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“Then we don’t tell him everything.” I followed our progress on the map. “We tell him the less crazy parts.”
“Which parts are those?” Eddie’s tone was dry. “I can’t decide.”
“The house is on this street. Number forty-seven. Just up there.”
We were pulling up to a town house complex, a string of small homes attached by the garages. The complex wasn’t new, and the small yards were weedy, with bikes and kids’ toys abandoned next to the porches. An old man smoking a cigarette on his porch watched us as we drove by.
Eddie drove past John Haller’s house and parked farther down the street, next to the curb. Kal Syed’s cruiser parked behind us. I glanced in the rearview mirror and saw the old man promptly stub out his half-smoked cigarette and disappear into his house.
“Haller isn’t going to talk to us,” I said. “Not with a cruiser here. He probably won’t even answer the door.”
Eddie sighed.
Kal got out of his car and walked up to my window, which I rolled down. “Hello, Officer,” I said with one of my fake smiles. “Fancy meeting you here.”
“I’m not leaving,” Kal said. “Are you going to tell me what you’re up to? I can sit here all day.”
I pushed my sunglasses up on my head and took the folded photocopy of the missing person’s report from my purse. I handed it through the window to Kal.
He unfolded it, reading in silence for a minute. “Goddamn it. How the hell did you get this?”
“Check the date,” Eddie said.
“I know, Mr.Carter. I know. A year and a half after we found the body in Coldlake Falls. So there wasn’t a missing person’s report at the time.”
“There’s more,” Eddie said. He took a folded paper from his pocket and handed it over. It was the copy of the classified ad Carla Moyer had placed in 1977.
Kal read that, too. “Do you have any leads on this Carla Moyer?”
“Already talked to her,” Eddie said. “She’s in the phone book.”
“I hate you both.” Kal sighed. “You make me look bad. Were you planning on knocking on John Haller’s door and asking questions? Because I assure you, I’m not going to let you do it. From this point on, I’ll ask the questions.”
“Be our guest,” I said. “We’ll wait right here.”
Kal ducked and looked in my window at us. “You think this is going to get me closer to finding a serial killer? Or do we even have a serial killer? Do you want to give me a clue?”
“From this point on, the clues are your problem,” Eddie said.
“I hate you both. Please turn around and go back to Coldlake Falls now. Or better yet, go home to Ann Arbor.”
“No,” I said.
Without another word, Kal stood and crossed the street to John Haller’s door. We watched him knock, then knock again. The door opened and a man with gray hair in a ponytail opened it. He wore old sweatpants and a T-shirt, flip-flops on his feet. He gave Kal a hostile stare as the policeman spoke, and then his expression changed. He said something back to Kal, an argument of some kind, and when Kal persisted, he stood back and let Kal in.
—
Twenty minutes later, Kal emerged from the house, putting his hat back on his head. He strode across the street to our car. “John Haller answered all of my questions,” he said. “His daughter, Shannon, left home in 1976, wanting to travel and find herself. She was an addict and an alcoholic with mental problems. He never saw her again. He waited over a year for her to come home, and then he filed a missing person’s report. Nothing ever came of it.”
“Can Shannon be connected to the unidentified body you found?” Eddie asked.
Kal sighed. “The dental records would do it, if we still have them. We’d have to track down Shannon Haller’s dentist and find out if he still has nineteen-year-old records. If that’s a dead end, I’ll check if any blood or tissue samples were taken from the body and kept all this time. If not, the unidentified girl was buried in one of the graveyards in Coldlake Falls. We’d have to exhume her, which takes a ruling by a judge and a lot of money. And even if we do have samples saved from the postmortem, we’d have to run DNA tests, which take a lot of time and cost a lot of money. We’d also have to run DNA from John Haller to match the results, if he even agrees to give a sample. All of this is above my pay grade. But I’ll try.” He looked at us. “This is in the right hands now, and there’s nothing else the two of you can do. You can turn around and go back to Coldlake Falls now.”
I glanced at Eddie. He had turned to look at John Haller’s house, which was quiet. He seemed to be deep in thought, so I turned back to Kal.
Our eyes met. We were thinking the same thing: Even if the body could be proven to be Shannon’s, her murder still wasn’t solved. Max Shandler was a child when Shannon was killed. I knew now—or had an idea—how the others had been murdered, if not who the killers were. But who killed Shannon?
“You could help, you know.” Kal’s voice was low. “If you tell me what you know, or what you think you know. We’re no further ahead than we were before—you know that. You could change that situation.”
