Page 97 of Deeper Than the Dead

Russ placed her hands atop a file folder and looked directly at Vera. “The truth is, I didn’t know Sheree.”

Oh hell. Vera put up a hand. “Let me stop you right there. We are not—”

“Please,” Russ interrupted, “let me explain. I did not contact your family on anyone else’s behalf. No one hired me to look into her case. I’m not working with a reporter. My goal is to help you and me.”

Vera had no patience for this sort of setup. “You have two minutes, and then I’m walking out.” She so disliked having her time wasted. Mostly she felt sick at the letdown.

Russ nodded. “I’ll get right to it then. Twenty-five years ago, right after I took over the agency from my boss, I accepted a client whose daughter had gone missing. Mrs. Sutton didn’t have much for me to go on, but what little she did know was that her daughter had gone to Fayetteville, Tennessee, and then simply disappeared.”

Twenty-five years ago ... the unidentified female remains instantly zoomed into Vera’s mind.

“Trina, her daughter,” Russ went on, “had recently been released from jail. She’d done a year for a stack of petty charges that involved prostitution and drugs. It was a shit sentencing, but that’s the way things were back then.”

“You’re saying,” Vera reiterated, “she was released from jail, went to Fayetteville, and never came back.”

“Yes.”

“Why?” Vera held her arms out. “Did she know someone in Fayetteville?”

“Her reason for going to Fayetteville,” Russ explained, “was because just before she was arrested and ended up in jail, her best friend, Latesha Johnson, went missing—also while visiting your little town.”

Two more sets of female remains. Bent’s voice echoed in Vera’s brain, and she felt suddenly ill.

“Latesha,” Russ went on, “had told Trina about a rich boyfriend and how he was going to take care of her until they could be married. She wouldn’t say his name. She insisted it was a big secret and that she would tell Trina when she could. One Friday, just over twenty-six years ago, she packed up and headed to Fayetteville, and Trina never heard from her again. Before she could look for her friend, Trina was arrested.”

“This Trina,” Vera ventured, “was sure her friend came to Fayetteville that weekend.”

“Oh yes, her sugar daddy”—Russ made air quotes—“was moving her into an apartment that weekend. His family was out of town, so he was available to get her set up.” Russ shook her head. “Bastard. You have no idea, as a PI, how often I see this sort of thing.”

Vera could imagine. She wrestled with the need to stand up and pace. “Trina gets out of jail a year later,” she repeated to be sure she had this right, “and hires you to look for her friend.”

“No.” Russ shook her head again. “She went looking for her friend and never came home again.”

About a ton of worry settled on Vera’s shoulders, flattening her rising hopes.

“Two months later,” Russ went on, “her mother came to me. She hadn’t heard from Trina in all that time. She was the one who hired me.”

“But,” Vera challenged, forcing logic to rise to the top of the thoughts whirling in her head, “if Trina was involved in drugs and prostitution, she may have met the wrong connection or just disappeared for whatever reason. It happens far too often.”

“I agree, but that’s not what happened,” Russ argued emphatically. “Trina’s mother was very well aware of her daughter’s issues. But when she came home after doing her time, she was different. She’d gotten cleaned up, and her first order of business was to find her friend ... or find out what happened to her.”

“Any ideas on who this sugar daddy was?” Vera chewed the inside of her jaw to prevent herself from spewing a dozen other questions. This was a solid lead for sure, but she needed more. She needed a firm connection to someone—any damned one.

Russ shook her head. “Mrs. Sutton only knew that he was supposed to be important and wealthy. And, obviously, married—thus all the secrecy.”

“If Latesha Johnson frequented Fayetteville,” Vera suggested, “she may have known or hung out with Sheree.” Wishful thinking maybe, but it wasn’t impossible.

“Perhaps. I’ve found no proof of that. You see when Sheree disappeared,” Russ explained, “I went back to Fayetteville and talked to dozens of people. I hoped that maybe—since the circumstances were similar—someone might be able to help me in my search. That maybe Sheree had fallen victim to whoever caused Latesha and Trina to disappear. But I found not a single witness who had seen Sheree with Latesha or Trina. Is it possible they met at some point? Maybe. But I suspect Sheree was busy with trapping and keeping her own sugar daddy at the time Latesha and Trina disappeared.”

Made sense in terms of the timeline.

“What I did find,” Russ added, “was that Sheree’s case was just as perplexing as the others. Whoever made her disappear did a damned good job.”

Vera held her breath for a beat before forging on. “Why come to my family now?”

The remains, of course, but Vera wanted to confirm that she was indeed fishing for information in order to close her old case—not for a spot in this investigation to garner attention for her business.

“Two other sets of remains—female—besides your stepmother,” Russ said without hesitation, “were found in that cave on your property. The estimated age of those remains fits the timeline in my case.” At Vera’s look of surprise, since few facts about the discoveries had been released, Russ shrugged. “I made a friend in the Lincoln County courthouse all those years ago, she called me.”

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