Presumed Dead

Book 0: Carter Blake Series

by Mason Cross

Genres: Action & Adventure; Thrillers; Military Thrillers

Synopsis

Then

Fifteen years ago, an unidentified killer terrorised Northern Georgia, killing hikers with two shots from a pistol before disposing of the bodies along the remote trails and in the rivers in the vicinity of Blood Mountain. The killer was never brought to justice.

Now

Carter Blake has returned home for the first time in many years. The visit stirs old memories, including a girl from school who vanished without a trace. Blake runs into the mother of the girl, who mentions a case she's come across in Georgia, where someone is convinced their relative is still alive, 15 years on. Adeline Connor was the Blood Mountain Killer's last suspected victim. She vanished without a trace. So why is her brother so convinced she's still alive?

Release date: April 19, 2018

Publisher: Orion Publishing Group

Print pages: 368

Sample

1

Carter Blake

After the service, most of the mourners moved on to the gathering at Betty’s house. I hung back, watching as the crowd shuffled away from her graveside. I found a spot by a tall pine tree that was far enough from any of the knots of people hugging or smoking that I wouldn’t get drawn into a conversation. A white-haired man in a rumpled black suit who looked to be in his early eighties squinted at me over the rims of his glasses. He stared at me for a few seconds before shaking his head and moving on. I didn’t know him, but maybe he had seen me around in the old days.

I bowed my head, which made me fit in just fine in the circumstances, and everyone else filed past without comment. I recognized a few faces: all of them older and sadder. Nobody I felt like talking to, in particular. And then I saw a familiar face. Karen Day’s mother, Lauren. She looked in good health.

I hadn’t been back to Ravenwood in more than twenty years. I hadn’t thought much about the place in almost as long. Only one thing could have brought me back, and unfortunately that one thing had happened. I didn’t intend to linger: just stay long enough to pay my respects. But it was a crisp and cloudless late-November day, and I felt an unexpected urge to hang around a little longer. Perhaps it was the funeral, perhaps it was being back in a place I had put down roots, once upon a time.

I was parked a couple of streets down from the church, and I took a circuitous route back to the car, partly to avoid the crowds, partly because it would take me past the house where I used to live.

Forty-two Hemlock Road was still there, though I knew Betty had long since moved to the small apartment where she died. The house had weathered the years well. The lawn was neatly kept, the paint job looked fresh. A shiny red kids’ bicycle was lying on its side at the line where the grass met the sidewalk, its owner clearly having no cause to worry about passing thieves. There was a love seat hanging from the lilac tree out in the front yard – a new addition. When I looked closer, I could just make out a frayed, gray loop of rope curled around the thickest branch, from the tire swing I had hung there a lifetime ago. I wondered if I was the only one of Betty’s kids to come back for the funeral. It had been pure chance I had happened to read about her passing. I guessed the rest of them were out there somewhere. I had never formed any lasting friendships with any of the others she fostered. The only person I ever occasionally thought about from my Ravenwood days was Karen Day – the lost girl.

I took a last look at the house and headed back down the hill toward Main Street. I was passing Dino’s Diner, reaching into my pockets for the car keys when I heard a name being called. A name I hadn’t gone by in twenty years.

I turned and saw Karen Day’s mother, standing in the doorway of Dino’s, holding the door open. Lauren Day had to be in her mid-sixties by now, but was wearing it well. Her brown hair showed only a few streaks of gray. She was slim and had a narrow face, only a few lines around her eyes. She was dressed for the occasion. Dark pants, black shoes and a white blouse. No coat, so I guessed she had come out of the diner just to see me. I turned and retraced my steps. I hesitated over the appropriate greeting then she pulled me in for a hug, kissing me lightly on the cheek.

“I thought that was you,” she said. “Are you staying in town?”

I shook my head. “Just here for the funeral.”

“It was a lovely service,” she said. “People always say that, though, don’t they?”

She was still holding the door open. “Do you have time to get a coffee?”

I hesitated, but made my mind up when I saw the hope in her eyes. What harm could it do?

We went inside and sat down in a booth by the window and I ordered a black coffee. Lauren already had a full cup of Earl Grey in front of her.

“It was good of you to come. We tried to get in touch with all of the kids, but …”

“Hard to find some people,” I said. “I saw the obituary in the Times.”

It had been the first time I had picked up a physical newspaper in months. The previous customer had left it on the table at one of my regular breakfast places.

She smiled. “Betty wouldn’t have minded. It was enough for her to know she had made some kind of difference.”

“Dino isn’t around anymore, huh?” I observed as my coffee was delivered. Dino – a short, rotund guy with not much hair and even less regard for service with a smile. The diner was open seven days a week, seven a.m. till nine p.m., and if he took a day off, I never knew about it.

She shook her head. “Heart attack. Ten years ago, maybe.”

I wasn’t surprised. “You look well,” I said.

She waved away the compliment. “You’re seeing me at my most presentable, dear. Weddings and funerals. So, what do you do now? Somebody said you had joined the military?”

“That was a long time ago,” I said. “I work for myself now.”

“Doing what?”

“Consultancy. The work varies.”

“My, that’s awfully vague.”

I smiled. “I look for people. Usually they’re the sort of people who don’t want to be found. How about you?”

She took a breath and hesitated a second. “Actually, I look for people too. I’ve been doing what I do for a lot of years. I started it up after what happened to Karen, figured I would get the ball rolling, but it’s just grown and grown.”

Karen Day had been in the year above me in high school. She was tall, and had her mother’s brown hair and eyes. We were friends, but not close friends. Then again, none of my friends had been all that close.

She had gone missing on the night of May 25, 1995. She had been working at the Esso station on the edge of town and left at eleven, after closing up. Nobody ever saw her alive again. Over the course of that long, hot summer, we searched for her. There were six hundred acres of woods separating Ravenwood from the next town. At first, we had teams of volunteers out there, all of us reassuring each other she would be found safe and well. The whole town searched for weeks. Gradually, it set in that if we found anything it would be a body. Little by little, the volunteers found other commitments, until there were only a few of us left. The first big storm of the fall brought her back. The coroner speculated that her killer had trapped her body under water, and that was how her corpse ended up on the riverbank. She had been dead for months, probably since the night she disappeared. Her killer was never found.

“It’s called the Missing Foundation,” Lauren continued. “We have staff now, a half-dozen offices across the country. We work with families of people who go missing. We eventually found Karen, but not every family is so fortunate.”

Fortunate. Some would think that an odd choice of words. I didn’t.

“It sounds like important work.”

She nodded. “I really think so.”

We looked down at our drinks in silence for a few moments. I thought about Karen. How the whole town had gone from concern to foreboding to despair. I had gone through a different cycle. Building frustration that I couldn’t find her, rage when we learned her fate. I had never really forgotten those feelings. I couldn’t help but admire Lauren Day. She had channeled her own grief and sense of helplessness into something worthwhile, something that touched other lives.

“Are you able to help everyone?”

She considered. “Nothing can fill the hole in these families’ lives. Nothing. But in some way, we can usually help. There’s this one man I’ve been in contact with who—”

She hesitated. I motioned for her to go on.

“Obviously, confidentiality is important, but I don’t have to tell you his name. Some of our clients, we have a relationship that lasts years. This man is one of those. His sister was taken many years ago.”

“Taken?”

“They never found her body, but she was one of several people who disappeared in the same area at the same time.”

She didn’t have to say any more. There are at least a couple of dozen serial killers operating in the United States at any given time, according to the experts. Some of them are never caught, some of their victims are never found. I have more knowledge about this subject than I would like.

“Something happened recently that was curious,” she said.

I met her eyes, realizing that perhaps there was a reason she was relating this particular story about this particular client. Maybe on some level, it was the reason we were having this conversation. She needed to talk to somebody about this case.

“You have to understand,” she continued, “denial is incredibly common among these families, especially in the early days. This man never really got over his sister’s disappearance, but I always thought that intellectually he knew she was never coming home. Head and heart pull you in different ways, don’t they?”

“What happened?”

Lauren Day looked out at the street for a long moment.

“His sister is dead. The authorities are sure of it, and deep down I believe he had accepted it too. But then something happened.”

“What?”

“He says he saw his sister. Alive.”

2

Carter Blake

What do you know about the Devil Mountain Killer?

Lauren Day’s question came back to me that evening as I turned my key in the door of the 40th-floor apartment in Battery Park City that was my home for the moment.

I switched the coffee machine on in the kitchen, took my jacket and shoes off and sat down on the couch, looking out at the view of the Hudson that was one of the main reasons I hadn’t felt the urge to move on just yet.

She was good: I didn’t realize I was being recruited until it was too late. Maybe she had been doing the work she was doing so long that she could identify the right skills in someone she needed to do a job.

I had told Lauren I knew the name, but not much more than that. She gave me the potted history. The Devil Mountain Killer was the moniker given to the unidentified person or persons responsible for a series of murders and disappearances in northeast Georgia fifteen years ago. A rural, sparsely populated area, not far from the course of the Appalachian Trail.

The killer had claimed at least nine victims, with more suspected, between August 2002 and October 2003. The murders attributed to him shared the same M.O.: killed by gunshots to the head from a .38 caliber pistol. The same .38 caliber pistol. The gender balance was almost even: five men and four women. There was no evidence of ante-mortem beatings or torture, no evidence of sexual assault. These were more like dispassionate executions: a double tap to the head. As far as the investigators could work out, the killings had always taken place out in the woods. Lonely stretches of highway, remote trails. The victims were hikers or hunters or drivers passing through, who must have stopped for the wrong person. The bodies were found concealed in rivers and shallow graves in the vicinity of Devil Mountain, hence the media-friendly name.

The killer was never caught. Too often, they aren’t. The killings just ceased with as little explanation as they had started. People did what they always do when there’s a loose end: they speculated about what had happened. Some thought he had moved on to a new hunting ground, or gone to jail for another crime, others assumed that he had killed himself. The authorities worked along the same assumptions, looking closely at anyone from the area who fell into one of those categories. There were no similar killing sprees in nearby states that matched the pattern. They found candidates for the jail or suicide explanations: one man serving time for a stabbing in a bar fight, another for holding up a liquor store, and another who had hanged himself in the first week of November of that year. The lack of evidence left behind by the killer meant that there was frustratingly little information to work with to definitively rule any of the three in or out. Both of the imprisoned men denied involvement, and the one who killed himself hadn’t left a note.

Over the years, the media and the police moved on to fresher cases. It was still technically a live investigation, but the FBI had enough active murderers to catch without expending resources on the ones who were retired or dead.

On the way home, I had stopped to buy a book on the case called Devil Mountain: State of Fear, by a guy called William P. Heaney, along with a Rand McNally state map of Georgia. In the middle of the book were a series of pictures showing some of the locations where bodies had been discovered. There were photographs of some of the lead investigators on the case, a couple of the suspects, and family snaps of some of the victims. I was looking at one of these.

The man Lauren Day wanted me to talk to was named David Connor, and the girl in the photograph was his sister, Adeline.

The photograph in the book showed a seventeen-year-old girl. She was pictured sitting on the hood of a red car. She wore cut-off jean shorts and a T-shirt the color of claret. She had black hair and brown eyes, and wore a thin chain around her neck with a small gold crucifix attached. Adeline Connor’s wasn’t one of the eight bodies that had been recovered, but the cops were sure enough of her death that she had been written up as the final official victim of the Devil Mountain Killer.

Sometimes, the bodies of victims are found years or decades later. Often, they’re never recovered. What doesn’t happen is them showing up alive and well. Chances were good that David Connor had seen someone who looked like his sister and had been blinded by wishful thinking. Chances were also good that any attempt to find her would be a waste of time, and worse, would reopen old wounds.

I thought about it for a long time before I picked up my phone and dialed the number Lauren Day had given me, looking at the picture of Adeline Connor as the phone rang.

“Hello?” The voice was that of a relatively young man, but with a smoker’s huskiness. The tone was wary. Someone who wasn’t used to his phone ringing.

“Is this David Connor?”

“Who’s asking?”

“Lauren Day asked me to give you a call. My name’s Carter Blake.”







3

Dwight Haycox

Haycox sang the opening lines of “Mr. Brownstone” under his breath as he typed in his username and password. He sat back and sipped from his lukewarm cup of coffee and watched the status wheel circle, as though it was thinking carefully about whether to permit him access.

No new posts since your last visit.

His eyes moved to the top right corner of the screen.

Private Messages: 12 (0 new)

Nothing new. Nothing from “Bloody Bill”, the user who had contacted him the week before, teasing some new information. It wasn’t exactly an unusual occurrence on the boards. The type of person who logged in here liked to know more than everyone else. Often, they were fantasists; the type of people who called in to talk-radio stations boasting about knowing the real story. Or the type who take it a step further and confess to the police investigating the case. They were easy to filter out.

This guy was different. If it was a guy at all, username notwithstanding. Most likely it was. The profile of users of this kind of website was overwhelmingly of one kind: white, mid-twenties to middle-age, and male. Ironically, not too different from the profile of your average serial murderer. Not for the first time, Haycox wondered if that was a coincidence.

Playing the odds, and for the sake of convenience, he was happy to think of “Bill” as a he. Bill had focused on something that no one else would have had any reason to connect to the DMK case: the death of Walter Wheeler. Somehow, he knew David Connor had hired Wheeler. Bill thought there could be more to his death than met the eye. Haycox concurred, though his sources in Atlanta hadn’t yet responded to his questions.

He closed the browser window and opened the file drawer in the desk. The desk had come with the apartment. It was too big for the room, but it suited his purposes. He pulled out the file and leafed through it.

Haycox had been interested in murderers for as long as he could remember. It was a big part of why he had gone into his chosen profession. Something about DMK had stuck out, though. The fact the case was unsolved was important, of course, but many of them were. Perhaps it was because he had visited the location at an impressionable age. Either way, when the position had been advertised, it had seemed too good to be true.

The copies in the file were arranged chronologically, with his own notes in the margins. They came straight from the source, much of the information unavailable in any of the websites or the books written on the case. The sheriff’s department would not be pleased if they knew these copies were here, but they would never find out.

He closed the drawer and switched off the computer screen, plunging the room into full darkness. The glow from the streetlamp across the road filtered through the branches of the tree in the yard. He watched the road for a while. Nothing came past, even though this was the main route through town.

He walked through to the small kitchen and microwaved the last chili dinner from the freezer, then ate it with a beer in front of the late news. Then he took a shower and laid out his uniform for the morning. Light blue shirt, blue coat, gray hat. He ran his fingertip along the embossed letters on the badge on the sleeve. Lake Bethany Sheriff’s Department.

If only they knew.







4

Isabella Green

The Mercer place was just off Cherry Hill Road, about a half-mile outside of the Bethany town limits. It was a wide one-story house with whitewashed wood siding. A big integrated garage took up almost half of the front, and there was a covered porch that wrapped around to the back of the building where it became a raised deck overlooking the woods behind.

Deputy Isabella Green pulled the venerable blue-and-white Crown Victoria into the rainbow-shaped concrete driveway, keeping her eyes on the door and the windows as she parked behind the white pickup out front. If anyone heard her approach, there was no outward sign. She knew from the record that Waylon Mercer was thirty-eight. Five years older than she was. At about six-one, three inches taller. Two hundred and thirty pounds: a hell of a lot heavier.

Isabella lifted her hat from the passenger seat and fitted it over her head before she opened the door. Out of habit, she reached down and patted her sidearm in its holster as she approached the house, not hurrying. She climbed the three wooden steps, hearing the wood creak beneath her, and heard a rustle. She paused and bent at the knee to look between the steps. There was a skinny black water spaniel staring up at her with moist brown eyes. The dog looked away after a moment and busied itself sniffing at the ground. Isabella straightened up and climbed up to the porch. She knocked hard on the door and stepped back. There was no sound from inside. No raised voices, no television. If it hadn’t been for the pickup outside, it would look like no one was at home. She knocked again, harder this time, and heard footsteps approach. The door opened.

Mercer had wide shoulders and jet-black hair that was beginning to recede a little. He wore jeans and a white vest beneath a plaid work shirt. His belt buckle was a brass star, like a sheriff’s badge in the Old West. He had been handsome in high school, and had been able to coast on that ever since.

He forced a smile.

“Deputy … Green, right?”

Bethany was just about big enough that he could get away with pretending not to be sure of her name.

Isabella didn’t return the smile. “Is your wife at home, Mr. Mercer?”

His eyes narrowed at the confirmation of why she was here. “She’s not feeling well. What’s this about?”

“Routine check,” she said. “After the trouble you had last month.”

He waited for her to say more. When she didn’t, he just shrugged. “Everything’s fine.”

“I’m glad to hear it. Can I talk to Mrs. Mercer?”

“I said she isn’t feeling well. She’s sleeping.”

“I heard you. I’d like you to go ask her to come out here and talk to me.”

Mercer looked down at the deck, giving a little head shake, like he was amused she wasn’t getting it. “She’s asleep.”

Isabella waited until he raised his eyes again before she spoke.

“Go wake her up, then.”

The amusement drained out of Mercer’s eyes and he straightened up and stepped toward her. The nightstick was clipped to the left side of Isabella’s belt, the Glock 43 on the other side. Her hands didn’t move to either one, not yet.

“I said she’s asleep, Deputy. Now why don’t you come back tomorrow? I’m sure she’ll be happy to tell you the same thing I just did, since it seems that ain’t good enough?”

“It ain’t,” she said, pronouncing the Ts hard.

His eyes moved from Isabella’s to where she had parked the car. She could almost see the thought process going through his head. First, making sure she didn’t have a partner with her. Then wondering if the car had a dash cam or something like that. It did, but the pickup was obscuring the line of sight. That was deliberate.

He seemed to consider it and then, without taking his eyes off her, reached behind him to close the door.

“Step out of the way, sir,” she said.

Mercer took another step forward, getting in her face. He raised his voice. “Come back with a warrant. This is harassment.”

She leaned in even closer, smelling juniper berries on his breath. Early for gin. Or perhaps the night before was still going on.

She lowered her voice by the same degree he had raised his. “Get out of my way, or I’m going to make you get out of it.”

Before he could stop himself, he had raised his right hand and swung it toward the left side of Isabella’s face. Open hand. Big mistake. Even if she had let him connect it would have been weak. But instead she ducked and punched him hard in the stomach, right above his stupid cowboy belt buckle. He folded over around her fist, and she reached for the nightstick, snapping it off her belt, bringing it up and cracking it over the back of his head while he was still bent forward. She didn’t hit him hard, not enough to knock him out or anything. Just a tap on the head to remind him not to do anything else foolish.

Mercer lost his balance and sprawled on the porch, before scrambling onto all fours.

Isabella crouched down before he could get to his feet again, holding the nightstick loosely. They locked eyes. She could see he was fighting the urge to strike out again. His face was red. She shook her head. His eyes dropped.

She stowed the nightstick again and gripped him by the lapels of his shirt, hauling him up to his feet. She dusted off his shoulders and stood back.

“Try that again?” she asked, leaving her precise meaning open to interpretation.

He rubbed the back of his head and smiled, stepping out of Isabella’s way and giving an exaggerated “come in” gesture.

She kept her eyes on him as she opened the door, then nodded her head to indicate he should take the lead.

The front door led into a hall with a tiled floor. At the far end, it widened out into a kitchen at the back. There were three closed doors leading off the hall: two on the left, one on the right. As Mercer stepped into the hallway, the farthest door opened.

Sally Mercer was thirty-four. She wore a blue-and-pink floral dress, and her blond hair was tied back in a ponytail. She was looking down at the carpet, and her left hand was massaging the side of her head, failing to conceal a fresh shiner.

“Everything okay?” she said in a shaky voice, without looking up.

“I told you she wasn’t feeling so good,” Mercer said, his voice a little less steady now. Not so sure of himself.

Isabella stepped forward and gently took Sally’s hand at the wrist, moving it down so she could get a look at the black eye. It was recent, within the last fifteen minutes. She wasn’t just going on the look of the bruising to tell that, of course. That was when the neighbor had called them.

“He hit you again, sweetheart?”

Sally avoided her eyes, shook her head weakly. “I fell down.”

Isabella turned back to Mercer. He was leaning back against the wall, watching the two of them coolly. She wished he would take another swing at her, but knew he wouldn’t. Outside had been a mistake and he knew it.

“The sheriff told you we were going to be keeping an eye on you, Waylon,” she said.

He didn’t reply.

“I’m going to take Sally to get that eye looked at. Can’t be too careful. You never know what domestic accidents can lead to.”

She put a hand on Sally’s shoulder and started walking out. Mercer didn’t even look at his wife, just stared at Isabella the whole time.

As they reached the doorway, another department vehicle rounded the corner and swung into the driveway. This one was an SUV, a GMC S-15 Jimmy, also blue-and-white.

Deputy Kurt Feldman got out. Isabella was struck again by the thought that he looked more like the guy in the catalogue modeling the uniform than a real cop. His uniform was impeccably pressed, the boots spotless, the hat perfectly positioned on his head, the aviator sunglasses hiding a pair of deep blue eyes. The only thing creased on him was the brow above those sunglasses, which was knotted in concern.

A sudden, rapid barking from the far end of the house made his head jerk to the source. Isabella looked and saw the black spaniel scampering out from under the porch, turning and then running toward her and Mrs. Mercer. She saw Feldman’s hand reach to his holster and held h. . .