Page 85 of Her Wild Coast Promise

“You think?”

She purses her lips for a moment, as if deciding how much to share. “When she left, she didn’t take everything. I had a feeling she knew she’d be back.”

I’m tempted to break into the notebook now, but what I’m after is more important.

“Terrilynn wanted to get out of Alaska. Start her life over somewhere else. She had a job but it wasn’t paying very much, and rent isn’t exactly cheap.” She glances up at me, uncertainty in her eyes. “Something happened, and she begged me to let her stay at our facility, even though by then she had aged out of services. I think she was trying to hide.”

“Any thoughts on who she was hiding from?”

“No and that’s not something I would have asked.”

“When was this?” I ask.

“About a week before Cooper and Sarah pulled her out of Porcupine Creek.”

“Anything in the diary about who she was running from?”

Heidi shakes her head. “I only read enough to figure out it was hers. It was started when she first came to us. She was fifteen.”

My empty stomach knots. Fifteen years old and discarded like that.

“I think she was pregnant,” Heidi adds.

She’s right, but I can’t confirm details of an active investigation.

As if Heidi is reading my thoughts, she nods, her lips pressed tight.

“Has this kind of thing happened before, or since?” I ask. “Young girls in the foster care system getting mixed up in prostitution, drug use, crime?”

She gives me a patient smile. “It’s not like I know what happens on the outside.”

“Did you ever see Terrilynn with anyone? Maybe someone gave her a ride somewhere? Or visited?”

“As for a ride, it’s possible. But at OCS, we have strict rules about visitation, and she refused to see her dad.”

I remember what Vera Hayes mentioned, about Terrilynn’s daddy hurting her. Though relevant to Terrilynn’s life and the choices she made, it’s not connected to her death. Someone murdered her for her silence.

Maybe it was Russel Walsh, though based on his reaction to the idea that his bombs at the survey camp could have killed three people, I don’t get the sense that he’s the type to strangle a woman to death. Being that close to a victim while they suffer takes a special kind of psycho.

Could it be Kristov Stoll? Having a child with a teenaged sex worker might dampen his plan to marry the soon to be wealthy Vera Hayes. He’s definitely crooked, but a murderer?

The feeling that I’m missing something returns, tugging at my stomach.

I slide out my phone and pull up Stoll’s mug shot. “Did this man ever visit OCS?”

Heidi leans forward, her hair falling around her face as she studies my phone screen. “Yes, a few times.” She glances up. “He came with Vera Hayes to see William and Zach.”

“Did he interact with the other children?”

She frowns. “What do you mean? Families get the use of our visitation rooms only. They are not permitted to roam through the facility.”

“Could this guy have met or even interacted with Terrilynn Silva at OCS?”

Heidi sits back and crosses her arms. The frustration and pride she’s grappling with are clear in her troubled eyes and her defensive posture. But she exhales hard and looks me square in the eyes. “There’s no way he would have been alone with her.”

I nod to reassure her that I’m not attacking her or the methods she adheres to. “I’m looking for a way that Terrilynn could have landed on this guy’s radar.”

She purses her lips, as if thinking. “Zach and Terrilynn were close.”

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