Shattered Secrets (Cold Creek #1)(23)
She shook her head hard and sniffed twice sharply. “It’s just that I thought he might be the one, so I tried to jolt something loose in my brain. Maybe he or Marva loves kids and so they take them, I don’t know. He gave me the creeps, but I can’t recall one bad thing about him. Sorry, Gabe,” she said, wiping her wet nose with the back of her hand, “but I don’t think I’m going to be any help at all, when I want to so bad. But maybe the cornfield trip will work.”
He reached over to squeeze her shoulder. Then she got a tissue out of her purse and blew her nose. Tess’s handling of Dane impressed him. Here he’d thought she was timid and broken, but the way she’d just dealt with a potential suspect—what a gutsy girl! He’d joked about making her a deputy, but he needed her, now in more ways than one.
8
After he dropped Tess off, Gabe drove to the crime scene. He parked on the street because he’d put up police tape in the alley. He’d finally contacted Sam Jeffers, who was bringing his dog, Boo, to track Sandy’s scent—he glanced at his watch—in around ten minutes.
Going in the front door, he had to wade through a crowd of about a dozen people, two with news cameras on their shoulders, others thrusting cell phone recorders at him. He’d assigned Jace to do follow-ups on various vans that used the alley, food delivery for the Kwik Shop, the garbage collection truck, even the security vehicle that picked up money from the bank. Not that he thought they’d taken the girl, but what had they seen? A particular vehicle? Someone who didn’t belong?
As the small crowd started to pepper him with questions, he held up both hands. “We’re working on finding evidence and a suspect to lead us to the kidnapped girl. That’s my only statement right now. There will be a press conference tomorrow.”
“Anything different this time, since you’ve made no progress on finding the others? Is Teresa Lockwood back to help with your investigation?” a woman with horn-rimmed glasses, crimson lipstick and a pen stuck behind her ear demanded as she thrust her cell phone in his face.
Deciding not to give them a sound bite to broadcast, he said, “I promise a press statement at the conference tomorrow morning. Excuse me please.”
The questions didn’t stop. Gabe scanned the faces. It was common cop wisdom that some criminals loved to hang around the scene, fed off it, got high on it, but he didn’t see any locals. No, there was one woman, a good-looking redhead who held up a large poster that read Hug Your Kids More! She kept trying to move behind Gabe to get on camera. Her name was Erika something. She was the social director at the Lake Azure Community Lodge, who did a lot of activities for children there and was a friend of Marian Bell. He recalled that Erika drove in from Chillicothe every day.
“I know you don’t have any kids of your own, Sheriff,” she called to him. “So do you really think you can feel what the parents of the kidnapped girls are going through? Thanks to no progress on this string of abductions, people are starting to think Cold Creek is not a good place to raise children. The mayor’s concerned it will bring real estate prices down lower than they already are. Little Amanda Bell and now this child are both—”
“Both getting a lot of attention to locate them. Local law enforcement is working with the cooperation of the state Bureau of Criminal Identification and Investigation, so, as I said, if you’ll excuse me, we’ll get back to that.”
“Any new suspects this time—” a man’s voice pursued Gabe as he ducked under his police tape, went inside, closed and locked the shop door. Ducking the flying witches, he saw Vic was sitting at the sales counter going through receipts.
Without looking up, Vic called to Gabe, “I’m not above doing grunt work. Been going over the civilian tips coming into your office, including from some psychics, and those are usually off-the-wall, but got to weed them out. Right now I’m checking credit card names of recent shoppers who could have seen Sandy, going back a couple of weeks. Glad you got through running the gauntlet out there. Man, you’d think a rural place like this wouldn’t attract so many media vultures, but we’ll have the national big boys in here if we don’t turn something up fast. Get anything from Tess Lockwood?”
Gabe felt he’d gotten a lot from her, some professional, but a lot personal. “In about an hour, we’re going to reenact her abduction on-site, what led up to it, see if we can spring some memory loose. She’s all in to help. Your old friend Dane Thompson flagged down the cruiser and challenged me to lay off before I even went near him. He also insisted on saying hi to Tess, but she handled him great, even though she admitted he shook her up bad.”
Vic finally looked up from his pile of papers. “Shook up because she recalled something about him?”
“Because she didn’t.”
“I swear, I sometimes wonder if Dane and that taxidermist friend of his could be in cahoots—John Hillman. I used to picture them mounting dead girls and hiding their bodies in one of those animal graves.”
Gabe shuddered. “You should see Dane’s house and cemetery now. Lots of money poured in. State-of-the-art.”
“Oh, I will see it.”
Vic was shaking his head as he went back to skimming sales slips. “I remembered that taxidermist’s name because he was my number two like for Tess’s kidnapper. So give me an update on Dane Thompson, your dad’s top pick for the suspect.”