cellist. She played with a string quartet and went to West Chester to do some sort of residency for the music school.”

“And stayed at the hotel Bankes worked at?” Rick asked.

Standlin nodded; Neil felt like he’d been sucker-punched.

“Ten,” Brohaugh said. “If we count Mo Hammond and the two current missing women, plus these two who’ve been gone for years, that’s ten people.”

“Not including Bankes’s little sister,” Rick said, “and maybe his mother.”

“His mother?” Copeland asked.

“The sheriff we just spoke to says it looked like suicide, but Chevy was smart enough to pull that off. The baby’s gone so there’s nothing to do there, but we could exhume the mother and grandfather. May be worth a look.”

Copeland nodded and made himself a note as a woman with short curly hair cracked the door. She held out a piece of paper: “This just came from Agent Wright in Seattle, sir. He says an employee at the Orion Hotel remembers one of Bankes’s trips was to San Francisco, July Fourth. One of the cross-checks shows an antiques exhibition in San Francisco the same weekend.”

Neil’s brows went up.

“We knew already he went out of town for long weekends,” Harrison said. “You think it was always San Francisco?”

Neil was startled.
I still attend certain antiques exhibitions, usually long weekends at holidays.
Beth had told him that the first time they met. “It was antiques shows.”

Silence pulsed through the room for the five seconds it took for that to sink in. Then, quietly, Rick said, “Christ,” and Copeland put his pencil down.

“That’s where he met Chadburne,” Copeland said.

Neil was aware of his heartbeat. He reached in his pocket, dialed Beth, and tried to keep his voice calm. “Can you think back to last July, to an antiques exhibition in San Francisco?” He checked the page they just received. “It was held at the Hilton Northwest—”

“Sure,” Beth said. “That show is sponsored by Randolph Earley. He always gives a bash on the Fourth of July.”

“Did you go to it last summer?”

“No. I was going to, but Abby came down with strep. Hannah went instead.”

Close enough. Bankes wouldn’t have had any way of knowing Beth would cancel. “Are there others, big holiday sales or shows that someone would
know
you’d attend?”

“Pretty much every holiday there’s something somewhere. Someone from Foster’s always goes.”

Neil nodded to Copeland, who shuffled to a specific page and handed it to Neil, pointing at the dates Bankes had taken days off work.

“Beth, where was the biggest collection of antiques dealers last Memorial Day?”

It took her only a second. “Chicago. Herbert Goshe does an Early American furniture sale every year at the convention center. On July Fourth there’s the show in San Francisco, and at Labor Day,” she continued without being asked, “there’s a Victorian exhibition in Dallas.”

“Did you attend those shows?”

“Yeah. With Hannah. Oh, no, not the Dallas one,” she corrected herself. “That was just with Evan. Hannah didn’t go.”

“Was Margaret Chadburne there, too?”

“Actually,” she said, her voice growing cautious, “that’s where we first met. In Dallas.”

And she’d gotten the first phone call from Bankes that Monday night, Labor Day. Neil tried to control the thundering in his chest. “Is there some sort of registration for those events, or are they open to the public and anyone can go?”

“They’re open to the public, but there are always mailing lists, records of purchases, that sort of thing. Neil, what’s going on?”

“Hang on, honey. Don’t go to bed, and I’ll fill you in when I get there. Everything’s okay.” He hung up, looked at Copeland. “She didn’t go to San Francisco but was planning to until the last minute. On Memorial Day and Labor Day, when Bankes was taking long weekends, she was at sales in Chicago and Dallas.”

“Okay,” Copeland said, already looking at Brohaugh. “Check transportation from Seattle to those cities on those weekends. I know he didn’t leave us any plane tickets, but look anyway—trains, buses, even records of carjackings or hitchhikers during those times. Get a list of everyone who attended those shows. And look for Margaret Chadburne’s name.”