“Jayme’s hair is lighter, more blond,” Genevieve said, relief in her voice. “And the dress, it could be, but we’re not sure. She had one something like that, but maybe different.”
“We don’t believe this is Jayme, but we want to make sure,” I explained. “Would you be willing to give us some of the cells from inside your mouth, Genevieve? We want to compare DNA.”
Jayme’s mother agreed. Max swabbed the inside of her cheek, and we said goodbye. As she turned to leave, she looked at me. “If that’s not Jayme, do you think she’s safe somewhere? Maybe in Salt Lake like the police chief told us?”
“I don’t know,” I said. “We’re going to try to find out.”
As soon as the door closed behind the Coombs women, I turned to Max. “I was at Alber PD earlier. The chief wasn’t in. Can you try to reach him?”
“Yeah.” He pulled out his cell, dialed the number, and put the phone on speaker.
“Gerard,” Max said when the chief answered. “Clara and I have a question. We just had Genevieve Coombs in here. She says she reported Jayme missing to you in May. Did she do that?”
Barstow huffed. “Max, you’re questioning me?”
“We need to know, Gerard. We’re trying to pin some of this down.”
“Yeah, she talked to me. Told me what happened, that Jayme had disappeared or taken off. I made some calls to the usual places, the youth centers and stuff. I called a place in Salt Lake, some crisis center. A woman told me Jayme was there. So I gave the phone number to Genevieve.”
“Why didn’t you tell us that earlier, Chief?” I asked.
Barstow sounded furious. “I didn’t see where it was any of your business, Detective. The bottom line was that Jayme wasn’t missing. Like her mother told you, she ran off.”
“Gerard, we have a dead body. Everything is our business.” Then I thought about my own phone call with the crisis center. “How did you find that out so quickly? I’ve checked with that organization about the girls. They couldn’t offer much help. They don’t have a lot of computerized records. And the woman I talked to didn’t have any information on Jayme.”
“You think I’m not telling you the truth?” he railed. “Max, what the hell is this?”
“Clara’s not questioning your truthfulness, Gerard,” he said. “But we need to understand what’s happening.”
Silence, and then Gerard Barstow said, “Clara, listen. I didn’t get into the particulars with the woman. But I talked to a lady there. And she said someone staying at the shelter from Alber knew Jayme and saw her at the center. This was just a couple of days after the girl left town. Maybe she moved on. But that day they said she was there.”
We hung up. There was still so much we didn’t know. I was frustrated that Alber PD’s chief hadn’t told us everything earlier, but I tried to put that to the side. All I could do was move forward. “Let’s file missing persons reports on Eliza and Jayme and circulate them to the media. We have photos of both girls, the dates of their disappearances and descriptions of how they went missing.”
“I’ll get right on it,” Max offered.
“While you do that, I’ll skim the files I brought,” I said, pointing at the mounds sitting on the table. “Then we’re going to visit my family.”
Thirty-One
“I don’t think you should keep her chained up like that,” Jayme said, while Delilah listened through the vent. The man had returned a few minutes earlier. As soon as he walked in her room, Jayme turned the conversation to Delilah. “You’re gonna make that girl hate you if you treat her bad, mister. Why don’t you treat us better? Then we’d maybe learn to care about you.”
Delilah and Jayme had come up with their plan while the man was gone. To carry it out they needed two things: to have Delilah unchained, and for them both to gain more freedom in the house. Once the chains were off and he let his guard down, they might find a way to escape.
“You girls don’t need to care about me,” the man said. “That doesn’t matter.”
“I thought you wanted us to be a family,” Jayme said. “Ain’t I your wife? That girl upstairs, when she gets older, you’re gonna marry her, right?”
“I’m gonna marry her soon. I’m not waiting much longer. She’s old enough,” the man scoffed.
Upstairs, Delilah felt a wave of revulsion and her skin chilled.
“When do you think?” Jayme asked.
“Soon as I get a few things done,” he said. “Some things I have to take care of came up. Gotta handle those first.”
“You don’t want to marry her chained, do you?” Jayme prodded.
The man didn’t say anything that Delilah could hear, but there was some murmuring. She strained hard, listening. “If we was a family, you could trust us. We could cook for you, take care of you, like we were trained to take care of a husband,” Jayme said. “Don’t you want us to be a real family, with babies and all?”
“Babies?” he repeated.
“Yeah,” Jayme said. “That girl and me could take care of you. Wives do that for husbands. If we’re gonna be living here the rest of our lives, like you say we are, I think it’s better if we become a family.”
“How do I know you two won’t try to get away?” he asked.
The girl stared wide-eyed at him. “Because we know what you’d do. You told us you’d kill us and our families. We wouldn’t risk that.”
“I would,” he said. “Kill you all.”
“If we were a real family, if you were our husband, we wouldn’t want to leave,” Jayme argued. “Wives take up for their husbands. Like my mom always told me, women obey their men.”
The man said, “I’ll think on it.”
A short time later, Delilah heard a door close downstairs, as
