Elizabeth Heiter - Vanished

“Over there,” Jack called, pointing, and Tomas could see it, too, floating at the far end of the marsh. An industrial-size black garbage bag, with something heavy weighing it down. Had it not gotten tangled in the reeds, it probably would have sunk.

“Shit.” The caller was right. It did look like it could be a body. A small body.

He’d come across enough dead bodies when he’d worked homicide in Atlanta—including a couple in the garbage. He’d taken the job in quiet Rose Bay, hoping to see fewer. And that was what had happened. But the child cases were always the hardest. If Brittany Douglas was in here, it would rank up there with the worse cases he’d handled.

Tomas wiped a hand across his forehead and it came back wet with perspiration from temperatures that were pushing ninety, at 8:00 a.m. He forced his feet to move faster, splashing through the murky water, until he reached the bag.

Jack got there ahead of him, but he waited, looking apprehensive. “Should we try dragging it out before we open it?”

In answer, Tomas pulled the switchblade from his pocket.

“What if it’s just the air in the bag keeping it afloat?” Jack asked, but it was too late, because Tomas had already run the knife through the top of the bag.

It deflated slightly, letting out a putrid smell. Jack adjusted his stance the way Tomas had seen him do dozens of times at crime scenes in preparation for something he didn’t want to see.

Tomas folded the knife and stuffed it back in his pocket, then slipped on a pair of plastic gloves. He tore the bag open wider with his hands and things started spilling out. A perfectly good basketball. A filthy old pillow. Some green slimy substance he couldn’t identify.

He braced his feet wide in the gunk on the marsh floor and stuck his gloved hand into the bag, feeling for anything that might have been a body. His fingers pushed through cans and tissue and a rubber ball, but nothing in the bag had ever been alive, other than the maggots feeding on old Chinese takeout.

“It’s nothing,” he told Jack, who rocked back on his heels with a relieved sigh.

“What a waste of time,” Jack complained, pivoting gracelessly and plodding back toward shore.

Tomas sighed, shoved the spilled trash into the bag and hefted it over his shoulder. It weighed far less than a body, but it felt a thousand times heavier as he followed Jack back toward a town demanding answers he didn’t have.

* * *

The tide raced greedily at Evelyn, soaking the bottom of her jeans as she walked toward the sand dunes shrouded by long grass. From the main part of the beach, the area was accessible only to the adventurous. To get here, Evelyn had clambered over an outcropping of rocks, fighting for purchase on the slick surface. Combined with the dunes to her right, this was an unlikely spot for beachcombers. For someone trying to hide a body, though, it might be appealing.

Evelyn pushed determinedly toward the dunes. The wind whipped sand around, like little needles dancing on her skin, and the waves crashed loudly into the rocks.

She’d chosen a spot away from the other searchers this morning, needing time alone to think. About Walter Wiggins and Darnell Conway. About the trickier aspects of her profile.

She hadn’t been to this spot since before Cassie had gone missing. It had been Cassie’s mom who’d shown them how to get here. Instead of risking the rocks, they’d come through the dunes. To a twelve-year-old, they’d seemed to go on forever, but then they’d arrived at this little stretch of beach, and it had been like their own private world.

She’d thought about it for the first time earlier today, and realized it had only been a month before Cassie’s abduction that they’d come here. Maybe he’d followed them. Maybe he’d made it his private world, too.

A shiver raced through her, as hard as the wind ripping strands of hair from her bun.

“Hey!”

The unexpected voice made Evelyn’s head snap up. Emerging from the dunes was Darnell Conway.

She felt a new sense of unease. Had he followed her out here?

Evelyn’s hand grazed her hip, where her SIG Sauer rested reassuringly. Her holster had rubbed the skin underneath it raw in the South Carolina sun, but she never went anywhere without it.

After leaving Darnell’s house yesterday, she’d done some more digging and learned he’d kicked his girlfriend, Kiki, out of his house two years ago. It was possible he’d stopped the abductions after Cassie eighteen years ago because Kiki had started to suspect. Now, if he had decided to go back to his old ways, there’d be no one around to notice anything.

As Darnell walked toward her, an almost lazy swagger to his stride, Evelyn watched his hands for any sign of a weapon. But they swung loosely at his sides, empty.

“It’s Evelyn Baine, from the FBI, right?” Darnell asked, an artfully blank expression on his face.

“What are you doing here?”

A hint of a smile curved one corner of his mouth, and a predatory gleam flickered in his eyes. “Well, after you and that officer told me about the missing girl, how could I not help with the search?”

“Don’t you have to work?”

“I’m sure you know I work in sales. From home. I can set my own schedule.”

He stepped closer and Evelyn continued walking, careful to keep him in her line of sight. “Why here?”

“The dunes?”

“Yeah. The cops were assigning searchers to groups.”

“You’re not in a group,” Darnell said, lengthening his stride and moving close enough to give her a whiff of his aftershave. “Should you be out here all alone?”

His tone was neutral, but his words were calculated, intended to intimidate.

Evelyn felt her jaw tighten as she strode up the first sand dune instead of heading back toward the rocks. She’d need both hands for that climb, and with Darnell next to her, she was keeping her gun hand free.

Either he wanted to flaunt his guilt, thinking he’d never be caught, or he was just one of those guys who got off on being aggressive, got power out of trying to bully others.

“Should you ?” she tossed back, wanting him to know he didn’t scare her.

Darnell kept pace with her, his expression shifting in a way that told her he liked the challenge. “What’s the point of searching with the group? The more area we cover, the more likely someone is to find this little girl, right?”

Or the easier it would be to hide a body, with the convenient excuse of being out searching. Some killers liked to be the ones to “discover” their victims. And if Darnell had, in fact, killed his girlfriend’s daughter twenty years ago, he was one of them.

A sick feeling roiled in her stomach. Was she going to find Brittany in these dunes? Was Cassie here somewhere, too?

She clenched her fists and intentionally slowed, so Darnell could pick the route. If he wanted to lead her to the bodies, pretend to find them, she’d go along with it.

His eyes narrowed slightly as she allowed him to get in front of her. It was as though he could read her. As though he knew exactly what she was doing.

She half expected him to call her on it, but instead he suggested, “Let’s go this way,” and led her deeper into the dunes.

Almost immediately, he started moving faster. He probably had ten inches on her, so his strides were much longer.

Was he trying to wear her out, make her easier to overpower once he got her deep into the dunes?

She kept a careful distance between them as they crested one dune after the next. Darnell was breathing heavily, his T-shirt soaked through and stuck to him, outlining biceps bigger than her thighs.

“Kinda sick, isn’t it?” Darnell wheezed after ten minutes of silence.