North Country(117)

“She was drinking and high. Could have tripped and hit her head.” Terry clicks at his ballpoint pen repeatedly as he thinks out loud. “Accidental head injury that turns fatal?”

“It might have started as an accident, yeah,” Mike pipes up. He’s not scheduled to work today but insisted on coming in to help, given he was the first one on the scene. It’s also the biggest case our detachment has seen in twenty years. “But then someone disposes of her body. Why?”

“To hide something.” It seems so simple. “Holly told her friends that she was meeting a guy there. Someone older. Someone her parents would not approve of if they found out about him. That sounds like a sexual relationship.” My thoughts go directly to Axel Murphy. “She was fifteen when she died, so a male in his twenties could get into serious trouble if they were having sex.”

“In that case, his DNA would need to be on her,” Terry finishes for me. “Okay, so Holly and this mystery man have intercourse behind the Bale House, and then she somehow hits her head on the dumpster. She dies within minutes probably? I mean, look at that wound.” He gestures to the autopsy photo.

I blink away. I don’t need to see it again.

“He panics because his DNA is all over her, tosses her into his truck or trunk, and drives to a remote lake an hour away to get rid of her body.” Terry scribbles on his notepad under a heading of POSSIBLE SCENARIOS.

“He does all that but leaves her phone behind?” Mike says doubtfully.

“Where was that found again?” Schmidt starts flipping through the case report for the answer.

“In the stack of pallets out back. It slipped down a crack.” I don’t need to review those pages. I know them by heart. “One of the kitchen staff heard it vibrating when he was dumping a bag of garbage. He brought it inside.”

“If she was sitting out there, she could have bumped it and it fell,” Terry says.

“And if the guy’s panicked and rushing to not get caught, he might not think about her phone. Or he does but doesn’t see it anywhere, doesn’t have time to look. It’s dark,” Schmidt speculates. “And it gets left behind.”

“Maybe he came back later that night after the place closed, to search again?” Mike says.

“We have about twenty-four hours of footage from the gas station across the street. We can definitely take a look.” Schmidt nods.

Terry scribbles it down. “Okay, assuming this was a solo male for the moment, he could have dumped her body that same night, or shortly after.” Terry shifts to his laptop. “Where was her body found again?”

“About thirty feet offshore, near Bear Island,” Mike confirms. “One of the residents spotted her red shirt floating in between the chunks of ice.”

“That’s a massive water system,” I say over Terry’s mouse-clicking and key-tapping.

He turns his screen toward us and points out the satellite image of the road. “One access road in from our direction, right? It looks pretty long—”

“Eighteen kilometers.”

“And how deep is this lake?”

“The deepest basins are three hundred and sixty-odd feet, but average is sixty.” Mike spends a fair amount of time out there fishing.

Schmidt studies the scatter of pages and photographed evidence on the table as his fingers twirl the end of his moustache. “So we’re looking for someone who is local enough to be familiar with the lake, might have been in the Bale House that night but definitely drove in and out of that parking lot, and has access to a boat or some other watercraft.”

“Someone in our community. Someone we probably know,” Mike murmurs, and I feel his gaze on me.

Terry returns his laptop to his purview as Schmidt goes over next steps, starting with reviewing every second of footage.

Again.

“I don’t know about you guys, but I need another coffee already.” He wanders out of the meeting room, empty mug in hand.

Mike stands. “I’ll start on the gas station video.”

I nod. “Thank you.”

“Hey, McAllister, can you hang back for a sec?” Terry calls out, clicking away.

“Yeah, sure. What’s up?”

He waits for the meeting room door to shut. “If you were investigating this case, the first person you’d talk to would be anyone who you can confirm was on Lake Temagami the weekend Holly disappeared, right?”

“That makes sense, yeah.” I frown. Where’s he going with this?

He spins his computer around to show me the search he pulled up.

Logan’s picture fills the screen, the one of him appearing to ponder life while leaning against a fence. It’s the one from the Cold River Post piece.

“Great article, by the way.” Terry punctuates that with two thumbs up.

“Are you kidding me? This again?” I stare at him, dumbfounded. “Logan has an alibi for that night!”

“And what about his cousins?”

“Who? Jack and Jameson?”

“They were at the Bale House that night, and they were with Landry at the lake the next morning. We’ve been assuming all of this was done by one person, but maybe he had help?”

I’m struggling to wrap my head around this insanity. “So, what are you thinking? That one of them killed Holly and then the three of them dumped her body the next morning while fishing? Oh, and then also saved a drowning woman’s life a few hours later? Really?”