The Nobody Girls (Kendra Dillon Cold Case Thriller Book 3) Read online

  “Thanks for calling it in for Judith. She was happy as hell to get the scoop,” Art said. Judith French ran WPLE’s daily news radio department. While Kendra spent weeks chasing cold cases for The Cold Trail podcast, Judith and a team of interns churned and burned the daily news for WPLE.

  “Of course, I’d hear about it for the rest of my life if I didn’t.”

  Anytime Kendra’s cold case travels crossed the path of breaking news, she always clued Judith in. Kendra had been in the daily news grind; she knew what it took. She respected the heck out what Judith did on a shoestring budget with a loose collection of college kids. She’d called Judith from the High Timbers construction site, now a crime scene, and given her the report.

  “You still working on that find?” Art asked.

  “Yeah, I guess. It is sticking with me.”

  “Do we think it’s the next season?”

  “We don’t know yet, too early to tell.”

  “I have every confidence you’ll figure it out. But you’ll let me know ASAP, since—”

  “I know, I know, underwriting, promotion, and all that.”

  Art didn’t let up. It was his job to keep the lights on. Which was no small task in commercial broadcasting, much less in public broadcasting.

  “You know, you’re looking tired. Why don’t you get out of here, take the day off? Shoop has the right idea,” Art said.

  “You just said ASAP.”

  “I’m going to tell you a little secret. Thanks to your blockbuster podcast, we’re doing just fine. We’ll be fine for the rest of the fiscal year. You earned a day at the beach, not an afternoon at a crime scene.”

  “Wow, we have enough money? Are you sure you’re Art Cabrera? Have you been replaced by aliens?”

  “Possibly.”

  “I’m fine. Thank you for the suggestion.”

  “I’m heading home. You may be able to work until the wee hours, but if I’m another minute late Eva, will leave me for Jimmy Smits.”

  “Noted.”

  Art left. But Kendra didn’t. The day’s images replayed in her mind.

  Maybe this was the next season of The Cold Trail? She knew she needed to find out more. She felt a connection, a pull, to discover whatever led up to the woman’s violent end.

  “Hey!”

  Kendra jumped in her chair again. She really needed to get out of her head!

  “You’re not answering texts? Or my calls?”

  Detective Kyle Carver was handsome, doubly so when he was mad. And he was mad.

  “Oh—oh my gosh, I’m so sorry. Normally Shoop keeps me on track, but I got involved in this—”

  Kyle put his hand up to stop Kendra’s rambling. She knew she was rambling and that she’d blown it, again, with Kyle Carver.

  Kyle stepped into her office. His hands were on his hips, his jaw was clenched. He was trying to remain calm. That was a bad feeling, knowing you were the source of a normally sweet person’s Herculean efforts to remain calm.

  “We were supposed to meet, get some groceries, any bells ringing here?”

  “It’s just—listen, there was this body found, and I was the only one with the tip, and we were out there for a long time.”

  “I get it. But how was I supposed to know you weren’t the dead body?”

  Kendra winced at the comment. “You’re being dramatic.”

  “Really? Since I’ve known you, you’ve been shot at, what? Two, three times? And held prisoner by a crazy person! Forgive me if I freak a little when you don’t answer your phone.”

  “It’s fine. I’m fine.”

  “But you’re not sorry, and you won’t change.” The anger drained from Kyle’s face as he exhaled. Kendra preferred the anger. This stance seemed worse.

  “I…I am sorry. I should have let you know I was okay.”

  “Yeah.”

  “But let me tell you about this case. It’s got me in knots already.”

  “Kendra, I spent the day today chasing down the scum of the earth, who happened to be trafficking his daughter. And then you didn’t answer for hours. I don’t know if I have more right now, for more of it.”

  “My work is important to me,” Kendra said. But she did feel bad. Terrible, actually. She should have called. And this wasn’t the first time or the second.

  “Listen, Dillon, I really think we could have something here…”

  This time it was Kendra’s turn to interrupt. She walked from her desk and reached out to put her hands in his. She looked up; the man was tall.

  “Yes, I think so too. I’m sorry, but I was busy, and I promise to answer my phone.”

  “I’m tired, and I think we need a break. I need a break. I don’t need you to stay out of trouble. That’s who you are. Hell, it’s who I am. But I do need you to lean on me when you get into it. And obviously, that’s not happening.”

  “I wasn’t in trouble; I didn’t need you!”

  Well, that came out wrong.

  Kyle looked at Kendra, removed his hands from hers, and lowered his head.

  “And you don’t, I get it. I’m done. I can’t deal with this level of stress at work and with you constantly. I can’t even tell you to stay safe. I think that’s a waste of breath.”

  “You’re dumping me?” Kendra felt the sting of the words. Talking to her was a waste of breath.

  “I’m stepping back. I wish you the best and all that, but I need to leave the front row seats of the Kendra Dillon show.”

  Kyle turned and walked out. Just like that.

  Kendra swallowed hard. Kyle Carver was a good man. He was more than that. Heroic, patient, smart. And good. That was at the front of the list and the end of the list about the man.

  Kendra had run him off. She hadn’t meant to.

  But there it was. She felt her eyes well up. She didn’t mean to cry today either, but the tears were there. She wiped them away.

  She walked back to her desk.

  Kendra opened a browser and typed: Unsolved missing persons cases, the 1980s.

  Chapter 5

  “I go away for a weekend, and your life falls apart. That’s what I’m seeing.”

  Adeline Shoop was back and extremely frustrated with Kendra.

  “I managed to feed myself and Swisshelm. I think that’s a win-win.”

  “That is something, but your scalp is flaking.”

  Kendra’s sunburned part was sloughing off. Lovely, she thought as she reached up and touched it. “I appear to be trying to regenerate human skin,” Kendra said and rubbed the spot. It was healing and so itchy.

  “I mean seriously, piles of mail and our email filing system? Totally ignored.”

  Their jobs required organization, cataloging information, and a system. Shoop was in charge of that system, and Kendra, admittedly, had ignored it as she researched over the weekend.

  “I was preoccupied with this body at the High Timbers site. And also, uh, Kyle dumped me.”

  “What?”

  “Yeah, because apparently, I’m a lousy girlfriend, like I was a lousy wife.”

  “Oh, honey!”

  Shoop came over and enveloped Kendra in a hug. Kendra hugged back. Shoop wasn’t just the glue that held the office together. She was Kendra’s best friend.

  “I’m okay, it’s okay. That feeding myself thing I just bragged out, it was mostly ice cream. Okay, all ice cream, all meals.”

  “I’d call that medicinal ice cream.”

  “Yeah, that.”

  “So is the Kyle Carver chapter closed, or is there hope?”

  “It didn’t seem like there was hope. I blew it because I’m not willing to change. He wants me to, I don’t know, get a job that doesn’t require me to be up close and personal with crime.”

  “Well, why doesn’t he take his own advice?”

  “Right?”

  “Though you could do a better job of, you know, answering your phone and stuff.”

  “You too?”

  “I called three times!”


  “You were on vacation. You didn’t need all this, wrecking it for you too.” Kendra gestured to the office, which was really their first home, not second.

  Shoop’s desk was in the corner of their main office work area. One wall was completely dominated by a seventy-five-inch electronic smart board. The thing was fully integrated with the internet. They could draw on it and pull up just about anything. Kendra was half afraid it had become self-aware and could do the podcast without them.

  The underwriter for just about everything they did, J.D. Atwell, had insisted he fund the high-tech equipment. Kendra and Shoop were perfectly happy with their old dry erase whiteboard, but Art insisted they accept.

  “When a billionaire wants to buy you something, say yes, and thank you.” That was Art’s edict on the gargantuan smart board.

  Kendra was still adjusting to the new tech.

  “Okay, so, where are we with all this?” Shoop said.

  Kendra sent the picture from her phone to the currently empty screen on the smart board.

  The image of the remains of the woman, the tattered bag, and the tights around her neck—the whole of it took Shoop’s breath away.

  “Oh, that poor thing,” Shoop murmured.

  “I know, I can’t get her out of my head.”

  “Any identification yet?”

  “No. I called Omari—he’s the one who gave me the original tip—but there’s nothing back from BCI yet. It could be a while since they don’t have much, and it’s been so long.”

  “My mom had tights like that,” Shoop said.

  “She did?”

  “Yeah, they were a leftover from her younger days, but yeah.”

  “I was looking at disappearances, missing persons and such, and unsolved cases from the 1980s.”

  “And?”

  “I need your help. This is going way back. I am going to start at the Ohio Attorney General website. Can you start looking at newspaper archives?”

  “On it. Is this our new season?”

  Kendra stood up and looked at the enlarged image on the smart board.

  She thought about the off-handed comment.

  “I don’t know, but I know we have to try to help her.”

  “Okay, let’s get to work.”

  Kendra nodded and walked into her office, which adjoined the main work area.

  She opened up her laptop, and the search began.

  The Ohio Attorney General’s website was as good a place as any to start. She’d have been an unsolved case whoever the woman was since only now did they have a body.

  Kendra started out with missing persons. There were too many to count. And so many were women that there was no way to connect what she’d seen at the construction site to what was on the missing persons database.

  And if she could be from anywhere. Was she from Michigan, or Kentucky, or Indiana?

  Kendra decided to look at it from another direction.

  Homicides from the 1980s. There were hundreds, of course, so she narrowed again. She wanted to see if any homicides involved the recovery of a body in the same way they’d found the woman at High Timbers.

  Slowly, after clicking on results, clicking back, and double-checking, Kendra found an incident that resembled the one at High Timbers:

  Body found at highway overpass paving project

  The article had been scanned in on the Port Lawrence News Daily online archive. It was from 1978. Kendra entered the relevant links and sent the information to the smart board. A follow-up story revealed the woman’s name, Linda Kay Ellis.

  Sending headlines via email wasn’t the same as scrawling them on the board with her big fat dry erase marker, but it was more efficient, she admitted. Thanks, J.D. Atwell.

  Kendra walked out to be sure the snippets of information she’d found had, in fact, shown up where she meant them to on the smart board.

  She looked at the wall and saw her headline wasn’t the only one. Shoop had found one too.

  “Details the same,” Kendra said to Shoop.

  “Sincere Anderson, found in our possible time frame, similar circumstances, 1980.”

  “Hmm.”

  “Yeah, this isn’t the first time they’ve found a body along I-75,” Shoop remarked.

  “No, it isn’t. Or the second.” Kendra walked closer to the board. “There’s a pattern.” Kendra felt it in her bones. In one afternoon, they’d found three.

  “The thing is, they’re up and down the highway. Sincere is in Michigan, Linda Kay, Ohio. That could be a reason they’re not connected in a bigger story,” Shoop said.

  Kendra looked. Shoop had added a map of I-75 as it went North of the Upper Peninsula of Michigan through that state, through Ohio, and down to Kentucky, and off the board south.

  Kendra knew there was something here, something that the woman in High Timbers was leading her to.

  “But all three were found in a garbage bag to conceal their bodies and at a highway drop site,” Kendra said. She looked at the three victims on the board.

  “You have that look,” Shoop said.

  “What look?”

  “The look that says you’re not going to stop.”

  “I imagine you’d see that look in the mirror too right now, Shoop.”

  “Maybe.”

  “But you’re right. It feels like this is what we’re going to do, these stories.”

  “The three we have?” Shoop looked dubious about Kendra’s assertion.

  “Sure, yes, who were they? How is it we don’t know them?”

  Shoop looked at Kendra and then back at the board.

  But neither of them was sure what to do next. Normally they had a victim’s friend. Or a family member who wanted answers. Right now, it was only the two of them, and the victims weren’t high profile or celebrated. They were women who no one seemed to know or remember.

  “You know, this is like our I-80 Jane Doe,” Shoop observed.

  That was the in their first season, when they’d successfully identified a body, unclaimed for decades. The crime was still unsolved, but they’d at least helped one family have some idea of what happened in the last days of a troubled niece. Annie Walters had been labeled the I-80 Jane Doe for decades until The Cold Trail had figured out who she was.

  “Yeah, it’s like Annie Walters, except this time we do have their names,” Kendra responded. “With her, Annie, we had nothing.”

  “I guess Kyle dumped you just in time. We’re going to be busy as hell.”

  Kendra gave Shoop a look but then agreed. She didn’t have time to worry about her long list of relationship shortcomings if they were taking this on.

  “Right.”

  Chapter 6

  Offering a snack, a little treat, helped.

  That made it so he could get in close. He liked to know they were breathing heavy, but he didn’t want their smell on him. Their odor of fear had a weight. It could stick to him. He wouldn’t have that. Couldn’t.

  The first time he hurt something, his dog, it made him feel funny. It was shameful. But it was good. So, he did it again.

  Then he got a new puppy.

  It took a while to get to this point. He’d honed his skills. How to look, how to stay unseen, and then how to predict.

  Predicting wasn’t a guess. It really was a science. If they looked hungry, he had food. If they looked needy, he had kindness.

  And some? Some he could see required a firm hand right away. He traded “Hop in” for “Move your ass” in those cases. When they were a little harder. It worked.

  Some of them liked that kind of talk. He gauged it individually, adapted his approach. This one, though, she’d been snacking, chewing, looking around, long enough.

  “Hey, you know, I have an hourly rate.”

  He nodded. “It can’t be very much, by the looks of you.”

  “Hey, that’s mean!”

  And then he smacked her face, hard. Hard enough to sting his hand. Hard enough that a red welt appeared on her cheek immediatel
y.

  She’d been around, though. She’d been hit before. She wasn’t a nice girl. She was getting what she deserved. The smack got her attention.

  “There will be no more sass, okay. I don’t want to hear sass.”

  “Look, maybe you should just let me out. I’m not into this.”

  “Maybe you should be quiet, really quiet, and I’ll get you to where you need to be.”

  She was quiet. She looked out at the road. They could be anywhere, any number of dozens and dozens of fields along the highway.

  Maybe about now, she wished she’d paid more attention to where he’d turned, the name of the street? He stifled a chuckle. He knew what came next. And sure enough, she started looking at the vehicle.

  Where was the door handle? Where was the lock? Where was the knob to roll down the window?

  They weren’t where they should be.

  He kept driving but watched from the corner of his eyes. He could feel her heart beating faster, could sense the blood inside her chest quickening. He felt it too.

  They were almost to his pre-ordained place.

  She could scream all she wanted, though he’d put a quick stop to it. She could try to find the door handle, maybe kick her way out.

  But that wasn’t going to happen. He’d made sure of it. It was like the oil change and the tire pressure. He had no loose ends when it came to her trying to escape his trap.

  That was a lesson learned from experience. He never made the same mistake twice. These creatures were evil, fetid, and deserved this treatment. But they were also survivors. They had a flight instinct. His job was to be sure that there was no way to act on that flight instinct.

  So, like the little mice or vermin they were, their little animal brains reverted to the next survival instinct, fight! They’d never get away, so they’d have to fight.

  That’s where this process got so, so intriguing.

  The fight.

  He chuckled. No need to hold back. No one could hear him but her, and she wasn’t going anywhere.

  Chapter 7

  “Let’s spread this out from our three,” Kendra said.

  “Do you have more from BCI?”