There was always the option of asking around town, but the longer he was in Daversville, the more he was growing suspicious of the town as a whole. After the appearance of Tall Boy and his cronies, it wouldn’t need an MIT graduate to realize it was a bad idea to draw attention to his quest to find Lila.
He could go back into the diner and question Agnes, but he doubted that she’d speak to him. In fact he was convinced it was her who’d sicced the boys on him. A few heavily suggested threats might work on a guy, but he wasn’t prepared to threaten an elderly lady, and besides all that, Agnes was in a public place and if he started getting heavy with her in front of witnesses, all it would take for his investigation to grind to a halt would be a call to the town’s cop.
If he was to get information from Agnes, it would have to be another way.
Chapter Four
Special Agent Zoey Quadrado flicked the blinker and made the turn. Daversville was only another five minutes away and she was looking forward to a relaxing shower and a clean bed. The journey from Atlanta after flying down from New York had been uneventful to the point of boring, especially so since she’d left the interstates and started weaving her way through the forests of Georgia. There had been mile after mile of tree-lined roads and little traffic to impede her progress. Apart from the fact she’d had to drive the first fifty miles with the windows open to remove the smells of fried food and body odor from it, the car she’d been loaned from the Atlanta field office was in decent enough condition.
Like the road ahead of her, Quadrado’s career was all mapped out in her head. The case she’d been handed was intriguing on one level and insulting on another. Fifteen women passing through the lumber town of Daversville had gone missing over the last four years. They’d travel through, maybe they’d stop for gas or something to eat at the diner, and would never be seen again. Their vehicles would vanish and any triangulation from their cell phones would show the missing women as having left Daversville before their cells hit another one of Georgia’s many blackspots.
The sheriff from Douglas had dispatched his detectives to Daversville on three separate occasions but they’d always come up blank. The locals hadn’t known anything and the deputy who kept order in the town was as non-plussed as everyone who’d been spoken to.
There were no transactions on the missing women’s cards in the town, which meant the only firm clue was that all their cells had shown them as having traveled on the road that passed through the lumber town. The latest to go missing, Lila Ogilvie, was the only person who’d been traveling with a companion. The boyfriend had made up a story about a warning from a server at the diner and about being run out of town. To Quadrado, this sounded too fanciful for her liking and she couldn’t help but wonder if he had something to do with Lila going missing. After all, statistics proved that most murders were committed by someone who knew the victim.
But Quadrado knew her initial theory that the area with its cell phone blackspots was a good place for people to drop out of society was sketchy at best, and she also knew that she’d have to uncover any decent leads for herself. While it was the kind of challenge she enjoyed, she’d have preferred a more high-profile case rather than being shunted out to the backwoods of Georgia.
The fact that the fifteen missing women fit a range of demographics left her without any obvious theories. They were a variety of different ages. Some had good looks and, without being cruel or judgmental, others didn’t.
No matter how she’d looked at it since she’d been handed the case last night, the only link Quadrado could find between the missing women was the town of Daversville. It may well be that they had joined some new cult or other. Whether it was a religious cult or a band of preppers readying themselves for the end of civilization didn’t matter. She’d find them, report back and earn the plaudits of her peers. What she feared most—though if she was honest with herself, made her blood pump that little bit harder—was the idea that the disappearances could be all due to a serial killer picking off lone travelers. If this Lila Ogilvie girl had been taken by this guy, had he made a mistake in selecting his next victim? Or had his confidence grown to the point where he no longer felt it necessary to only target those traveling alone?
The Senior Special Agent may or may not have known about the personal nature of the case for her. As part of her application for the FBI, she’d had to disclose her family history. Her mother’s little sister had left the Wisconsin farm that was the family home to go and get some groceries. And Aunt Janet had never returned. Her car was found in a parking lot a block from Medford bus depot and she was never heard of again. Quadrado had been two at the time and while she couldn’t remember her aunt, she’d grown up with a family unsure if a loved one had run off from choice or been abducted against her will. Even now, some twenty-plus years later, her family had no more information about where her aunt was than they did the day she vanished. It was this lack of answers for a grieving family that had compelled Quadrado to pursue a career in law enforcement.
It wasn’t ideal to arrive at a town late on a Saturday evening and begin an investigation on a Sunday morning, but she was working on the theory that the sooner she cracked this case, the sooner she’d be back in New York and in a position to impress her boss.
As she drew into town and looked for a parking lot, she noticed four youths hanging around a pickup. The look on their faces suggested they were discussing something a lot more serious than the local football team.
Chapter Five
The room above the bar at Duke’s wasn’t what anyone would call plush. A threadbare carpet surrounded a bed whose mattress sagged in enough places for it to form a landscape more rugged than the Rockies. The bedcovers were made from materials that had gone out of fashion before Nixon took office. However, when Fletcher gave them a tentative sniff, he wasn’t greeted with any scents that turned his stomach.
Fletcher was sure he’d slept in worse rooms, yet try as he might, he couldn’t recall when.
He dumped his bag on the nightstand and changed into a clean shirt after washing his face in the closet-sized bathroom. The water from the hot tap was lukewarm at best, but it was clean, so he was grateful for that smallest of mercies.
He guessed the room’s usual occupants would be those brought in to repair machinery used in the town’s lumber mill or in the woods supplying the lumber mill. Perhaps once in a while a traveling salesperson would need a room, but a lesson would be learned, and the salesperson would arrange accommodation in another town the next time they were in these parts.
While arriving on a Saturday evening was a bad idea in terms of getting access to public records, it was a great time to ask around a bar. It didn’t matter where you were in the world—and Fletcher had been to a lot of places—come the weekend, people wanted to socialize, hang out with friends and catch up on what was going on.
Fridays and Saturdays are when bars and restaurants are at their busiest. Duke’s was a small hotel with only a couple of rooms above the bar, and there were enough meaty smells filling the air for Fletcher to be confident Duke’s doubled as a place to eat.
Fletcher went down the stairs with the picture of Lila tucked in his shirt pocket beside enough dead presidents to loosen the tongue of even the most hardened drinker.