Looking embarrassed, she nodded yes, then said, “But only the ones with assholes for parents.”
Perry looked at the screen, then at Quilla. “In fact, I have two missing person complaints on you!” He shifted his glare to me.
“You can call them missing person complaints,” she snapped. “But my mother overreacted when I stayed away one weekend after my stepfather hit me. The other time I had a fight with her about sex. I stayed at my friend’s house. So if most of your missing person complaints are for kids who stay away a day or two, they don’t count. How many real calls do you get about kids who leave and never come back?”
“Hard to say,” said Perry. “That’s what’s so damn frustrating about runaways. If a kid’s parents are considerate they’ll call and say their son or daughter came home. If the parents don’t call us we call them in a couple days and most of ’em are back. Some get arrested in other cities or they get bored or lonely and they show up on mommy’s doorstep. Then there’s the ones who never return.”
He lowered his voice, and displaying a rare sense of consideration, said, “Like your Aunt. We had her down as a missing person/probable runaway. There wasn’t much we could do. Nine years ago we didn’t have the kind of technology we have now. And we didn’t have the manpower to do any serious searching for your Aunt. Once we found out that your Aunt was the woman in the mausoleum, I pulled out her file. Nine years ago a call was made to the FBI regional office. There wasn’t a lot they… I… we could do. Even the most sophisticated law enforcement operations can’t do much with a missing person case. There’s so little to go on.”
Perry was behaving so decently to Quilla it took me aback. I kept waiting for him to ruin the moment with some ill-timed barb. But he continued to be kind in his words.
“Once I learned the identity of your Aunt,” he said. “I studied her file. I have no details. Not one specific fact. And if you don’t give me something, I want to tell you up front that I can’t see this case ever being solved.”
“All the more reason to consider our theory about the disappearance of Del’s girlfriend and Mrs. Thistle,” Quilla said.
Perry shook his head. “As far as I’m concerned, the investigation my father conducted twenty-four years ago solved that matter.”
“But without a body how can you be sure?” she protested.
“Lots of cases are tried and convictions gotten without a body,” said Perry. “As for Del’s girlfriend, this is all news to me. What’d you say her name was, Del?”
“Alyssa Kirkland.”
Perry punched a few keys on the computer. “And she disappeared fifteen years back?”
Perry punched a few more keys. Something appeared on the screen and he read it out loud. “Missing person report placed by her mother. Presumed runaway.” Perry wrinkled his forehead. “I don’t remember any Alyssa Kirkland from high school.”
“She didn’t go to Dankworth. Her family moved here when we were Seniors. She was a freshman in college that Fall. I didn’t even meet her until the following summer when she came home for vacation. That’s when we were together.”
“Then one day she just disappeared?”
“Yes. I didn’t know she was gone. We’d stopped seeing each other. There was no contact. Then I got a note from her in which she apologized for leaving so abruptly and I just assumed she took off. Her parents got a note too.”
Perry frowned. He suddenly looked angry. “Then why the hell did her parents file a missing person report if she sent notes to them and you?”
“Her mother didn’t think it was like Alyssa to just take off.”
“Is that how you felt?”
“No. She hated Dankworth. Didn’t get along with her father. Couldn’t stand the college she went to. All the while we went out she talked about getting out of Dankworth.”
Perry frowned again. “Then why did her leaving come as a surprise to you?”
“It didn’t. I mean it did… but not really… ”
“What the hell are trying to say, Del? So far, you’re painting a picture of a girl who wasn’t especially happy living in our fair town, wasn’t looking forward to going back to college, didn’t have a happy home life, and had just ended her summer romance. Why would she stick around? She said to hell with everything and everyone and took off.” He looked at Quilla. “Does that make sense to you or am I missing something?”
Quilla was speechless. I think she was so surprised that Perry had asked for her opinion, she couldn’t talk. “I, uh,” she stammered. “But you’re leaving one thing out. Something Del said on the way over here. Alyssa broke up with Del. He hadn’t spoken to her in three weeks. In her mind, the relationship was over.” She looked at me. “But like you said, Declass="underline" why would she send you a good-bye note, apologizing for leaving so suddenly? She didn’t owe you an apology. She didn’t owe you anything. If I dumped a guy there’s no way I’d send him a fucking postcard.” Quilla bit her lower lip and seemed to be thinking, formulating the words she wanted to use, making sure she got the phrasing right. “What if the killer didn’t know that Del and Alyssa broke up?”
Perry was expressionless. I wondered where Quilla was going with this.
“And because the killer thinks Del and Alyssa are still a couple,” said Quilla. “He sends Del a note, figuring that the brief message will make Del not be suspicious.”
“But Del was suspicious,” said Perry.
“Not at first,” said Quilla. As she spoke, she turned her head back and forth between Perry and myself. “Even though they’d broken up, Del was still in love with her, so he probably wasn’t thinking straight. The chick who dumps him suddenly sends him a note? It gives him hope. And there’s nothing like hope when you’ve been dumped by someone you still love. I think Del was so blinded by hope that he couldn’t let himself believe that something bad had happened to Alyssa. A note and then a postcard a few months later and he was in limbo.”
“Postcard?” said Perry.
“I got a postcard six months later. So did her parents.”
“So why would he think Alyssa was missing or some kind of crime victim?” said Quilla.
Perry looked at me. “But now, after all these years, you’ve decided she was murdered?”
I took a second to answer. “Yes.”
“And all because of this theory about the same guy killing her Aunt and Thistle’s wife?”
“It’s the most logical explanation I’ve heard so far to explain the disappearances.”
“Three women vanish in the course of twenty-four years,” said Perry. “Twenty-four years! You call that a pattern?”
Quilla and I looked at each other. In her eyes I could see her saying, “See, I told you so.”
“If a woman disappeared every year or every two years or even every five years for twenty-four years, then I could see a pattern,” said Perry. “But not three disappearances spread out over two-and-a-half decades.”
“We don’t know that there weren’t more,” I said. “How do you know that some of those missing people who never came back weren’t murdered by whoever killed her Aunt?” Perry said nothing. “And how do you know that the killer only took women from Dankworth? If every police department around here gets as many missing person reports as you, there could be dozens of names of girls who never were heard from again.”
Perry pointed at his computer. “Any serious missing person report gets bumped onto the network. I might be able to give this more credence if there were more to the pattern than the three women over twenty-four years.”