Page 48 of Murder Road

How did two teenage girls have a copy of an unreleased police file?

Gracie’s voice came from behind the kitchen counter, where she was still standing. She recognized each page even from that distance; she must have known them by heart. “Go to the next section,” she told Eddie. “The one dated in June.”

Eddie turned the page, then frowned down at what he was reading. “They found a jacket?”

“Six weeks later,” Beatrice supplied. “It was shoved into some underbrush. A hundred feet away.”

Eddie scanned a page, then picked up a photo—or, more precisely, a photocopy of a photo. He held it up for me to look at.

“It’s a letterman jacket,” I said, looking closely at the fuzzy photocopy. The jacket had dark blotches of what was most likely dirt on it. It was hard to tell without color.

“A high school letterman jacket,” Beatrice supplied. “From Midland High School in Midland.”

Midland was farther south, almost at the Indiana border. “The Lost Girl was in her twenties, not a high schooler,” Eddie said.

“They don’t even know if the jacket was hers,” Gracie said. “It could have been there randomly. It could have been the killer’s. Or she could have owned it a long time. They couldn’t find any evidence connecting it to the Lost Girl. No hairs or blood or anything. It had been there too long.”

“The file says that Midland PD was contacted, and they didn’t have any reports of missing women,” Beatrice added. “And that was it. A dead end.”

Eddie lifted the next set of papers. “Another police file,” he said. “Katharine O’Connor’s.” He looked up, his eyes narrowed. “Tell me how you got your hands on all of this. Now.”

The girls were silent, but I knew Eddie would get it out of them. I pulled the Lost Girl file toward me and flipped through it, reading for myself.

There was a standoff between Eddie and the two weirdest teenagers I’d ever met, but finally, Gracie caved. She rounded the counter and sat in a chair at the table, flipping her long hair behind her shoulders in a move I had done many times myself when my hair was long enough. I kept it cut just above my shoulders now, so hair tossing was much less dramatic. “Okay, so I got into some car trouble,” Gracie said.

“You were totally speeding,” Beatrice interrupted.

“Fine, okay. I was speeding.”

“Like, six times.” Beatrice looked at us. “They were going to impound her car.”

“Shut up,” Gracie snapped at her little sister. “Anyway, Dad knows a lot of people, and he arranged that I could volunteer at the police station to pay off the tickets. Like community service. Everyone thought it was this huge punishment, like I’d be bored. It’s the best.” She smiled. “Coldlake Falls isn’t the most exciting town, but I get to see everything. I fetch coffee and order supplies, but what they really needed was help in the file room. It was a complete mess, stuff piled everywhere, nothing alphabetized or labeled the right way. Enter me.” She grinned again. “I spent six weeks in there, and by the time my punishment was up, it was so perfect that they asked me to stay. Oh, and the photocopier is in the room next door.”

“Oops,” Beatrice said, her grin mirroring her sister’s.

“Jesus.” Eddie’s tone was halfway between admiring and creeped out. “You two are a little scary.”

“Just resourceful,” Beatrice said. “If we don’t do it, who will?”

Gracie’s smug smile faded. “Some of those kids were my age. They got killed and dumped a few miles from my house. Over and over. Like garbage. Someone did that, and the police and the newspapers think that I don’t have a right to know about it.” She pointed to the file I was reading. “They didn’t put anything about the letterman jacket in the papers. They didn’t want it public because it was something only the killer would know. But they could write about it now. They could put out a story twenty years later: Hey, do you remember a girl who went missing in 1976? A girl with this jacket? Do you know? I bet someone knows, someone remembers her, but they won’t do it.”

“Why not?” I asked.

“Because we need tourists,” Beatrice replied. “If there are stories about a serial killer in Coldlake Falls, the tourists go away. Which is why the cops could have planted evidence on Max Shandler, just like they did on O. J. Make it look like one guy went nuts and killed a girl, and they caught him the next day. Everyone’s safe. No reason to cancel your vacation.”

“They didn’t plant evidence on O. J.,” Gracie said.

“Yes, they did,” Beatrice shot back.

Gracie shook her head, her tone imperious. “O. J. did it. Everything else, I question.”

It was possible, maybe, but I had a hard time picturing Kyle Petersen and Chad Chipwell planting DNA evidence as if they were the LAPD. If the LAPD even had planted evidence. I didn’t follow the case closely enough to know. Normally, I paid no attention to murder.

“It isn’t just because of tourists,” Gracie said, returning to the topic at hand. “It’s because the Coldlake Falls PD know who the killer is, and they’re covering for him. Framing Max Shandler is part of that.”

“So who is it?” I asked her.

“If we knew, do you think we’d have all of this?” Beatrice waved to the pages strewn across the table. “We would have done something, told someone before Rhonda Jean got killed. We’d stop being obsessed. We’d go back to being normal.”

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