And There He Kept Her (Ben Packard #1)(87)

Both Gary and Packard looked at her, surprised.

“What? I worked the front desk at the garage for years. I know cars, thank you very much. That’s a mid-nineties Pontiac Grand Am. You can tell by the fluted panel on the side.”

“Jesse Crawford was driving a mid-nineties Pontiac Grand Am the night he and Jenny Wheeler disappeared,” Packard said.

“Those local kids that have been missing? Is that who you’re talking about?” Cora asked.

Packard nodded. The three of them stared at the car frozen on the screen. Cora was tense again. She grabbed the zipper on her vest and pulled it higher. “Could be another Grand Am,” she suggested.

“Start the video again,” Packard told Gary. After a second the wrecker drove off the side of the screen and was gone. “What about the camera in the back? Let’s look at the view from that.”

Gary clicked and brought up another window with the video that showed the view from the backyard camera. He moved the slider until the time lined up with the time from the other video, and they watched the wrecker’s headlights move down the property line. The junkyard was well out of the range of the camera and its night vision. All it could pick up was lights against a dark background. They could make out the headlights when the wrecker made a left, kept going well past the junkyard, then turned right and disappeared. “Where were they going? We don’t have nothing back there,” Cora said.

Packard kept what he knew to himself.

They went back to the other view, four times the speed, saw nothing happen for hours, and then suddenly Emmett Burr limped past the three garage doors, looking like he was fighting a current. He was lost in the dark under the porch overhang for a minute; then they saw him go back to his car and drive away. Gary let the video run for another couple of hours until the sun came up and the footage changed to color. Near the end, Cora came out the front door with a coffee cup in one hand, looking like she was checking if anyone was parked in the driveway. Gary stopped the video.

Cora was confused. “Where’d they go? Where’s Carl and the truck?”

Packard took his phone out and called Shepard. “Is McCarthy in the water yet?”

“Yeah, he’s been down ten minutes or so.”

“Stay on the line. I have a feeling he won’t be down long.”

Gary was saying, “Lots of people park on the road out here and cut through my property to hike down to those quarries in the summer.”

Packard left the two of them and stepped outside.

“Anything yet?” he asked Shepard.

“I can see his light now. He’s heading up.”

Packard listened as Shepard asked McCarthy what he found. He could hear the sound of McCarthy’s response but not what he said.

“Jesus Christ,” Shepard said.

“What is it?”

“He says there’s two bodies.”

Packard’s blood turned to ice. Jesse and Jenny. He’d promised Susan he’d find her daughter. Not like this. “Is it the boy and the girl?”

“Hang on a second,” Shepard said. Packard waited an eternity for Shepard to ask the question, then repeat back what he’d been told. “There’s no girl. He says there’s two vehicles in there. A maroon car lying on its side at the bottom. The trunk is partially open like it might have popped when it hit the water. He said there’s a male in the trunk who looks like he’s been dead a while. The second vehicle is a tow truck from Carl’s Auto. It’s almost on top of the car, ass end down. Carl is in the cab up against the windshield. Dave says he’s got what looks like a stab wound in his neck.”

Packard was too cautious to be relieved that there was no sign of Jenny. If Jesse was in the trunk of his car, where did that leave her? Just because she wasn’t in the pit didn’t mean she was alive. “No sign of the girl? Could she have been in the trunk and fallen out?”

He waited again while Shepard asked. “He doesn’t think so. The trunk is only a little ways open and the body is fully inside. He can go down for a second look if you want him to.”

“Tell him yes. Call and request fire, EMS, and crime scene. Make sure everyone knows where you are so they know what equipment to bring. Not a word about who’s down there over the radio. Understand me?”

“Got it.”

***

Carl Shaker had helped Emmett Burr hide a car that every cop in five states was looking for. So why was Carl dead? Something had gone sour between him and Emmett. That was the problem with trust among criminals. The quality of their character was incompatible with the integrity necessary not to murder each other.

So where was Jenny? Was she alive? Was she what had come between Emmett Burr and the one person he could trust to help him dump Jesse’s body?

Emmett had killed Jesse and Carl. Jenny had to be at Emmett’s. And right now Thielen was on her way there alone, knowing none of this.

Packard tried her phone and got no answer. He didn’t have the number of the lady from Lutheran Social Services to find out if Thielen was still there or had come and gone already.

He called dispatch and got Mac. “I need another deputy out here at the Shaker place. What’s Thielen’s status? Where is she?”

“She was ten twenty-three maybe fifteen minutes ago.”

“Where?”