Go into the first store or bar and call a cab.
Mandy had never answered and her boyfriend had called Virginia police.
Investigators soon determined that Mandy’s hotel room key was never used after she’d texted her boyfriend. Records showed no activity on her phone, bank and credit cards at any point after her last text. Mandy had vanished. Until four years later, when her remains were found in a shallow grave near a barn in New York.
She compared Mandy’s case to what had happened to the first victim, Bethany Ann Wynn, aged nineteen when she went missing. Bethany was last seen leaving her part-time job at a mall. She was waiting for a bus to her home in suburban Hartford, Connecticut. Both cases were miles apart but seemed to fit a pattern: young women who’d vanished while alone in vulnerable places.
Kate’s heart skipped a beat when she felt a hand on her lap.
“Mom, can I have some cookies?”
She smiled at Grace.
“Just one. Then brush your teeth and reach back, like the dentist said.”
Kate sighed, then resumed reading.
It appeared that both Bethany and Mandy had been stalked. Was there a connection to their financial records and the data center where Nelson worked? What was his real name? Did he have a tie to Denver, or was everything circumstantial? Kate needed to do a lot more digging but it had to wait, because right now she had to pull a story together.
In the older news articles she saw that from time to time, Mandy’s mother, Judy Bryce, had spoken to the Charlotte Observer.
The keys on Kate’s keyboard clicked and within a minute she had a listing in Charlotte and called it, hoping that Brennan had notified the family. The line rang five times before a man answered.
“Hello, my name’s Kate Page. I’m a reporter with Newslead, the wire service in New York.”
“Yes.” His tone was neutral.
“Would it be possible to speak with a relative of Mandy Marie Bryce? It concerns the news release issued a short time ago by police in Rampart, New York. I take it you’re aware of it?”
“Yes, we’re aware.”
“Would you be a relative, sir?”
“Me? No, you want Judy. I’m a friend of the family, hang on.”
The sound of a hand over the phone’s mouthpiece and muffled words about a reporter in New York.
“I’m Judy Bryce, Mandy’s mother.”
“My condolences for your loss, Mrs. Bryce,” Kate said, repeating her introduction and explanation for calling before requesting Mrs. Bryce reflect on her daughter for her news story.
“My Mandy was a selfless angel who always put everyone’s needs before hers.”
Kate underlined those words in her notes. As she continued talking with Judy, the older woman said her devotion to her faith had helped her deal with her daughter’s tragedy.
“It may sound funny, even cold, but when she first went missing, I knew in my heart that I’d never see her again.”
“How did you know?”
“I can’t explain it, but a mother just knows, or maybe God let me know. When Mandy was ten, she took a bad fall down the stairs. In the hospital, seeing her in the bed, I had this powerful, crystalline feeling that I was going to outlive her. I just knew it. I—I—I’m sorry.” Judy stopped to choke back a sob. Kate overheard her say something to the man at her end that she was okay to go on. Then she came back to Kate. “Deep in my heart I just knew that when Mandy disappeared, I’d lost her forever. The pain will never go away, but I’m at peace with it now. We’re making arrangements to bring her home.”
Struggling with her own emotions, Kate opened up to Judy about her personal connection to the story, about Vanessa and how she couldn’t give up her feeling that she was somehow still alive. After listening, Judy gave Kate advice.
“Trust your heart. It’s telling you there’s hope. Hang on to that.”
The woman’s unexpected compassion for Kate, when she was the one who’d intruded on her pain, was somehow therapeutic. Kate then asked if Mandy had any ties to Bethany Ann Wynn in Hartford, or Carl Nelson or Vanessa, or Alberta or Denver?
There were no links, Judy said.
After hanging up Kate sat alone in the kitchen with her elbows on the table and her face in her hands, as if to stem the emotion draining from her. Calls to the bereaved were never easy. They always cost Kate a piece of her soul.
Get to work.
Kate marshaled all of her concentration and threw herself into writing her story as fast as she could. She didn’t think there was much of an exclusive angle to it but didn’t care. It brought Mandy Marie Bryce to life, letting readers know what the world had lost. Kate looked at Mandy’s picture and, for a moment, smiled back at her.
She pressed Send and filed her story.
Then Kate joined Grace, who was on the sofa watching a movie about puppies. She put her arm around her and for a moment tried not to think about missing women, shallow graves and monsters.
“Ouch, Mom, you’re scrunching me too tight!”
“Sorry, honey.”
As Kate’s mind raced back to…the mountains, the river, Vanessa’s hand—letting go…her cell phone vibrated. Thinking it was likely Reeka with some problem with her story, she was inclined to ignore it. But the area code was for Colorado and she answered.
“Hi, Kate, Will Goodsill in Denver.”
“Yes, hi, Will.”
“I found something in my notes that may help you.”
CHAPTER 31
Lost River State Forest, Minnesota
“You come up here for the birding?”
Zurrn didn’t expect the attendant pumping gas into his van to start a conversation. He was in Pine Mills, a village that skirted the state forest near the Canadian border.
The forest was known for bird-watching.
It was dusk. Bishop’s General Store and Gas, where he’d stopped, was the only sign of life. The attendant, “Ferg,” according to the smudged name patch on his shirt, was chatty.
“That’s right,” Zurrn said to his side-view mirror.
“I figured.” Ferg clamped on
