He laid the file in front of her and opened it up. “This is a very old missing person case that I’m certain is connected to our case.”
“Sandy Cranston?” Quinn looked up at him. “This says she went missing over five years ago from the University of Pittman. What kind of ties does she have to Barbie?”
“On the surface, you wouldn’t think any, other than she was a college student, but she was originally from Altoona. The family moved away after she graduated from high school before she started college. Then she simply disappeared one weekend after the homecoming game. She was reported to have been seen with an unidentified male wearing a Pembroke State hat.”
“Our connection.” She sucked in her breath.
Burrows nodded. “It’s a thin one, but what if it’s our guy?”
Quinn looked over at Sheraton who had been sitting quietly listening to them talk. “What do you think? Is this enough to run with it?”
“I trust Logan, and if he believes he’s found a third victim then I say hunt this dog down.”
Excitement bubbled inside her chest, and she nodded. “Okay. Let’s do whatever it takes to find solid connections between Martin, Cranston, and Randall. So far, no eyewitness has said that the guys the waitress in Lewistown was chatting up before she went missing were wearing Pembroke State hats, but it was summer and hot.”
“I can travel back and ask specifically if they recall that detail. It wasn’t something I thought to ask before, and I should have,” Burrows said.
“What about credit card receipts of the customers the waitress served?” Quinn asked.
“That table of guys paid cash. Every single time they were there. And they went three times, making a point of sitting in her section, before she went missing.”
“Don’t you think that’s odd? That they’d sit in her section each time?” Sheraton said.
Logan shrugged. “Not if she gave good service and she’d been friendly with them. Remember, my previous notes showed these guys were frat boy types out for a good time. They were chatty and flirty. And according to Randall’s boss, she was a very pretty girl.”
“Do we think the MO changed in the waitress's disappearance?” Quinn asked. “If we do, then we have to rethink the connection between Cranston and Martin.”
Burrows shook his head. “No. I think it’s still one person responsible for her going missing. Even if there were three frat boys seen at the brewery sitting in the waitress’ section. Just like it was one person seen with Martin and one person seen with Cranston wearing a Pembroke State hat.”
“But in Martin’s case, more than one frat boy was seen wearing a Pembroke State hat the night she was at the frat party,” Quinn reminded him.
“It still doesn’t matter,” Sheraton said. “We have three cases now, regardless of how many hats or no hats. We just need to find the common denominator. We need to find the male involved.”
Quinn sighed and leaned back in her chair. “That may be like finding a needle in a haystack.”
“Maybe not. I talked to Sandy Cranston’s parents, and they mentioned that their daughter had dated a boy in high school and may have still been seeing him while in college, but they couldn’t be sure. It had turned into a long-distance relationship once they moved from Altoona.”
Burrows flipped the page in the file and a photo of Sandy and a young Cliff Beamer, the son of Blair County District Attorney, was there.
“Oh my!” she said. “Sheraton, do you see this?”
Her editor came forward and glanced at the file. “That’s not good. Logan, do you know who that is? If he’s involved, then this case has just taken a major turn.”
Burrows crossed his arms. “Your point being?”
“The Beamers are a very prominent political family in the state,” Quinn said. “Cliff is the only son of socialite Candace Foust Beamer and Russell Beamer, Blair County District Attorney. His paternal grandparents are Harlan Beamer, Blair County District Judge, and Clancy Pepperidge Beamer of the Pennsylvania Pepperidge’s. We must be very careful here.”
“If you turn the page in the file, you’ll see I already uncovered that in my investigation into him, but it still doesn’t change the fact that the Cranstons said he dated their daughter. That’s all that page tells you. Not that he is the guy in the Pembroke State hat. Like they said, they weren’t even sure if Sandy was still seeing him once she went to college. She didn’t talk about him anymore. He visited them once during the summer after they moved from Altoona, and that was the last time they heard from him. According to her parents, he was a nice, respectable young man from a good family while their daughter dated him in high school. However, I checked, and Cliff Beamer did his undergraduate at Pembroke State, and he pledged to a fraternity there. He would have been an older boy during the time frame that Barbie Martin attended that frat party. That timeline matches up. And he did take a road trip with some college buddies of his a few weeks ago that put him in Lewistown during the time that Heather Randall went missing. A coincidence? On all three counts?”
Sheraton chuckled. “I knew you wouldn’t just bring us a file without having proof of anything. That’s what you meant earlier when you said you’d dug up something. Now, this is something a dog can hunt.” He looked down at Quinn. “It’s now your job to get people on the record and build a solid story to back this all up before we go to press with it. Right now, we have a solid theory, and we need to get a solid line connecting all the dots. No holes. We need to know for sure we have more than conjecture here before we start pointing fingers at him and his family. Because if it is him, then we can understand why the Altoona PD has been claiming Barbie Martin was a drunk and druggie who just disappeared from that party.”
“Right.” Quinn pushed back from the table, she had her work cut out for her and the first thing she needed to do was to call her insurance and get a rental car until hers could be repaired. She couldn’t travel around by transit.
“See why I think you need protection? If you’re already getting death threats before this comes out, you’re going to need it more when you start publishing articles about Beamer.” Burrows sat down for the first time in twenty minutes.
“When do you want to run an article connecting the three cases?” she asked.
“Let’s hold off on that for a day or two,” Sheraton said. “We don’t want to tip our hand just yet while you’re gathering as much background as you can. Then we’ll start releasing a series of articles daily. I’ll begin planning a strategy of what I want to see from you while you and Logan work together on getting more details.”
