“There was someone else.”
“At the cabin?”
She nods.
“Okay, so Ke-Kramer was there because he drove you there. And you already mentioned Krebs, so who else?”
“I don’t know his name. It was when…” She pauses for a moment. “When we were upstairs, in a bedroom.”
Then she falls silent again, undoubtedly reliving the ordeal.
I reach over and cover her hand.
“Where this man took you,” I prompt her gently.
“I heard an engine. Thought maybe I could get their attention and call for help. I was able to get away from…him. Saw a man on one of those four-wheelers coming out of the trees.”
“An ATV?”
“Yeah. He pulled up to the house so I started banging on the window. He looked up, but…”
“He didn’t help,” I fill in for her.
“No. When I heard footsteps coming up the stairs and saw the door open, I thought maybe…” She swallows hard and gives her chin a little jerk. “But he sat down on a chair in the corner to watch as…”
She gives her head a hard shake as if she’s trying to clear the mental image.
A loud bang from the sink has both our heads snap around to see Lee bent over, his arms braced against the counter, and his head hanging down.
“Hey,” I draw Melissa’s attention. “If I showed you some pictures, do you think you would recognize him?”
She shrugs, and I pull out my phone, ready to pull up a few photos I’ve been collecting, when Raj walks into the kitchen.
“I’ve gotta run,” she announces.
I glance at the clock on my screen and note it’s well past midnight.
“It’s the middle of the night.”
She grins. “I know, Matt’s agent friend arrived from Paducah. I’m meeting them downtown.”
As gentle and soft-spoken as Raj may appear, there is steel underneath. She’s a force to be reckoned with when she sets her mind to something, and what she wanted was an interview with Jamie Lyons.
Looks like she’s about to get it.
By the time she’s gone, Lee is back behind his laptop, a teapot, three mugs, a carton of milk, and a bag of sugar in the middle of the table.
“Can I show you the pictures?” I check with Melissa.
“Sure.”
I slide out of my seat and sit down beside her, locating the photos the CARD team took at the sex club, showing a few people going into the private room. But first I want her to look at a picture I took at breakfast at the center.
“I know you know these two.” I point at Krebs and Melnyk. “But how about this man? Do you recognize him?”
I indicate Russel Germain.
She nods, and I feel excitement surge.
“I’ve seen him before at The Youth Center,” she says. “But he wasn’t the one at the cabin.”
Dammit. I would have loved to nail that slick bastard.
“Okay. How about one of these guys?”
I hold my phone up so Melissa can see and start flipping through the surveillance pictures from the night at the club.
“Wait. Go back one?”
In the picture she asks me to return to is the man who was a few years ahead of me in school.
Fuck, I was supposed to have looked into him, but I never got around to it.
“He was wearing a beanie though,” she explains. “I didn’t know he was bald. I’ve never seen him at the center.”
“Who is it?” Lee asks and I turn the screen toward him.
“Marshall Browning. He’s the son of the former—”
But Lee doesn’t let me finish as he slams a fist on the table.
“Son of a fucking bitch. I knew it!”
TWENTY-FIVE
Opal
I shoot off a quick message to Mitch, letting him know I’m fine.
It warmed me to notice a text had come in from him, asking if I was okay. He must’ve heard from Jacob what happened at Lee’s house. I would’ve loved to have given him a quick call just so I could hear his voice, but we may be on to something and my gut tells me my time is better spent seeing where it leads us.
I look over Lee’s shoulder as he zooms in on the satellite image of Krebs’s mountain property.
On the screen, I recognize the clearing and part of the cabin’s roof, as well as the barn where we found the Yukon I saw barreling at me outside the library.
“Here, you can see the trail leading to the cliff where Krebs was found,” I point out on the image.
I’m able to follow the trail farther up the mountain until it abruptly makes a sharp left, veering back in the direction of the main road. About halfway down you can clearly see another structure. Much smaller than the Krebs cabin.
“Looks like a hunting cabin to me,” Lee suggests.
“She’s asleep,” Janey announces as she walks in from the family room and pulls the French doors closed behind her.
She’d come down at Lee’s outburst and was about to rip him a new one when she noticed Melissa huddled on the chair next to me.
With a gentleness she doesn’t usually put on display, she took the girl’s arm and guided her into the next room.
It didn’t escape me the reporter observed my friend’s uncharacteristic behavior with great interest.
Janey sat down on the couch with Melissa and appeared to talk to her softly before changing the channel on the TV to an episode of The Big Bang Theory.
“I’m glad. Come have a look, we may have something here.”
I wave her over.
“It’s got to be a hunting cabin,” she echoes Lee when she takes in the image on the screen.
“The girl said she saw an ATV coming from the direction of that trail,” I explain.
“The same trail we think Kendrick disappeared down?”
“Same one,” I confirm.
She nods. “Give me a minute to grab my laptop.”
It takes her all of ten minutes to find a title for the cabin and apparently a total of sixty-five acres surrounding it. Unfortunately, there’s a name on the title I don’t recognize.
Elizabeth Allen.
“Gotcha,” Lee mutters, opening up a new window on his screen. “There it is.”
I peer at the file’s small font, a reminder it’s time to get myself some reading glasses. The Excel file lists a bunch of names in the first column and I spot George Browning. The name Elizabeth Allen right beside it in the second column.
“George Browning’s late wife,” Lee clarifies. “Marshall Browning’s mother. She died in 2003.”
In the third column, beside Browning, I see an address which doesn’t match the hunting cabin we were looking at.
“Where is that?” I want to know.
“Cave Run Lake. It’s where Browning bought a property when he retired.”
Janey looks over her computer at Lee.
“Any reason you’ve been collecting information on Lanark’s former chief of police?” she asks with a healthy dose of suspicion.
“Yeah. The man is as dirty as the day is long, and I’ve spent years trying to prove it.”
His calmly delivered honesty has one of Janey’s eyebrows lift almost imperceptibly.