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“You’re asking everyone about strange vehicles?” she questioned with a hint of fear.
“Yes. Why? Have you noticed anything out of the ordinary?”
“No,” came the quick, sharp response. “I really have to get back to my work.”
“Sorry to bother you. Have a good day.”
The door closed in Greta’s face. She heard rustling from inside the house. She stepped off the porch to peer into a large front window and past the open drapes. Helen Snyder sat in an armchair, holding her bowed head in her right hand. Her left hand clutched the now crumpled photos.
Did I hit a nerve? Greta wondered. Helen Snyder is a nervous sort and sure doesn’t want me back asking questions, but why? And when I told her to ask her neighbors about people or cars that were out of place, that certainly got a reaction. Again . . . why?
Greta’s mind stayed on Helen Snyder, while she continued canvassing.
Could the husband’s alibi be faked? she thought.
She didn’t see how, and she rejected the possibility that the Snyder woman was the killer. Not only did she not seem the type, how would she have gotten the body in the trunk, much less dropped it along the highway, driven the car to Lincoln City, and gotten herself back home? Joe and Helen working together? No, not possible.
Greta quit canvassing at six o’clock and walked back to her house. She couldn’t get the Snyders out of her mind. A quick Google search on Joseph (Joe) Snyder got hits galore. Unfortunately, none of them were her Joseph Snyder of Pacific City, Oregon.
Hell, she thought. There must be hundreds of Joseph Snyders in the U.S. Narrow it down.
She retried with Joseph Snyder Tillamook County or Pacific City. No hits.
Next, she tried Helen Snyder of Tillamook. The Google screen again listed many hits, and the first hits were for a Helen Snyder of Tillamook, Oregon. Greta scanned through the listing: community and church activities, pancake feeds, Christmas services, food bags for the unemployed, and various other church activities.
She went on to the second page of hits, and when she clicked on the first one, she got a surge of déjà vu.
Wait a minute, she thought. This looks familiar.
It was a group picture of thirty or more men and women, a Tillamook County scholarship drive to raise funds for local high school students to help pay for college—organized by the Tillamook County Ecumenical Council of Churches. She read on. The article listed several churches, including the Church of God Arising, with Helen Snyder one of the organizers of the drive.
Greta did a double-take. Balfour’s church? No wonder I thought I’d seen this article before. I had! When I searched for information on Balfour/Pererra.
The article mentioned Balfour once, along with several other clergymen. She went back and read the other articles carefully. Helen Snyder’s and Balfour’s names appeared together in three articles, two referencing him as the pastor of the Church of the God Arising and Helen Snyder as a member of the congregation and prominent in church activities.
There were several references to the church having fundraisers for a mission and a school it supported in eastern Peru. Balfour traveled there once or twice a year for several weeks. There was no mention of anyone else traveling with him.
Greta sat back in her chair and stared out the window, thinking, Could this be one of those “obvious” cases Bruce is always warning me about? I discounted Balfour before because he had no known connection to Toompas. But now there is one, although indirect. A member of his congregation was likely burglarized by Toompas. Of course, who knows how many others in the county might have been burglarized over the last few years? It’s probably only a coincidence. Still . . .
She read the articles again about Balfour’s Peru mission. The village of Sevite. The only other information stated that the Church of God Arising supported a church and a school for poor Peruvians and Indians. She couldn’t find much else. There was only a postal code and an undetailed map of Peru, giving no exact location of the village and the mission.
Next, she searched for Sevite in Peru using Google Earth and found it.
Talk about in the middle of nowhere! she thought.
The roads to Sevite looked like a drunkard’s walk, zigzagging across mountains and forests. As far as she could tell from the satellite image of the village, there weren’t more than twenty structures at a dirt crossroad.
She zoomed back away with the view on the map again.
“Christ. One article mentioned flying into Lima. From there, you’d go fifty or more miles south along the coast and then wind hundreds of miles on dirt roads where you probably couldn’t average fifteen miles per hour. It’d take forever to get to this Sevite, if the roads were open. Couldn’t Balfour have found someplace more remote?”
Now she was full-throttle suspicious. Maybe Balfour had found Christ and turned his life around, but this was one more detail that ate at her.
She kept reading until she exhausted the hits on Helen Snyder and Balfour. Nothing additional came out.
She wanted to know more about this mission, and she wanted to look at Balfour again. Although there was still no direct connection to Toompas, now she was curious. They could just be coincidences—but too many for her taste.
At the end of the day, she and Plummer talked again over the phone. Five days gone, two left. They had already agreed to push the deadline to Friday, instead of the assumed Wednesday, as the last day, giving them two more days. They figured the sheriffs wouldn’t notice. When she told Plummer about the Snyder visit, he merely grunted.
