“We’ll start with you, Nessa. On the morning of May sixth, you made a gruesome discovery on Danskammer Beach.”
“Yes.” Nessa’s voice came out as a whisper, and Josh gestured for her to speak louder. She cleared her throat nervously. “Yes,” she repeated.
“What was it?”
“It was the body of a young girl wrapped up in a garbage bag. She looked to be around seventeen years old, and she was nude.”
“How did you happen to come across the body?” Josh asked.
“My friends and I were walking down a trail from the road to the beach, and I spotted the bag in the scrub. I’m a nurse practitioner, and I used to work in a hospital. I’m familiar with the smell of death. I knew there was something terrible in that bag. And there was.”
“The police claim the young woman was a prostitute who died of an overdose.”
“They still can’t tell us who she is, but they know she was a sex worker?” Her indignation came through clearly, though Nessa kept her tone polite. “What difference would it make if she was? Is it suddenly okay to kill sex workers?”
“Of course not.” Josh looked taken aback. “I didn’t mean to suggest that.”
“If the police said she was a cashier at CVS, would you have brought that up, too?
“No. Probably not,” Josh conceded.
“The police claim the girl died of an overdose while with a client, who panicked and got rid of the body. But that doesn’t fit with what I saw. The bag hadn’t been tossed out of a car. Someone had taken the time to wrap the girl up like a present and carry her down the trail. The bag’s drawstrings were tied in a neat bow.”
Josh lifted a finger to have Nessa pause for a moment.
“The pictures Nessa took of the bow are up on our website and will remain there until we’re forced to take them down. Nessa, you and your friends called the police. But when they arrived, there was something you didn’t share with them. Is that right?”
“Yes. I had a feeling there were other bodies nearby.”
“Are you talking about ESP?”
They’d discussed how to handle the subject of Nessa’s gift. Josh felt it was best to keep it vague.
“You can call it whatever you like. I’ll call it women’s intuition. Every lady listening right now knows exactly what I’m talking about. I had a feeling that I just couldn’t shake. I mentioned it to my daughters that night when I got home, and they reminded me that a girl their age had disappeared along Danskammer Beach two years ago.”
“A girl named Mandy Welsh.”
“My friends Jo and Harriett met Mrs. Welsh. She told them she was convinced her daughter had been murdered. But two years later, police were still writing Mandy off as a runaway.”
Josh turned to face the microphone. “We tried to reach Mandy Welsh’s mother for this podcast, but we were unable to locate her.”
“A few weeks back, Amber Welsh and her kids disappeared overnight,” Nessa said.
“Overnight?”
“Literally,” Nessa confirmed. “In less than twenty-four hours, a woman, three little boys, and an entire trailer disappeared without a trace. When we found out they were gone, Jo and I went right back to the police.”
“And what did they say?”
“They said the disappearance wasn’t surprising, considering the Welshes’ background.”
“Which was?”
“In a word? Poor.”