When the results come up, it's no longer the distance that seems strange. Instead, it's that I'm not looking at a neighborhood or a city street. There's a house, but the old-fashioned white farmhouse is barely visible at the edge of the photo that came up. Most of the image is a baseball field carved into a cornfield.
“That is the fucking Field of Dreams,” I mutter.
I'm not a Hollywood expert or anything, but I'm fairly certain no one's putting their head down on the pitching mound to sleep at night.
“What the hell is going on?”
I add the name 'Ron Murdock' to the search engine but find no connection between the name and the movie. Or the state of Iowa. Or anything else that makes any sense.
Tucking that information in the back of my mind to simmer, I move on to the last page of registration cards. I'm fairly certain the blonde woman wasn't Joseph or Abernathy. The petty part of me wants her name to be something like Bambi or Sugar, but that isn't showing up. The only card left belongs to Andrea Layne. Assuming she isn't also lying, the address listed has her living just one town over from the hotel. I put it into the search engine just to make sure it doesn't come up as another movie icon or an empty field. Instead, it shows a modest house that reminds me of the ones built in the fifties for the soldiers growing their families after the war. Not exactly what some might immediately think when they looked at the woman cozied up to the police chief, but I have been on the job long enough to know people are rarely as predictable as we want them to be.
No one is listed on the registration card with Miss Layne, much less Chief LaRoche. That's not a surprise. The way Mirna spoke to him when he showed up after the shooting tells me she had no idea he was making himself comfortable in one of her rooms last night. Or at least today. She only checked in yesterday. My eyes scan over the card a few more times, taking in as much of the information as I can and hoping something more will pop out at me. It's obvious LaRoche is very friendly with this woman, but there's a clenching feeling in my gut that tells me it's more than that.
Chapter Eighteen
The sun is all the way down now, and the air feels thin and cold enough to shatter if I breathe too hard. But that doesn't stop me from adding another layer, tying my scarf around my mouth, and heading outside. Like every night in Feathered Nest, everything is eerily quiet. It isn't late. It's barely after when I'd usually eat dinner, but it feels like everything around me has totally shut down. The memory of the gunshots ring through my head as I step down off the porch and let the beam of my flashlight sweep over the ground in front of me.
It's not enough to chase me back into the cabin. That wasn't the first time I've been shot at, and I can't help but believe it's not the last, either. I just hope the next time isn't going to be tonight while I'm out in the woods. My phone rings as I make my way around the back of the cabin. It's a video call from Bellamy, and the wide smile she has when I first answer almost instantly melts to a concerned expression.
“Did your furnace go out again? I thought you just got that fixed.”
“Talking to Eric?” I ask. “I didn't realize the two of you have gotten so close.”
“It's just because you aren't here to be between us, so we ended up just kind of sliding into the space you left. Like when you put too much jelly on a peanut butter and jelly sandwich,” she offers.
“Exactly how much jelly-ing has been happening?” I raise an eyebrow.
“Not that much,” she assures me. “We just happen to know you have the bad habit of only giving each one of us pieces of what's going on. So, we started comparing notes.”
“Well, my furnace did not go out again. It's lovely and warm inside the cabin right now,” I tell her.
“Are you telling me you are not inside the cabin right now?” she asks.
She's curled up in her favorite plush white bathrobe on her white sofa. Bellamy likes things in very specific ways, and that's one of them.
“That would be what I'm telling you. I'm going into the woods behind the cabin,” I say.
“Don't you think it's a little cold for a nice after-dinner stroll? Not to mention it's darker than the inside of a witch's hoo-ha at a pumpkin festival?”
That is also one of them.
“I don't know what that means, B.”
“It's so dark, all I see is you. It's very fake documentary,” she says.
“Well, you're a step ahead of me. I can't even see myself. Let's hope my flashlight sticks it out.”
“What are you doing out there?” she asks.
“I'm checking on a theory,” I explain.
“What theory?”
“The last time I came out here, I found a path that leads straight to the train tracks where the two bodies were found. I didn't even notice it the first time I went out there to see the scene. I'm sure you know I asked Eric to look into some things for me.”
“He said something about trains,” she says.
“Right. I wanted to see the feed from the cameras on the trains that went down the tracks in the days before the girl was found. The police officially linked her murder to the others, but they haven't figured out exactly what happened, and from what I see, aren't really making a ton of progress, either. One of the biggest questions is why the killer would go to so much effort to hide all the others so they wouldn't be found, then just dump one right out in the open. It doesn't make sense,” I tell her.
Talking to her carries me the first several steps into the woods. Darkness closes around me.
“But they found another body, too, right? Close to there.”
“Yes. A man. His body was further up the tracks, but it wasn't nearly as mangled as hers.”
“Maybe he was trying to get attention,” Bellamy points out. “The killer wanted to show off a little, so he left the bodies where they would be found.”
“He was already getting plenty of attention. If he wanted more, he would have left one of the identified missing people out to be found. Maybe it's the opposite. Maybe he thought he was getting too much attention, and so he left the other body out for the specific reason of making them look connected. And to stop investigators from digging too deep into the first one. My point is, maybe this isn't what it seems,” I say.
“What do you mean?”
“Nobody really knows what happened to either of the bodies. They were too damaged to give any real conclusive evidence. But the running theory has been the girl was put on the train tracks so a train would hit her.”
“But that's not what you think happened.”
“No, I don't. The last time I came out here, I found a dog collar attached to a tree. It was deep in the ground, like it had been there for a while, and someone had tried to cover it with leaves. The crime scene pictures of what was left of the girl showed damage to her neck, like something was wrapped around it. There is absolutely no record of her for days before she was found. The police interviewed people from her hometown and from the bar here, and no one could remember seeing or speaking to her. There's a gap of time that isn't accounted for.”
“And you think she spent that time on the other end of a dog leash,” Bellamy muses.
“I think it's possible. The train videos don't show a lot. The cameras are positioned badly, and it's hard to really see much of anything. But I watched them closely, and after seeing the same thing a few times, I noticed something different. There's a flicker of movement. It's not much. But it's enough to make me believe Cristela Jordan wasn't killed and then dumped there, or even put on the tracks to die. I believe she was in the woods and managed to escape. She ran out of the trees in a panic and didn't realize the train was coming until it was too late. The train killed her when the corner of it hit her on the edge of the tracks. It dragged her for a while; then she tumbled to the side. That's where they found her.”