Threads of Suspicion(53)
“My PI was looking into your missing college girl.”
“Which case connected to it?”
David pulled out a smaller folder. “Tammy Preston. Give me a minute to read the details. I looked at these suspended cases earlier, but the red flag only went up when I saw that research folder.”
“Take your time—you’ve certainly got a captive audience. Are you going to finish that coffee?”
“Just poured, it’s yours,” David replied with a smile after a glance at her.
She nodded gratefully, drank most of it, and then began sorting through the other items in the folder. Articles on a Wisconsin high school football team and its star running back. Several Jane Doe remains discovered. A variety of announcements for musicals, theater performances, and concerts in Chicago during a two-week period eight years ago. Then the news on Jenna’s disappearance.
“This isn’t good.”
Evie looked up at the tone in David’s voice. She’d heard a lot of cops say those words over the years, and with that tone the words were underselling how bad it actually was.
“A Wisconsin family hired Saul to look for their missing daughter, thinking she might have traveled from Wisconsin to Chicago,” he murmured, studying a sheet in his hand. “She had a history of taking off, was of age, revolving boyfriends, living with a girlfriend rather than renting on her own. But she had always called, stayed in touch with the mom. Then it just went quiet. A pretty girl, but not striking. Five-foot-four, auburn hair, one hundred forty pounds. Twenty-one when she went missing.” He slid the photo to her. “Something about her led Saul to look up the newspaper articles on your Illinois college student. You’ve been looking at cases possibly related to Jenna. Is this girl one of those? Tammy Preston?”
“No, I don’t recognize the name or photo. But I can check the full FBI report and see if I passed over the name. Time-wise, do both our cases overlap? My girl went to a Triple M concert the night she disappeared. And now your PI looked into my missing girl?”
“Think God is trying to tell us something?”
Evie wondered, shook her head. “I don’t know anymore.”
“Tammy was last seen on a Sunday night. She had attended a concert two nights before.” David handed her the slimmer file. “Look at the band, page three.”
She turned pages. “‘A Triple M concert,’” Evie read, a sense of dread coming over her. She looked over at David. This bit hard.
“Yeah.” He sighed. “My PI suspended his investigation because the family had asked him to spend no more than five thousand dollars for his time, but he was on the scent of something telling him these cases were similar. He might have tagged onto the concert link. The parents were thinking their daughter had left on her own, had hooked up with a new boyfriend they would find questionable, but Saul was wondering if it wasn’t something else.”
Evie went back to the beginning of the folder, reading the paperwork in Saul’s neat handwriting. “‘Tammy wasn’t in college. That’s why she’s not on my board, why she didn’t get picked up in the search for similar cases years ago. But she’s the right age and lived near a college campus.’”
“The date she went missing puts her a year after Jenna.”
“That could fit.”
“After two years with no contact from her, the police elevated Tammy to a suspicious missing. Her body has never turned up.”
Evie took a deep breath, let it out. She was holding a case file that was likely also her guy. “Someone likes Maggie’s music, likes those who like Maggie’s music? Is he traveling around to her concerts, or is it any concert that attracts a college crowd?” she wondered. “Jenna Greenhill. Tammy Preston. Two missing college-age women, living within a hundred miles of each other, both attend a Triple M concert the weekends they go missing. The raw numbers say it could be random, but it doesn’t feel random.”
“Find a third, it’s not random.”
She pushed back her chair. “I’ve got an Indiana case on the board that had a missing driver’s license, my best prospective match for Jenna. They had recovered a body days later. Let me go pull the full file.”
Evie sat at her laptop, found the FBI report and case number, figured out how to get from her Illinois police account over to the Indiana police database, then sent the full case report to her printer. She grabbed up the first ten pages, leaving the rest to print, and was reading as she walked back to the conference room. “Case highlights: Virginia Fawn, a student at Indiana University, went missing on a Saturday night. Body was found on Thursday three miles outside of town. Probably smothered. Her purse was near her body, cash and credit cards in her wallet, but no driver’s license.” Evie scanned the summary for more details. “Boyfriend repeatedly questioned. Where was she before she disappeared?” Evie searched the pages. “The day of her disappearance, a credit-card charge at Famous Eddie’s Burger Palace, 4:42 p.m., followed by a credit-card charge at State Fairgrounds, 6:12 p.m., for eighty-four dollars and change.”