I heard that you two met with McNally.”
“More like he met with us.” Frowning slightly, Scott threw a look Glenn’s way. “Are you drunk?”
“Workin’ on it,” Glenn said, wishing they’d both just go away so he could continue his drinking in peace.
It wasn’t about to be.
Renee and Scott discussed McNally for what felt like eons before they headed out together.
As soon as the door closed behind them, Glenn drew out the bottle and sloshed his glass a hefty refill.
He just wanted to stop thinking.
Chapter Fourteen
Mac rubbed his face as he sat at his desk, poring over all the details from twenty years ago, trying to mesh the past with what the Preppy Pricks recalled now. He’d been at it all day and should hang it up. But the station was quiet now and he had time to himself, time to concentrate. Not that being alone was helping. There was nothing new. Nothing he could grasp on to. It was all just as it had been. Maybes. Possibles. Tiny mysteries. Nothing concrete and credible.
He’d listened to the cassette tapes he’d taken of their interviews twenty years ago and thought how young their voices sounded, how young his own voice sounded. He wasn’t taking audio notes now, though he supposed he should. Instead, he wrote copious notes on the interviews from today, comparing them to the tapes and chicken scratchings he’d jotted down at the time of Jessie’s disappearance.
Now he glanced at the more detailed report from the lab that had been tossed on his desk earlier that day. No DNA results. Just more about the bits of detritus found at the scene. The little bit of white plastic turned out to be a teensy bit of oyster shell—no prints on it.
Mac thought about that hard. Oyster shell…from the beach? Was it significant? Was it even related to the victim in the shallow grave?
And then the thought he’d tried to come up with when he’d been interviewing Hudson surfaced. It had been prompted by Hudson’s mentioning a weekend getaway. Mac’s mind had touched on a trip to the beach. And that reminded him of something about a guy—a caller who, twenty years earlier, after seeing mention of Jezebel Brentwood’s disappearance on the news, claimed to have picked her up hitchhiking several weeks before. It had seemed superfluous to the girl’s disappearance and Mac had pushed the incident aside, deeming it not that important. Her parents had a cabin in some little burg on the coast, and he’d assumed she’d been coming back from there.
Now Mac meticulously combed through his notes till he found the small information he’d written on the stranger. He remembered how impatient he’d been. How little he’d cared for any information that took him away from the Preppy Pricks. He’d been so hotheaded, with his head stuck up his ass in those days. A young buck determined to nail one of those kids.
Hell.
He reread the passage. The stranger was a man named Calvin Gilbert who lived outside of Seaside and made a living selling firewood from an old pickup. He traversed Highway 26 from Astoria, Seaside, Cannon Beach, and a string of smaller coastal cities through the Coast Range and nearly to North Plains and Laurelton. He happened to catch a news report about Jessie on his television and he called the Laurelton police and was connected to Mac.
Re-examining his notes, Mac could almost hear the guy’s voice again. “I picked ’er up outside of the cutoff to Jewell and Mist, y’know? It was black as hell’s furnace and rain sheetin’ somethin’ fierce. This little girl is just trompin’ along, so I rolls down the window and says, ‘I could be one of them psychos, or I could be a guy just offerin’ you a lift,’ and she says back, ‘You’re not a psycho—probably a nicer guy than people think,’ and she jumps in and asks me to take her to this school. Saint Teresa’s, I guess.” Mac had interjected at that point, “St. Elizabeth’s,” and the fellow had said, “Could be. So I drives her there, and it’s still black as hell’s furnace, so I try to talk her outta gettin’ outta the truck, but she gets a little stubborn and says it’s where she wants to go. To change the subject, she asks if I cut my firewood off Highway 53. And I says, ‘Yeah, missy. How’d you know?’ And she gives me this sexy little smile and says, ‘I know things,’ as she gets out of the truck. Kinda eerie, like out of one of them damned Stephen King movies. Anyways, she slams the door and doesn’t look back. Not once. Which was okay with me, cuz I’m thinkin’ she might have snake eyes or somethin’, you know—that she wasn’t quite human. I watch her go, till she was out of the glare from the headlights, you know, and she kinda disappears into the darkness. Then I leave, though I didn’t want to, fire up the truck again and take off. Then I saw ’er face on the news, so I called you.”
“I appreciate it,” Mac had told him, though it didn’t mean much.
“You know what’s weird, son? My pickup was empty that trip. I’d dropped my load and swept the truck bed. How’d she know about the firewood?”
Mac hadn’t offered any explanation, expecting there was more evidence of Calvin Gilbert’s pursuits in his vehicle than he’d believed—sawdust, a chainsaw, bits of bark. Now he thought about that odd bit of information and wondered what Jessie Brentwood had been doing hitchhiking in the dead of night and why she’d asked to be taken to St. Elizabeth’s.
Not home.
Not to a friend’s house.
To the campus.
Where she probably died.
Shit.
The guy, Calvin Gilbert, it had turned out, spent a lot of time at a local watering hole and he’d been drunk more often than not, picked up for a DUI twice since that report. He hadn’t been specific about the date he’d found Jessie in the mountains with her thumb out. Had it been the day of her disappearance? Three days prior? Mac had tried to piece together the last days of Jessie’s known existence at the time, but Gilbert’s call had been almost considered a crank. A guy getting his jollies by acting as if he knew something.
But maybe he’d been straight with them.
Maybe Calvin Gilbert had been the last person known to see her alive.
Rolling the small bit of oyster shell between his thumb and forefinger, Mac considered Jessie Brentwood. She was secretive, had run away from home several times before her final disappearance, was somewhat psychic, by all accounts, and there was something about the beach that seemed to run like a thread through the fabric of her life. Why he thought that, he couldn’t quite say. It was more than just this bit of oyster shell, more than the fact that she was found halfway from the coast to Laurelton. But if she was hitchhiking—well, more accurately, just walking, apparently—along the highway that led straight west to the coast, where had she been? What or who had she seen? What was she looking for?
Hudson had said she felt trouble was after her. What kind of trouble? Did it have anything to do with her pregnancy? Hudson didn’t seem to know about that, or else he was a consummate actor worthy of an Oscar as he hadn’t even lifted a hair when Gretchen asked if he thought she was pregnant.
And Rebecca…Mac wished he could have talked to her more. She struck him as another person with secrets, though he couldn’t begin to guess what they were at this point.
He sat at his desk and thought, stretching minutes to hours. The department went into night mode, with only a skeleton crew at the station. He sat and thought,
