Page 17 of Vanished in the Mist
He chuckled. “Good-looking guy, I take it?”
“I thought so. But it only took a few weeks for his ugly to come out. He’s…controlling, to put it mildly. Called me all the time. Texted nonstop. Got jealous when I went out with friends, regardless of whether they were male or female. Kept showing up at my office to check on me.”
Kaden could feel his inner caveman wanting to come out, to find this Troy and give him a lesson on how to treat a woman. He reached across the table and took her hand in his. “Did he hurt you, Shanna?”
She stared at their joined hands, then gently pulled her hand back. “Only once. I had him arrested, filed a restraining order. That was the day I broke up with him, obviously. As so many do, though, he’s largely ignored the order. I had himarrested just a week before I came here because he kept texting, calling and showing up outside my house. He made bail and disappeared. Haven’t heard from him since. Honestly, the silence, not knowing where he is, has me more jumpy than when he was openly harassing me. Which is why I felt I should warn you. I don’t know if his violence would escalate beyond what happened, given the chance. But since you’re around me you should be careful, just in case he does show up here. I’ll text you his picture.”
“Is that why you brought your gun?”
“It definitely factored into my decision.”
He wanted to reassure her that he’d protect her. But it was a catch-22. Although they clicked together as if they’d been friends a long time, the truth was that they didn’t know each other all that well. Acting as if he wanted to be her bodyguard at this point could make him seem like the controlling one, like the ex she’d fled. Making her uncomfortable around him was the last thing he wanted to do. Which meant the next time he was tempted to take her hand in his, or even kiss her forehead as he’d done earlier, he’d have to quash those desires. She was coming off a bad relationship and didn’t need to worry that he was coming on to her. That, and their lives being based so far apart meant one thing. Shanna was off-limits. He knew it. But his heart, not to mention the rest of his body, was going to take some convincing.
Her gaze searched his. “I’m sorry. That was a lot to lay on you. If you want to head back to Charleston now and leave all of this to me, I totally get it.”
He was shaking his head before she finished speaking. “You haven’t managed to chase me away just yet. And both of us have businesses to get back to. A week is all we’ve got. Let’s make the most of it and see if we can figure out what happened to Tanya. Her parents deserve to know.” He motioned toward theominous stacks of paperwork. “My investigations are completely different than the type you do. You’re the lead here. How do we start?”
“Thank you, Kaden. Thanks for your support, especially even after you’re aware of the potential danger.” This time she was the one who reached across the table and took his hand in hers.
A spark of desire shot straight through him. But he did his best to keep any sign of that from his expression. “Of course. We’re in this together. For a few more days, anyway.”
She pulled her hand back. “I’ll check with the police back home tomorrow to see if they’ve located Troy yet. At least if they have, that’s one less thing to worry about.”
“You mean besides a killer being in Mystic Lake, a killer whose identity we have no clue about? Let alone the identity of his victim?”
“Right. Besides that. Heck of a vacation, huh?”
“At least it won’t be boring.”
They both laughed and she began scooting some of the piles of papers to the side. Then she retrieved a yellow legal pad and pen for him from the brown leather satchel she’d set beside the table earlier, after they’d finished eating. For herself, she pulled out a laptop and set it in front of her.
He motioned toward the legal pad and computer. “If that’s what you brought when you were planning to do nothing, you need some serious coaching on how to relax away from work.”
“My satchel of supplies and my computer are my security blankets. I always take them with me. Always be prepared, right?”
“Are you quoting the Boy Scouts to me?”
She blinked, then grinned. “I guess I am. It’s a good motto.”
He laughed and nodded his agreement.
She picked up one of the larger stacks of papers and set it in the middle. “This is the official copy of Tanya’s investigation filefrom the police. On most of my investigations, like the divorce cases, I have the luxury of time on my side. But we don’t here, so we’ll have to take some substantial shortcuts and hope we don’t miss anything. Where I’d usually try to start the investigation pretty much from scratch, not relying on someone else’s work, on this one we’ll need to rely a lot on the foundation the police built. We’ll note any inconsistencies or holes that will need more follow-up. But we can’t start from nothing and hope to make enough headway to make a difference fast. I’ll need you to be my devil’s advocate, the person to question everything I do so you can help me see any gaps.”
“Makes sense. But I’m at a disadvantage. I read everything your sister sent and used that to formulate a plan of where I’d scan the lake. I’m not sure what to do aside from that. Do we go talk to Tanya’s family? Her friends at school? Try to get a better timeline of what happened the day she disappeared?”
“All of that, to an extent. But, again, we have to take some shortcuts. The police investigation, at least initially, would have been focused more on quick action to find someone they believed could still be alive. That’s very different from what we’re doing now, trying to find a body.”
She swallowed, obviously feeling sad about Tanya, then continued. “We’re more in the cold-case phase of the investigation and need to look at it that way. We’ll build on what was done, and try to narrow everything down as much as possible to see who we actually need to reinterview, so as to cause the least distress to the family.”
“Officer Fletcher mentioned she’d notified Tanya’s family that we’re looking into her disappearance,” he reminded her. “Do you still want to talk to them?”
“Probably. But let’s review the reports from all of their previous interviews to be sure it’s necessary. I’d rather not bother them if we don’t have to. Let’s organize everything into piles that arelogically related. All interview reports can go in one stack. Any physical evidence reports, like logs of what may have been seen or taken from Tanya’s bedroom, her school locker, anything the police may have collected from the outdoor area where we were today, let’s stack those together. Photographs should go in a separate stack too. Once we get all of the information sorted, we can go through each group together.”
“And after we do that? What’s next?”
“Normally, interviews and reinterviews. Then, I’d dive into cell-phone records, the missing person’s computer, a health-tracking device if they wore one to see if we could get location data from it. Really, any technological devices associated with the missing person to help formulate who they’ve been talking to, what was going on in their life at the time they went missing and where they might last have been. I’d also look for a journal, or diary. Those can be a gold mine of information about daily activities and people the missing person has been interacting with, people her parents might not even know about. Many young girls keep diaries or journals without their parents ever knowing.”
She powered up her computer.
