grandpa referred to it, had only come to light after Grandma Louisa had passed away. Then it had all been revealed, how he’d loved another woman, had gotten involved in her life, how he’d nearly destroyed his marriage.
Carmen had last been seen, just a few days after her fortieth birthday, in West Falls, a town not more than a twenty-minutes’ drive from Lancaster Falls. She’d once taught at a college in West Falls, but hadn’t been back to town for years. That day, she’d been in a sedan driven by a man no one seemed to be able to identify. There was no evidence as to why she’d been driving through West Falls, but she’d never been seen again. Grandpa’s notes spoke of a corrupt system of officials in Lancaster Falls, a police department that wasn’t any help at all.
When I’d approached Bryan, to ask to be attached to the Lancaster Falls case, he had sighed, but he hadn’t dismissed my request to be assigned to the task force out of hand. I could recall his warning word for word.
"Your involvement in this is coming down from high, from people who knew Special Agent Tobias Ruskin and respected your grandfather for the kind of man he was. They want your input. They have the files Agent Ruskin created on the case, the same as you. This isn’t a trek into your family’s past. This is a multi-team operation with a potential serial killer.”
I wanted to find out what had happened to Carmen Kreuger, and in doing so, give Grandpa Toby some kind of peace.
I pulled myself back to the here and now and cut the engine. The air conditioning went silent, and the heat it had held at bay began to surge. I'd driven most of this journey through wicked thunderstorms, but even though they were meant to break the heat, they hadn't managed it yet. There’d been rain so heavy I’d had to pull over on two occasions. When the storms finished, any evidence they'd even been there was gone as soon as the heat returned; the towns I’d driven through drying in an instant as the rain dissipated in steam from the sidewalks.
I waved at the kid in the window who was tall and skinny, with dark hair. He appeared startled at the action, but then he grinned and waved back. He made a gesture to indicate a question as to whether I was coming in, and I gave him a thumbs-up, but I also tapped my watch to indicate later and then looked away.
I wasn’t ready to get out of the car yet. I'd always been the shy kid at school, the one who’d sat at the back of the class and never said boo to a goose. It had taken years of focus and work for me to emerge from my shell. I could work with others to the point where no one thought of me as anything other than confident. On my downtime, however, I was a person who craved peace and a good book, but I worked up my Special Agent persona to the best effect when it mattered.
Still, I could take comfort in the fact that I wasn’t the guy at the top of the food chain here. There would be other members assigned to the team, likely reporting to Bryan himself, starting with Avery. The FBI didn't do things by half, and this was a complicated burial site. Also, we had the issue that this case was already in the papers; the whole shitfest was journalist heaven.
I might not need to do much coordinating, so I didn’t know why I was sitting in my damn car, panicking that everything rested on my shoulders alone. There were two ways this could go. The wider team, plus any ancillary staff requested to attend, could connect the dots and finish everything. Or maybe they’d find out that the women identified through their remains had no connection at all. It could be that the sinkhole was merely a convenient place to dump bodies in this area, and they were individual unlinked crimes, the same as how a river might hold secrets of murders going back centuries. There’d been one single thing in the pathology to indicate a signature from the killer, one common finding that led us to think serial killer though. A blade of some sort had cut the victim’s necks, deeply through skin and muscle so they would have been dead before disposal—the only