Colder Than Death

There were two popular theories as to why the body was never found. Kyle Thistle either cut it into little pieces and scattered them in public trash cans all over the county, or he weighted down the corpse and sunk it to the bottom of Dankworth Lake.”

“Was the bottom of the lake ever checked?” asked Quilla.

“They dragged it three different times. Nothing.”

“So it’s not proven that it’s there,” she added.

“Back then the lake had lots of fish. Hungry fish.”

“And how did they know that the body was cut up?”

“They didn’t. That was a theory that came about because of a witness who saw Kyle Thistle dropping a black plastic bag into a public can.”

“What’s so bad about that?” said Quilla.

“People who live in their own homes don’t drive into town and dump garbage in public cans.”

“But there’s no concrete proof that what Kyle Thistle was dropping into the garbage were parts of his wife’s body.”

“Right,” said Perry.

“And was it proven a hundred percent that the guy the witness saw was Kyle Thistle?” said Quilla.

He adjusted himself in his chair. “What the hell is this leading to?”

“Okay,” I said. “Kyle Thistle’s wife disappeared twenty-four years ago. Brandy Parker disappeared nine years ago. And you may not even be aware of the person I’m about to mention, Perry, but… ” I caught myself. For an instant I couldn’t believe that I was about to speak of Alyssa as if she were dead. “Uh…another girl disappeared fifteen years ago. Alyssa Kirkland.”

Perry wrinkled up his face. “Doesn’t ring a bell. But I wasn’t on the force fifteen years ago. I was in college. Was there a missing person report filed?”

“I don’t know.”

“Who was she?”

“His girlfriend,” blurted Quilla. “We suspect she might be another victim of the guy who killed my Aunt and Virginia Thistle. We think there might be a pattern.”

“You think?” Perry smirked. “Where’s the pattern?”

“Isn’t it obvious?” said Quilla. Every eight or nine years a woman disappears and is never heard from again.”

I considered telling Perry about the letter and postcard I received from Alyssa, but decided not to mention it just yet for fear of him latching onto it and trying to use it to diffuse the theory.

“This opens up all kinds of possibilities,” said Quilla. We think it’s possible that Del’s girlfriend and Gretchen’s mother might be like my Aunt — hidden in old mausoleums at the cemetery. Who’s to say that whoever the killer is didn’t hide all his victims there? In fact, if we’re right about the pattern, there might even be another woman in the last year or two whose family thinks she ran away from home when she’s really dead. For all we know there could even be a bigger pattern. Maybe the killer murdered a woman every five years or three or every year. There’s no telling how many women could be lying in mausoleums at Elm Cross cemetery.”

Her enthusiasm was bordering on overkill. I was afraid she would turn Perry off. “Quilla, maybe we should concentrate on the three victims for now,” I said.

“Maybe we should concentrate on one victim,” said Perry. “Brandy Parker. I’m not interested in a case that was over a quarter of a century ago or a case I never even heard of.”

“Perry, I don’t want to tell you how to do your job…”

“Then don’t.”

“I have a gut feeling about this. Please hear me out.”

“If this gut feeling starts to get boring, I stop listening. Go ahead.”

“Alright. I guess it would help to know if you have records of missing person or runaways.”

“This year alone we’ve had forty-one,” Perry said.

“That many in a town the size of Dankworth?” I said, incredulously. There were roughly twenty-five thousand people who lived here.

“You’d be surprised,” Perry said. He leaned forward and pushed a couple keys on the computer on his desk. A list of names appeared on the screen. “We have husbands who go on a weekend drunk. Wives who have affairs and run off. Lonely women who live with their bossy parents and get tired of it, so they run away with a trucker. Of course, it’s mainly teenagers. Kids from thirteen to nineteen are always disappearing for a weekend, a week, some for six months.” He looked at Quilla. “Any of your crowd ever take off?’

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?”