I paused for a second to see if there was a caveat to that sentence. When none came out, I said, “Thank you, Chief. I just want to help.”
“Please,” he said, smiling a little, almost in defeat. “Call me Uncle Roy.”
I laughed, relieved that all the cards were on the table and he was going to try to work with me instead of fight against me. “Very funny.”
“What do you want to see first?”
I shrugged. “Everything and anything connected to this case would be nice.”
“The Bureau did a fantastic timeline for us of the events of the night—on paper, digitally, and video. With the help of the state police and county sheriff’s office, we did over a hundred and forty interviews in the first week alone. Forty-seven people were at that party over the course of the night. The Feds pieced together pictures, videos, texts, live streams. I’m old. I never realized how documented people’s lives are now.” He opened a desk drawer and pulled out a flash drive. Holding it up, he told me, “It’s all on here. Including the connection chart. Take this.”
He was right about that. The first thing I’d done that morning was check my texts, and now my assumed-identity Instagram and Twitter feeds. Before I’d left for Kelly’s Falls, I’d had to tell my friends and family back home that I’d violated the police social media policy and had to deactivate my accounts or face suspension. But even virtually friendless, I still spent almost an hour every morning on social media. I was just as connected as an imposter as I had been in real life.
“I’ll go over this tonight,” I told him, picking the thumb drive off the desk where he had dropped it and putting it into my purse. “This will be a huge help.”
He slapped his palms down on his desk. “Right this way for the grand tour.” Crossing the room, he opened the office door for me. I walked back out into the front with him right behind me.
“Jack, we’re going for a little ride. I’m going to show my niece around our lovely town.”
The chief’s office must really have been soundproof, because things had gotten a little heated in there for a second, but his officer had no clue.
“You two have fun, boss,” he replied happily. He acted like it was a great treat to be left on his own at the station house.
“I’m taking my chief’s vehicle. If anyone needs me, call me on the horn.”
“You got it. ’Bye now,” he called after us as we walked out the back door.
I hopped into the chief’s new giant white Chevy Tahoe. Chief of Police was emblazoned across both sides, complete with the Kelly’s Falls official town seal of an oil rig against the yellow rays of the rising sun. I guess fracking didn’t have a cool emblem to put on their police patches yet.
He pulled out of the parking lot and headed down the road to Main Street. “Kelly’s Falls has a pretty simple layout,” he explained, waving to a white-haired man in front of Kilkenny’s Dry Cleaning. “Hey, Mr. Kilkenny!”
Mr. Kilkenny waved back and straightened the sandwich board in front of his shop.
“Main Street is the center of town, with three major side streets. You are now currently residing on Oakbridge. Going south, toward the school, we have Carlisle and then Bainbridge. That pretty much makes up the heart of downtown, so to speak. But right now, we’re headed north,” he said, swinging around in the parking lot of the supermarket.
“Where to?” I asked.
“To the residential section off Oakbridge, on the other side of Main where Olivia and Emma lived. Skyler lived down on one of the rural roads in the trailer park.”
I sat there taking in all the scenery and all the landmarks he pointed out. “This is really small-town America, huh?”
“You may think we’re a bunch of hicks, but at least we can walk the streets at night.” He paused for a second, then added, “Or at least we could until we lost those girls.”
“You think they’re dead, don’t you?”
The chief adjusted his hat and sighed. “You know, I hope and pray, we all hope and pray, but in my heart I know they’re dead. I’m not naïve enough to think after twelve weeks they’re going to show up at the Los Angeles City Mission, trying to call home.”
We pulled into a neighborhood of large, pastel-colored country houses. Almost all had big wraparound porches and spacious lawns. Even in the muddy March springtime, they seemed warm and inviting. The chief stopped in front of one of the biggest homes on the street.
“We can only stay a second. I know Mr. and Mrs. Stansfield are down at the location center at the church. They go there every day to coordinate the search effort. Emma Lansing’s house is right there.” He pointed to a similar house about five doors down.
I craned my neck around, trying to take in as much as I could without getting out of the vehicle. “This is the scene of the crime?”
“Yes. Emma’s car was parked right here when the Stansfields came home. Everything was fine. The girls were just gone.”
“No physical evidence? Nothing?”
“We accounted for every fingerprint in the house. Luminol tests came up negative for blood. We believe they got into a vehicle that pulled in the driveway, but it was slushy that night. No usable tire-track marks or even shoe prints.”
A brown sedan drove by, slowly, the driver watching us. “We better go.”
Chief Bishop backed out of the driveway and headed down the street. On the way, we passed an older white pickup truck driven by a guy with dark hair. The driver nearly broke his neck swiveling around to eyeball us. “That was close,” Roy commented, glancing back in the rearview mirror. “That’s Olivia’s older brother, Nick.”
“A narrow escape, huh?”
“Yeah, but I would have said I was just checking on the house. Nick is a great kid. He goes to school up at RIT in Rochester. He took the rest of the semester off to be with his folks through all this.” The chief turned down another road and added faintly, “A real good kid.”
“I wanted to ask you about Skyler’s boyfriend, Joe Styles.”
“That punk.” The chief rolled his eyes. “He works nights at Fitzgerald’s machine shop in town. Goes to Harris Community College under the adult education program to get his GED. He’s been a thorn in my side since the day I took this job.”
“Really?”
“He and Skyler got in a lot of trouble together.” He swung the truck around to Main Street. “She lives over in the Rainbow View Trailer Park, just over Hoyt Bridge on the south side of town. Down the road, west of that, is St. Mary’s Cemetery. That was where Joe decided to make some skeleton art. That kid is really something—into drugs, always picking fights. His old man, Frank, died in Attica. He got stabbed to death by another prisoner.”
“Can we go by Skyler’s place?”
“Sure. Hopefully Brandy Santana is sober today.”
We crossed over Hoyt Bridge and came upon the Rainbow View Trailer Park. It was a big, depressing mess. I watched row upon row of squat little box trailers pass by, some decorated with plastic pink flamingos on the lawn. The place was dirty, run-down, and shabby-looking. A bunch of kids played in the swampy grass, throwing mud at each other, while a mangy hound chained to a stake in the ground howled in someone’s yard.