When All The Girls Have Gone (16 page)

Roxanne Briggs stirred the simmering pot of oatmeal with a wooden spoon and reflected on the past. It occurred to her that that was all she ever thought about these days—the past.

It was early—not yet five thirty. It would be a while before the first light of dawn, but the storm had passed. She had not slept at all during the night. Egan had said very little when he had returned from going after Max Cutler and Charlotte Sawyer. He had been in an adrenaline-fueled rage. He’d headed straight for the whiskey bottle.

When she’d asked him what he’d done, he’d said only that Cutler and Sawyer wouldn’t be a problem now. She had demanded an explanation. He’d told her that there had been an accident. Cutler’s vehicle had gone into the river. He and the Sawyer woman could not possibly have survived.

She had known then that he had attempted to murder Cutler and Sawyer. But she was not so certain that he had been successful. There had been something very competent-looking about Cutler. Her intuition told her that he would not panic in a crisis. Charlotte Sawyer had also seemed very formidable in her own right.

Still, they were just a couple of city people who had wound up in a flooding river. Odds were, they hadn’t made it out. But even if they were both gone, it was clear now that the world was falling apart. The secrets that she and Egan had kept for so long were coming back to haunt them.

Karma was a bitch goddess.

Eventually Egan had passed out in his big leather chair. She had undressed and gone to bed, but she had not slept at all. How could a woman sleep when she knew she was coming to the end of a very dark road?

Until now she had been able to endure the misery of her marriage because of Nolan. She had sacrificed everything for him. She was a mother, after all. But on this bleak morning she was no longer sure she could keep going, not even for the sake of her son.

Egan loomed in the doorway. “Pack your things. We’re leaving.”

She turned toward him. “What?”

“Did some thinking last night. Cutler and Sawyer are probably dead, but there’s a chance they made it out of the river. Doesn’t much matter. Alive or dead, they’re a problem. They’ve been poking around in the past, and sooner or later the shit is gonna hit the fan. We need to get the hell off this mountain. Find a new place. Idaho, maybe. Or Wyoming.”

Roxanne looked down at the simmering oatmeal and made her decision. “No,” she said.

“Don’t be a fool. We can’t risk hanging around here. If Cutler and Sawyer survived, they’ll go straight to the cops. If they’re dead, the cops are gonna come around asking questions. Forget the oatmeal and start packing.”

“No,” she said again, her voice very steady now.

“Suit yourself. I’m getting out. Up to you if you want to come with me or not.”

She tightened her grip on the spoon. Only one thing was clear—she had never hated Egan more than she did in that moment.

“I told you years ago it would blow up in our faces,” she said.

“Bullshit. You were as happy to take the money as I was.”

She did not answer that. There was nothing to say. She had agreed to keep the secret and take the money.
For Nolan’s sake
.

“When are you leaving?” she asked, trying to sound matter-of-fact.

“Today. I’ll take the SUV. Got to make a phone call first. Get one last payment out of the bastard.”

“Under the circumstances, that might not be smart,” she said. “You told
me yourself that Trey Greenslade has become a lot more dangerous in the last few months.”

“The death of his old man set him off, no question about it. At least two women are dead. Cutler was right about one thing—the murders aren’t going to stop. Trey is escalating. But he’s smart. He knows he’s got a hell of a lot to protect—he’s first in line to take control of Loring-Greenslade. Trust me, he’ll make one more payoff, especially if he knows he’s going to get what he wants.”

The oatmeal was starting to scorch. Automatically Roxanne moved it off the heat.

Egan was right. Trey had inherited everything—the Greenslade name, the Greenslade pharmaceutical company, the Greenslade position in Loring. The only thing that stood in his way was Egan.

“Well?” Egan asked. “You sure you want to stay here?”

She had made her decision. She and Egan were bonded by the secrets they kept, but that was the only thing that connected them.

“I told you,” she said. “I’m not going with you.”

For a moment she thought he might try to talk her into leaving with him—not because he loved her but because she knew his secrets and had kept them faithfully for so long. She was the only person on the face of the earth that he could trust and they both knew it.

And then she wondered if he would kill her to make sure she didn’t tell anyone the truth about the past.

Surreptitiously she moved her hand to the kitchen towel crumpled on the counter.

But in the end, Egan merely shrugged and walked away into the other room.

“Suit yourself,” he said.

She stood quietly in the kitchen, her hand resting on the counter near the towel.

She could hear Egan in the bedroom, tossing clothes into a suitcase. After a time she heard him go down into the basement. When he returned, he had the old cardboard file box in his arms. She held her breath.

“I’m taking this with me,” he said, daring her to argue.

“You’re welcome to it,” she said. She looked at the picture of her son on the mantel.

“What should I tell Nolan?” she asked.

“Tell him whatever the hell you want to tell him.” Egan headed for the door with the file box. “He won’t give a damn. All he cares about is his next fix. He’s a junkie, Roxanne. Junkies don’t change. One of these days he’ll OD and that will be the end of it. The only one who’s going to shed any tears will be you.”

She stayed in the kitchen while Egan finished packing up the SUV. Only when he finally climbed behind the wheel and drove off down the graveled road did she finally take a deep breath.

Heart pounding, she picked up the towel and looked at the gun on the counter. The previous night she’d toyed with thoughts of using it on herself. But that morning her maternal instincts had kicked in. She had been prepared to kill Egan if he had made a move to get rid of her.

She had to survive to take care of Nolan.

“What the hell made you go up that damn mountain to meet with Egan Briggs? Everyone knows he and his wife are both batshit crazy. They’re a couple of world-class preppers. You’re lucky all you lost was your vehicle. You could just as easily have gotten your heads blown off.”

“Trust me, that thought has occurred to us,” Max said. “And the reason we went to see Briggs is because I’m investigating the death of Louise Flint.”

The detective’s name was Tucker Walsh. He was in his midthirties. He had explained that he had joined the Loring department two years earlier because he and his wife had wanted a nice, safe, small-town environment in which to raise their kids.

Walsh came across as both intelligent and professional, but, like Charlotte, Max was withholding judgment on anyone who was even remotely connected to the Loring Police Department. Maybe we’re both a little paranoid, he thought. Nearly getting murdered sometimes has that effect on a person. So sue us.

The trek out of the mountains had gone smoothly, all things considered. There were a lot of repair crews out, as he had predicted. In the end he and Charlotte had been chauffeured into Loring by the friendly owner of a tree removal service.

By prior agreement, they had been careful not to mention Egan and Roxanne Briggs to the driver. Instead they had explained the loss of their
vehicle as an accident. Just a couple of tourists who’d had no business trying to navigate the treacherous mountain roads in bad weather.

The first stop in Loring had been a rental car agency, not the police station. Charlotte had lost her handbag and with it her credit cards, cell phone and identification. But his wallet and the plastic in it had survived in his hip pocket. He’d had no trouble renting a vehicle.

Satisfied that he now had a way to get Charlotte and himself back to Seattle, he had made the Loring PD their next stop.

The department’s headquarters was housed in a gleaming new building in the center of town. There was a shiny new library across the street. The nearby shops and stores appeared prosperous. The coffeehouses and eateries were filled with students and various academic types.

The campus dominated the north end of town. It consisted of a collection of handsome, brick-fronted buildings scattered across a serene, heavily wooded landscape.

From what Max had seen, the college was one of the community’s two major economic engines. The second was a large, prosperous-looking pharmaceutical company named Loring-Greenslade Biotech.

Walsh eyed Max with a speculative expression. “This Louise Flint woman isn’t local, is she? Because I don’t recall any reports—”

“No,” Max said. “She lived in Seattle. But she made a trip to Loring on the day she died.”

Walsh narrowed his eyes. “To see Briggs?”

“He says no,” Max said. “But there’s a possibility that the Flint case is connected to an assault that took place here on the college campus a little over ten years ago. Briggs was the detective in charge.”

“What happened to the assault charge?” Walsh asked.

He looked wary now, Max thought. Maybe the detective had a bad feeling about where the chat was going.

“It was a rape case,” Charlotte said coolly. “My stepsister was the victim. And what happened was that the case went nowhere because the evidence box disappeared.”

Walsh’s mouth tightened into a grim line. “I see. Sorry to hear that. I wasn’t working here at the time.”

“Yes, we know that.” Charlotte frowned. “You said the Briggses are preppers?”

“You know—folks who are convinced that there will be a major natural catastrophe any day now or that the country is going to implode,” Walsh said. “They stockpile food and ammo and probably a hell of a lot of toilet paper.”

“I know what the word means,” Charlotte said. “I was just interested to hear that that’s how the local community views the Briggses.”

Walsh sighed. “Look, they’re reclusive and eccentric, but they don’t make trouble—unlike their junkie son. He’s been in and out of rehab like clockwork for the past few years.”

“I saw the photo of a young man on the mantel at the Briggses’ house,” Charlotte said. “I assumed it was a picture of their son. He looked okay.”

“Trust me, Nolan Briggs is not okay,” Walsh said. “I think I speak for the entire department when I say that any day he shows up in Loring is a bad day. Luckily he doesn’t spend much time here. He just comes to see his folks when he needs money. But getting back to Egan Briggs, you said you went to see him about that cold case you mentioned?”

“That’s right,” Max said. “He seemed willing to discuss it. Gave the impression that the failure to close the case had really bothered him all these years. But in hindsight, it’s obvious he just wanted to know how much we knew or suspected. When he realized that we were going to keep looking into the death of Louise Flint and the old rape case, he panicked. That’s why he came after us.”

Walsh exhaled heavily and sank back in his chair. “And you figure there’s only one reason he would be so accommodating and then dump you into the river. Someone paid him off years ago to make that evidence box disappear. Is that what you’re thinking?”

“That seems like the most likely scenario,” Max said, going for polite. “It’s also possible that he knew more about Louise Flint’s death than he let on.”

“Keep in mind that Briggs is probably borderline crazy,” Walsh said.
“Crazy people do things that don’t make any sense. It’s sort of the working definition of crazy.”

“Actually, crazy people do things that make sense in their own worlds,” Max said.

Charlotte leaned forward. Her hands were clenched very tightly in her lap.

“Detective Walsh, you don’t seem to be grasping the gravity of the situation here. My stepsister is missing. The detective who may have been bribed to make her case disappear over a decade ago has just tried to murder us. And a woman named Louise Flint, who happened to be my stepsister’s best friend, is dead, supposedly of an overdose. The one common link between all of those things is this town.”

Walsh was starting to look annoyed.

“I’ll talk to Briggs,” he said. “That’s about all I can do until we locate your vehicle and pull it out of the river. But even then, I can’t promise much. The water will have washed away a lot of evidence.”

Charlotte was seething. Max decided to intervene before she went for Walsh’s throat.

“Is there anyone left on the force who was here when Jocelyn Pruett reported the rape?” he asked.

Walsh had been watching Charlotte with a wary expression. Reluctantly he switched his attention back to Max.

“There has been a lot of turnover, but I think Atkins might have been around a decade ago. He’s set to retire this year.”

“We would like to talk to him,” Max said.

“Hang on, I just saw him go down the hall.” Walsh got out of his chair, crossed the cluttered office and opened the door. “Atkins? Got a minute? Some people here would like to ask you a few questions.”

A big, middle-aged, florid-faced man with thinning blond hair and a beer belly appeared in the doorway. He gave Charlotte and Max a quick survey.

“This is Charlotte Sawyer and Max Cutler,” Walsh said. “Cutler is a PI from Seattle. He’s investigating a death.”

Atkins grunted acknowledgment of the introductions.

“What can I do for you?” he asked.

“Were you with the department a little more than a decade ago when Jocelyn Pruett filed a rape report?” Max asked. “You may remember it because at some point the evidence box disappeared.”

Atkins’s brows scrunched together. “I was an officer at the time. Always wondered what happened to the evidence. The investigation never got off the ground because it was lost.”

“I’m surprised you remember the case so clearly,” Charlotte said.

“I was the first officer on the scene. I took the initial report. I could tell the victim was traumatized, but she insisted on being taken directly to the hospital so that evidence could be collected. She was very focused. Very determined.”

“The victim’s name was Jocelyn Pruett,” Charlotte said. “She’s my stepsister. She has disappeared and Egan Briggs just tried to murder us. Do you see a pattern here?”

Atkins scowled, startled by her vehemence. He looked at Walsh for guidance.

“What the hell is this?” he asked.

“Mr. Cutler and Ms. Sawyer tell me that Egan Briggs deliberately forced their vehicle off the road and into the river. They were fortunate to survive.”

“Shit.” Atkins looked disgusted. “Sounds like the rumors are true. Briggs really has gone crazy. Can’t believe his wife is still with him after all these years. I guess she’s just as nuts. What a waste.”

Charlotte looked at him. “What do you mean?”

“Roxanne Briggs was a fine-looking woman in her day,” Atkins said. “But she got pregnant the year after she graduated from high school. Never could figure out why she slept with Briggs. He was too old for her and with her looks, she could have done better. But, like I said, she was pregnant and this was a real small town back then. Guess she figured she had to marry the father. Surprised she stayed with him, though. Always thought she’d
ditch him and head for the city. What’s all this got to do with that old rape case?”

“That’s what we’re trying to find out,” Max said before Walsh could reply.

“Did a woman named Louise Flint talk to you a few days ago?” Charlotte asked.

“No, I don’t know any Louise Flint,” Atkins said. “And there’s not much I can tell you about your stepsister’s case except that it went nowhere.”

“Here’s what I think happened all those years ago,” Charlotte said. “I think someone decided to make the case go away and someone paid off at least one cop—Briggs—to make sure that happened. What about you, Detective Atkins? Did you take a bribe, as well?”

And people think I’m the one who lacks social skills, Max thought. It occurred to him that he was seeing yet another side of Charlotte. The woman had a temper.

Atkins’s face flushed a dark shade of red. “I’ve been with this department for twenty years and I’ve got a clean record. You’ve got no right to ask me a question like that.”

“You lost the evidence box,” Charlotte said. “But you must still have a file. I want to see it.”

“I didn’t lose the damned box,” Atkins snarled. He pulled himself together with a visible effort. “As for the file, I’m sorry. It’s not available.”

“Do we need to file a Freedom of Information Act request?” Max asked.

“No point.” Atkins grunted. “The files in those days were all on paper. When the department finally got around to digitalizing them a few years ago, we discovered that some of them had gotten lost.”

“Let me take a flying leap here,” Charlotte said. “My stepsister’s file just happened to be one of those that vanished, right?”

Atkins was almost purple now. Max wondered if he was going to stroke out. But Walsh gave the big man a warning look. Atkins calmed down a little.

“Yes, that’s what I’m saying.” Atkins shook his head. “I’m sorry, but there is nothing I can do for you. I’d like to know why you think your stepsister’s disappearance now might be connected to that old case, though. Hell, it’s been—what—eleven, twelve years?”

“If we knew the answer to that question, we would not be here in your office,” Max said. He got to his feet. “Are you sure there’s nothing else you can tell us?”

Atkins grimaced. “Maybe one other thing.”

“What?” Charlotte asked quickly.

“Like I said, I was an officer back in the day. Briggs was in charge of the case. But at the outset, I was pretty sure the perp was a local guy, maybe a student or a teacher on the campus.”

“What made you think that?” Max asked.

“Because from the way Pruett described the attack, it seemed likely that he knew the layout of the campus very well. Knew exactly where to wait for her. Briggs assigned me to start talking to some of the male students who might have followed her from the library that night. I was taking statements when Briggs told me to stop. He said the rape kit had been contaminated and that there was nothing left of the case. The whole damn evidence box disappeared shortly after that.”

“Do you think someone paid Briggs to dump the case?” Max asked.

Atkins shook his head. “I don’t know about that. I can tell you that Briggs retired less than a year later. Said he’d come into a little money from an inheritance. That’s when he and his wife moved up into the mountains and got weird. At the same time it was no secret that the college authorities were leaning hard on the chief. They didn’t want the bad publicity. That’s all I can tell you. I’ll let you come up with your own conspiracy theory.”

“I’m good at that,” Max said.