John said, “I thought your shift was from four to twelve.”
“They changed it. As of today, it’s noon to eight P.M.” Then she turned her back to them and started down a dim hallway.
She had dressed in an ’80s era track suit, terry cloth scuffs on her feet. She hadn’t bothered to groom herself at all. The aroma of fresh coffee filled the house. She had a mug of it, but they weren’t offered any as she led them into a small living room and ungraciously pointed them toward a sofa. She sat down in a recliner but kept it upright.
John began. “I apologize for getting you up early.”
“Well, I’m up, you’re here, what do you want?”
“We wouldn’t have bothered you at all if we didn’t think it was important.”
“Have you found Crissy?”
“No.”
“Then I don’t know what you have to say that would be of any interest to me.”
To hell with this. He didn’t have time to spar with her. “There’s a possibility that Crissy’s abductor is going to strike again, tomorrow night, if he’s not identified and stopped in time.” He paused and blandly added, “If that’s of any interest to you.”
She divided a look between them, landing back on John. “Where’d you get that notion?”
“From Ms. Collins. I’ll let her explain.”
Beth scooted forward on the sofa cushion in order to shorten the distance between them and try to establish a rapport. “Ms. Mellin, do you know what a blood moon is?”
Carla looked at John as though asking him if she’d heard right, then went back to Beth. “It turns orangey. What about it?”
“There was a blood moon the night Crissy was taken.”
“There was? News to me.”
“There was cloud cover here, and the eclipse occurred in the wee hours.”
Beth spent the next several minutes explaining why the phenomenon might be significant. John interjected only a few comments. Carla said nothing but listened intently, especially when Beth began telling her about the other women who had vanished just as Crissy had.
Beth finished by saying, “Louisiana lies in the swath of the US where tomorrow night’s blood moon will be a total eclipse, and, weather permitting, the viewing should be ideal.”
Carla looked at John. “You’ve talked to your counterparts in those other cities?” He nodded. “What were their reactions to your prediction?”
“Skeptical.”
“Doesn’t surprise me. This moon business sounds real far-fetched.”
“When Beth first bounced it off me, I thought so, too,” he said, having decided that complete transparency would be the best tack to take. “Those detectives haven’t dismissed the eclipses out of hand, but they lean toward them being coincidental. Also, no one has isolated a common trait among the four victims, which is rule of thumb for serial criminals.
“An even bigger snag for those who’ve worked those cases is that Galveston has their culprit in prison, as he was when Crissy was taken. Ours is dead by suicide. That cancels them out as possible suspects in Jackson and Shreveport.”
“Billy wasn’t your culprit,” she said flatly. “I kept telling that buffoon Barker he wasn’t. That poor boy wasn’t clever enough to pull off something like that, even if he’d wanted to, and he wouldn’t have wanted to. He and Crissy were friends, and friends for him were hard to come by. Gracie had homeschooled him, which was good in some ways, but it had made him socially awkward.”
“We were aware of all that,” John said. “I’m not defending Barker’s stubborn belief that Billy was guilty, believe me. I’m simply pointing out facts that we, as investigators, couldn’t discount.
“Billy’s grandmother took him out of school in the middle of second grade because of behavioral issues. In his public school records there were numerous reports of aggression against teachers and classmates, general unruliness. He may not have misbehaved around you and Crissy, but—”
“No, he didn’t. Know why? Because we treated him kindly, didn’t make fun of him, call him a dummy. All those incidents were his reaction to being bullied. They failed to put that in their damn reports.”
Patiently, John continued. “There was another red flag. We discovered a number of pornography websites bookmarked on Billy’s computer. Some of it very graphic.”
“He had the typical urges of boys that age,” Carla said. “Didn’t you like looking at pictures of naked women when you were sixteen?”
“Still do.”
Beth cut him a sharp glance.
Carla harrumphed, but he could tell that because he wasn’t patronizing her, he was gaining ground.
He said, “He lived next door to you. That proximity was another factor we couldn’t ignore. I was in their house on several occasions that week. You could see Crissy’s bedroom window from Billy’s. Did she ever indicate to you that he made her uncomfortable? That he might be watching her? Anything like that?”
“Never. Not once. If he’d been creepy, would she have taken him places with her? Walmart, grocery shopping, a movie sometimes. Little outings like that.”
Gracie Oliver had told John the same thing. Billy idolizes that girl because she befriends him and treats him with dignity.
In his and Mitch’s interview with Billy, he told them that Crissy had invited him to walk with her to the convenience store that night. He’d blubbered, “It was raining, so I didn’t go. Why didn’t I go? If I’d only gone…”
Carla was saying, “If Billy had been of a mind to, he could’ve done something bad to Chrissy at any time. He never laid a hand on her. I’ll stand by that till the day I die. Billy didn’t harm anybody.” Her lip quivered. “Except himself. And poor old Gracie had to hear all those awful things said about him even after he was gone.”
John never would have expected a demonstration of such a tender emotion from this hard-shell woman. He looked at Beth and saw that she was equally surprised.
She said, “We don’t believe it was Billy, either, Carla. We believe the guilty person has gotten away with it, which will give him confidence to do it again. We’re running out of time to even identify him.”