Page 55 of The Lake of Lost Girls

“Why not?” I prodded.

Sergeant O’Neil patted his oversized belly. “My guts never lie. I knew we weren’t looking for one of those movie-style killers. This was something else. This was personal.”

“What about Dr. Daniels? Did you ever look at him?” I asked, remembering Ryan’s suspicions about the professor, though now I had to wonder why he was so keen to point the finger at someone else. My heart was beating too fast. The information about Ryan and Jess’s argument was another surprise. Once again I was faced with facts that the man beside me had purposefully kept from me.

Sergeant O’Neil looked unsure. “We did, but he was written off pretty quickly. I need you to understand some things about the case back then. Those girls were only missing at the time. No one suspected any foul play. At least not at first. Girls run away all the time. What was there to even look into? But Phoebe Baker’s parents wouldn’t stop calling and calling, so we had to check things out. Hell, we never even linked them together. There didn’t seem to be any connection at all. Different women, different looks, different social circles. The only connection they had was they all went to Southern State. That’s hardly a red flag, now is it?”

“A lot of people said you should have called in the FBI to take over, yet you never did. You continued to investigate the disappearances yourself,” Ryan began to talk. “It’s been said that you overlooked obvious suspects like Dr. Daniels from the beginning.”

Sergeant O’Neil inclined his head in agreement. “Maybe so. But no one wanted to look the professor’s way. He was well respected up at that school. And things run differently there. It has its own way of doing things. We were frozen out early on. Everyone was tight-lipped about him, so it was hard to run a decent investigation.” He sounded frustrated as he sat upright in his chair.

“Yeah, there’s Mt. Randall and there’s Southern State University. The two don’t often intersect, and when they do, it never goes well,” I agreed.

Sergeant O’Neil sighed wearily. “It was an uphill battle. The president of that school, what’s his name,” he flipped through his notebook again, “Bradley Hamilton—going through him was like trying to bust down a brick wall. He circled the wagons around Dr. Daniels, and we couldn’t really get near him after our initial questioning. So it was easier to drop him as a line of inquiry.” He put his notebook back down on the table. “I backed off when I admit I should have pushed more.” He twisted his gnarled hands together, his piercing eyes never wavering. “The truth is, Dr. Daniels’s alibi was his wife. And we all know that a spouse’s alibi isn’t worth the paper it’s written on.”

He slowly got to his feet, bracing himself on the armchair. He stretched out his back and then carefully made his way over to the fireplace. He picked up a black-and-white photo that looked like it was of him and his wife. I stood up and joined him.

In that moment, I hated him. Hated him for not doing more. For being weak. For not finding those women.

“So, his wife was his alibi,” I repeated. Sergeant O’Neil grunted in assent. “She claimed to have been with her husband the night Jess went missing?”

Another grunt.

“And you think she lied, yet you never followed up on it?”

Sergeant O’Neil brow furrowed as his voice took on a note of hard defensiveness. “You have to understand. He was a well-educated man. He had been teaching at Southern State University for years. It made no sense for him to have done those girls any harm. I couldn’t go around pointing fingers at men like him. Certainly not without some real evidence. Particularly given the way the college shut us down and made it damn near impossible to get answers. And I had norealevidence, only my instinct, which wouldn’t exactly hold up in court.”

“What makes you think his wife lied, Sergeant O’Neil?” Ryan asked as he joined us by the fireplace.

“It’s that gut of mine talking again. Like I said, I knew something wasn’t right.” His body seemed to sag under the weight of his confession. “But, the truth is—” He hesitated.

“What is it?” I urged.

Sergeant O’Neil bowed his head. “The truth is, I didn’t corroborate his alibi. I never dug any deeper into him. I never went to the restaurant where Mrs. Daniels said they were that night. I never did any of the things I should have done to officially eliminate him as a suspect.”

I was horrified. I knew that police incompetence had been largely to blame for the reason my sister’s, and the other girls’, cases were never solved. But hearing it admitted by the lead detective was like a punch to the face.

Then the rage set in.

The man was lucky he was already on death’s door because I was having very violent thoughts.

Sergeant O’Neil looked repentant. “I made the wrong choices back then. A lot of them. I know that now. Hindsight is always twenty-twenty. Because it was well known around the campus that he … well, he had several interactions that weren’t entirely wholesome with some of his female students. But that doesn’t make him a murderer, right? A pervert, yes, but a killer? I told myself it wasn’t possible. I purposefully didn’t listen to my hunch. Because if I had corroborated that alibi and it hadn’t added up then everything would have come out. I would have had to formally name him. The man would have lost everything. His reputation would have been ruined. And he had a family. Young children. What would that have done to them?”

“What about those missing girls?” Ryan demanded. “What about Jess?”

Sergeant O’Neil looked stricken. “If I had gone down that road, the school would have come after me. Southern State has a lot of power in that community. I was worried I’d lose my job.” He placed the photograph back on the mantle, his lips pressed into a thin line.

“So you cared more about your job than those missing girls. Got it,” Ryan snapped, losing all sense of journalistic neutrality.

“I’ve felt more than enough shame about my choices back then. Because I was pushed out anyway, once it became clear I wasn’t going to find Jessica. It was one thing when they were only a few girls from up on the hill, but once it was one of their own,” Sergeant O’Neil’s face took on a faraway expression, “it mattered a hell of a lot more.”

“Let’s say you had listened to your instincts about Dr. Daniels? What then?” I asked.

“Well then,” he stated matter-of-factly, the fierceness returning. “he would have been my number one suspect.”

Ten Seconds to Vanish: The Unsolved Disappearanceof Jessica Fadley

Episode 6

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