“Lime green? Is it near Roswell? They have a lot of alien stuff down there.”
“Yes, it is, but I don’t think aliens had anything to do with the water there. Anyway, we were out there camping and I woke up in the middle of the night. I had to take a leak, so I put on my shoes and walked over to the top of the cliff above the cove. The water was glowing. It was amazing. I sat there and watched it, looked at the stars, the full moon, all that nature crap. Then I thought I heard something. Like scraping and whimpering. I called out but no one answered. So I lay on my stomach and looked into the cove from up top. There was a girl.”
“She was in the cove?” I asked.
“No, she was trying to climb up the side of the cliff, kind of around the cove part.” He bowed his head in thought. “Looking back, I think she may have seen our campfires, been trying to get to them. Anyway, I reached down to give her a hand. I kept telling her to take it, but she didn’t even know I was there until my hand touched her. She jumped, looked up at me, her eyes huge. She was terrified.”
I felt a wave of anguish surge through him. Even after all these years, it affected him deeply.
“I kept trying to get her to take my hand, but she wouldn’t at first. I thought she was going to climb back down, but then she must’ve realized I wasn’t a threat to her. She put her hand in mine and I pulled. But she slipped and swung to the side.” He took a sip of water before continuing.
Gemma put a hand on his arm. “This is what you couldn’t talk about with me,” she said. “This part.”
He nodded. “She was hanging over the cove and pulling me with her. She tried to get her footing again, but then she cried out. She was falling or being pulled. I couldn’t be sure. I lunged for her and she put out her other arm to me, but she missed.” He bit down. “I missed. Her fingernails scraped across my face and she fell.”
“I’m sorry, Wyatt,” Gemma said.
But he had succumbed to his memories. He stared into the water as they resurfaced and took hold. “There was no sound,” he said. “The cliff wasn’t that high. Maybe twenty or so feet. I should have heard her fall.” He withdrew inside himself and I realized this wasn’t just a painful memory but a traumatic one. “I realized someone else was there. In the dark. I heard breaths echoing in the cove and I was scared to death it was a mountain lion or something.”
“What did you do?” I asked, knowing full well it wasn’t a mountain lion or something. But he knew it, too. Even then, he could tell the difference.
“I ran for help,” he said, an agonizing pain evident in his expression. The wounds he had inside were much deeper than any scar he carried as a reminder of that night. “I left her there.”
Gemma squeezed his arm as Uncle Bob got up to answer a call.
“Officer Pierce —,” I started, but he interrupted.
“Please, just Wyatt.”
“Wyatt, this may sound really weird and I can’t explain how I know this, but I am absolutely certain that there is a connection to this girl and the mass graves that have been found down south.”
He blinked at me in disbelief. “How can that be?”
“You say you were nine?”
“Yes.”
“And you’re thirty-one now?”
“Yes, that’s right.”
God, I hated math. “Okay, that means that dump site is at least twenty-two years old. I’m wondering if the girl you saw wasn’t the first of the killer’s victims.”
“Why would you even make that connection? The springs are over two hundred miles east from here. And hundreds from the mass grave site south.”
Uh-oh. The sticky part. I looked at Gemma, then at Uncle Bob, who didn’t care because he was still on the phone, but it was Cookie who set him straight. “Look,” she said, throwing down some attitude, “you just have to trust her. She solves a lot of cases based on her hunches because they are never wrong.”
That was a bit of an overstatement, as Wyatt pointed out. “She was wrong about me,” he said.
“Almost never,” she corrected.
Gemma nodded. “Cookie’s right, Wyatt. Charley just kind of knows things. It’s weird. Like supernatural or something.” She snorted. “Not that she’s supernatural. That’s absurd. It’s not like she sees ghosts or talks to dead people or anything.”
She never quite got the concept of stopping while she was ahead.
“And she has issues. Like she’s always in trouble.”
I gasped. “I am not. And besides, you’re dating a guy who could have been a serial killer. What were you thinking?”
She gaped at me, then sputtered, then threw her hands up, utterly frustrated.
“Use your words.”
“He’s not a serial killer.”
“Yeah, but you didn’t know that,” I said, totally winning.
“Oh… my god.” She was annoyed. “Why do I turn into a fourteen-year-old every time I’m near you?”
“I do that to a lot of people.”
“The lab just called,” Uncle Bob said, totally interrupting. “The oil at the grave site is used oil of all types, motor oil, cooking oil, industrial lubricants… They think it was slated for a recycling plant and the truck driver dumped it on that land instead.”
“Okay, then why that land in particular?”
“I don’t know, pumpkin. We’re still working on it.”
He went back to talking on the phone.
“Why are you in therapy?” I asked Wyatt.
“Charley,” Gemma said, scolding me once again.
“It’s okay, Gem.” He refocused on me. “According to my supervisor, I have anger issues.”
“And why would he think that?”
Gemma’s mouth thinned, chastising me. “You don’t have to talk about this, Wyatt, if you aren’t comfortable.”
“No, it doesn’t matter anyway. Anyone with a laptop can find out. According to the department, I have a problem with men who use violence against women. I used excessive force to bring a man to the ground who was hitting his wife with a nine iron.”
After a startled gasp, I said, “Well, good for you.”
“Yeah, well, he has money and connections. I almost lost my job. But if I hadn’t been ordered to do six months of therapy, I would never have met Gemma.”
I liked him.
“You know, I have everything back at my place. All of my notes. I’ve been investigating the girl kind of obsessively since I became a cop. I have to get back on duty, but —”
“This takes precedence,” Uncle Bob said. “I’ll call your sergeant and let him know you’re helping with an ongoing investigation.”
“Perfect,” I said, clasping my hands together. “Then that’s where we’ll start. After we eat, of course.”
Reyes brought out green chili stew and a couple of quesadillas for us to share. I batted my lashes and promised to tip him later. It was no wonder he kept brushing across me as he helped the server set down our plates. The guy was such a rake.
“So what did you do next?” I asked Wyatt after taking a bite of hot stew.
“I woke up the counselors,” he said, dipping his quesadilla. “They called the sheriff’s office. A deputy came out. One.” He wiped his mouth on a napkin. “That was it. I kept trying to tell them there was a little girl lost in the area, but no one believed me. The deputy actually implied that I’d been scratched by a raccoon or a coyote or something.”
“In their defense,” I said, “those scratches had to be pretty deep for fingernails, considering your scars.”
“Not really. After everything that had happened, the scratches got infected. My parents had to come get me from my grandparents’ house early that summer to take me to a doctor in Albuquerque, and I had to go through a round of rabies shots, because the deputy on the night shift couldn’t tell the difference between a coyote’s track and a human’s.”
“Oh,” I said. “That sucks.”
“Still, he did find tire impressions that didn’t belong t
o our bus.”
“What did they belong to?”
“A few of the other kids thought we saw a pickup the next morning, but the deputy said it was probably just a ranch hand.”
“A ranch hand?” I asked, taking a sip of iced tea. “You guys were on a ranch?”
“Yeah. But I’ve been investigating. I can’t find any links to a missing girl and a ranch hand.”
“Who owned it? The land you were on?”
“A family by the name of Knight.”
I tensed in alarm. Mostly to keep myself from falling over.
Uncle Bob was just as shocked as I was. “The mass grave site is on a ranch owned by a Knight family.”
“No shit? Wait, I remember something about that.” He closed his eyes and thought back. “Yes, that ranch was owned by a Carl Knight, and I remember discovering that he had a brother who owned a ranch in southern New Mexico.”
“Brothers?” I asked, thrilled that we were getting places. Maybe not anywhere near a solid conviction, but places. “I’d say we have a pretty strong connection now.”
Uncle Bob nodded and started looking up a contact on his phone. He stood to call in our findings. No idea to whom. Cookie wiggled in her seat and clapped, exhilarated to be in on the conquest, especially one so heartbreaking. We were still miles away from a suspect, but every inch brought us closer to the truth, and the women in my apartment deserved at least that.
“So,” I said to Wyatt, “you said you’ve been obsessed? Have you found anything out about the girl?”
“Um, a little, yes.”
My hopes soared like a kite in the wind. “Do you have a name?”
“No.”
And crash landing.
“But I have tons of research materials at my place. You’re welcome to go through it.”
“I have to admit, Officer Pierce, I’m a little in love with you right now.”
Gemma smiled, knowing my seal of approval when she saw it.
I offered him my best Sunday smile. “So, now? Would now be a good time to hang at your crib?”
He chuckled. “Sure, if it’s okay with you, sir.”
Uncle Bob hung up and nodded wholeheartedly. “It’s more than okay. I’ll meet you there.”
He left to make yet another call. That man loved his phone.
We went en masse to the house of Officer Wyatt Pierce. He was renting a small two-bedroom in Nob Hill. It was a nice neighborhood, old and well established. Uncle Bob walked in still on the phone. He hung up as we went inside.
“Okay, I have Taft following up on our leads right now, and I’ve contacted Special Agent Carson to fill her in as well.”
“Awesome,” I said. “She’ll like me even more.”
“I just want to prepare you,” Wyatt said to Gemma as we stepped toward the back bedroom.
“For what?” Gemma asked.
“Remember when you asked me if I’d been able to put that night behind me and I said yes?”
“I do,” she said, wary.
“Well, I may have exaggerated.”
He unlocked and opened the door. Hundreds of papers littered every available surface. The window was covered in old news clippings and pictures. There were dozens of drawings of huge eyes hidden behind a mass of blond hair. He was quite the artist, and he had been searching for years. That girl never left him. He clearly felt responsible for her disappearance, which couldn’t be further from the truth.
“You realize that none of that was your fault,” I said.
“I know.” He added a completely unconvinced shrug for my benefit. He had no intention of shirking the responsibility he felt. I admired him for his conviction, but I could see worry flash in Gemma’s eyes.
We walked in and perused his research material. He had collected evidence on every missing girl in that time period from all over the United States.
“I don’t know if this will help, but I suspect the girl was Deaf.”
“How can you possibly know that?”
“It’s a hunch. I suspected it anyway, but when you said you’d tried to call to her and she didn’t look up at first, it made me realize she probably was.”
“Wait.” He held up a finger in thought, then tore through some files he had on an old trunk. “There was a girl missing from the Oklahoma School for the Deaf.” He found the file he was looking for and took out a picture. “This is her.”
He handed it over and a jolt of recognition spiked within me. Same pixie face. Same bow-shaped mouth and huge eyes, only she was smiling in the picture and her bangs were crooked. I ran my fingertips over her image. “It’s her eyes,” I said, and then I showed the picture to Cookie and Uncle Bob. “This is the girl.” I turned the picture over. Her name was Faith Ingalls.
“It was so dark out there,” Wyatt said, “and she was covered in dirt and blood, almost like she’d been buried and dug back up. I just didn’t recognize her from this picture.”
“Did they ever solve this case?” Uncle Bob asked.
He read through the file. “Not when I was looking into it, but that was a few years ago. She’d been missing for over a decade. They suspected a maintenance man by the name of Saul Ussery but could never prove it.”
I read over his shoulder. “Did you get anything else on him?”
“No, but we can run the name,” he said. “Something might come up now.”
Uncle Bob put down the file he was reading. “I can do that.” He called in to the station while I had other plans.
The girl was probably the serial killer’s first victim. His trial run. He wanted her but couldn’t have her, so he tried to take her by force perhaps. He may even have killed her accidentally, though I doubted it. He seemed to enjoy the act even then. The power. And it only fueled his thirst for blood. His obsession for blond women.
I tried Agent Carson first, but couldn’t get through. If she was at the mass grave site, she could have been out of bars. So I called Kenny Knight instead.
“Mr. Knight,” I said when he picked up. “This is Charley Davidson, a consultant for APD. We met yesterday.”
“Yes, I remember.” He didn’t seem particularly happy to hear from me. I could hardly blame him.
“I was wondering if I could run a name by you. See if you recognize it.”
“Sure.” He was spent and tired of all the media that had surely hit that morning. The sheriff’s department had no choice but to announce the discovery of a mass grave, and every news crew in the state had to be there, vying for a story.
“Do you know or do you remember your parents ever hiring a man named Saul Ussery?”
“Saul? No, he never worked here. My parents couldn’t stand him.”
Adrenaline flooded my system. “Wait, they knew him?”
“Knew him? He was their nephew. My cousin. He only showed up when he needed money or a place to sleep. Wait, the oil —”
I snapped to get Uncle Bob’s attention. Both he and Wyatt rushed over to listen in as I switched on the speakerphone. “What about the oil?” I asked.
“It just didn’t occur to me. Saul drove a truck for several years. He worked for some company that recycled plastics and used oil. Part of his job was to truck the oil they collected from mechanic shops and restaurants to a processing company in Cruces every few weeks.”
“But why would he dump it on your land instead?” I asked.
“Because he was a low-life son of a bitch. I’m sure the company he worked for in Albuquerque had to pay the people in Las Cruces to take it. He could’ve pocketed that money every so often and dumped the oil here where no one would know.”
Uncle Bob was taking notes in a memo pad while Wyatt, Gemma, and Cookie stood speechless. “Kenny, I don’t want to upset you, but I think your cousin might have had something to do with the deaths of those women.”
“Ms. Davidson, that wouldn’t surprise me in the least. He was a piece of shit. Threatened my parents one time when they wouldn’t give him money for some harebrained scheme of hi
s. He was always joining one pyramid scam after another.”
“Was?”
“Well, is, only now he’s not doing much of anything. He’s in a nursing home. Had a stroke or something a while back.”
I took down the information, then asked, “Can you have Agent Carson call me if you happen to see her? I can’t get through.”
“It’s the cell service out there. How about I take a drive and let her know.” He seemed so relieved to know who the killer most likely was, and I was relieved for him.
“Thank you so much,” I said.
“No, ma’am, thank you. I got your note.”
I cleared my throat. “Um, my note?”
“It’s okay. I know she was here and I know she’s gone.” His breath caught in his chest and he began again. “I’ll put a garden there for those girls. Something she would have been proud of.”
Damn. He must have seen me put the note in his pickup. “Thank you,” I said.
“It will be my pleasure.”
I hung up as Uncle Bob gaped at me. “Did we just solve this?”
I smiled at the gang. “I think we did.”
Gemma beamed. “I can see the allure, sis.” She offered me a quick hug. “It’s kind of intoxicating.”
“Yes, it is. And it’s even more so when you solve cases actually intoxicated.”
“You have to sully everything.”
“I do,” I said as she hugged me again. “I really do.”
The nursing home smelled like a fermented combination of bleach and urine. The scent stung my nose as I went up to the nurses’ station. We didn’t want to converge on the home, so only Wyatt, Uncle Bob, and I went in. The nurse behind the desk was busy with paperwork, but looked up when she saw Wyatt’s uniform.
“Can I help you?” she asked.
I spoke up first. “We’re looking for Saul Ussery.”
“Oh, are you family?”
“We’re here on official business,” Uncle Bob said, his tone too sharp for her to argue with.
“He’s in room 204. Down the hall, second door on the right.”
“Thank you,” he said.
We walked in just as a young nurse was putting him back to bed. Saul was about my height with a wide brow and tiny eyes. His pudgy face probably didn’t show his age as much as it would have had he been thinner. He looked like a character from a J. R. R. Tolkien novel.