An Ice Cold Grave Read Free Page B

ambulance chasers. This was all I could do, my sole unique ability; and I was determined to bank as much money as I could while it was still operative. Someday, as quickly as it had been given to me, it might be taken away. I imagined I would be glad; but I would also be unemployed.
    â€œHow do you decide where to look?” the sheriff asked.
    â€œWe get as much information as we can. What did you find after the disappearances?” Tolliver asked. “Any physical clues?”
    The sheriff very sensibly got out a map of the county. After she spread it out over her desk, we all three rose to peer at it. “Here we are,” she said. “Here’s Doraville. It’s the county seat. This is a poor county, rural. We’re in the foothills, as you see. There’s some hilly land, and there’s some steep land, and there’s a valley or two with some level acres.”
    We nodded. Doraville itself was a town strewn about on many levels.
    â€œThree of them had vehicles of their own,” Sheriff Rockwell said. “We found Chester Caldwell’s old pickup up here, in the parking lot at the head of the hiking trail.”
    â€œHe was the first one?” I asked.
    â€œYes, he was the first one.” Her face tightened all over. “I was a deputy then. We searched all along that trail for hours and hours. It goes through some steep terrain, and we looked for signs of a fall, or an animal attack. We found nothing. He’d gone missing after football practice, in the middle of September. This was when Abe Madden was sheriff.” She shook her head, trying to shake the bad memories out of it. “We never found anything. He came from a tough home; mom drinks too much, divorced. His dad was gone and stayed gone.”
    She took a deep breath. “Next gone was Tyler Webb, who was sixteen. Went missing on a Saturday after swimming with friends at Grunyan’s Pond, a summer afternoon. We found his car here, at the rest stop off the interstate.” She pointed to the spot, which wasn’t too far (as the crow flies) west of Doraville. About as far as the trailhead parking lot was from north Doraville. “Tyler’s stuff was in the car: his driver’s license, his towel, his T-shirt. But no one ever saw him again.”
    â€œNo other fingerprints?”
    â€œNo. A few of Tyler’s, a few of his friends’, and that’s all. None on the wheel or door handle. They were clean.”
    â€œWeren’t you wondering by then?”
    â€œI was,” she said. “Sheriff Madden wasn’t.” She shrugged. “It was pretty easy to believe Chester had run off, though leaving his pickup behind? I didn’t think so. But he had a tough time at home, he’d broken up with his girlfriend, and he wasn’t doing well in school. So maybe he was a suicide and we simply hadn’t found his body. We looked, God knows. Abe figured someone would come across his remains eventually. But Tyler was a whole different kettle of fish. He had a very close family, real devout boy, one of the solid kids. There just didn’t seem to be any way he would run off or kill himself, or anything like that. But by then Abe wouldn’t hear a word on the subject. He’d found out he had heart trouble by then, and he didn’t want to upset himself.”
    There was a little moment of silence.
    â€œThen?” I said.
    â€œThen Dylan Lassiter. Dylan didn’t have a car. He told his grandmother he was going to walk over three streets to see a friend, but he never got there. A ball cap that might have been his was found here.” She pointed a finger to a spot on the map. “That’s Shady Grove Cemetery,” she said.
    â€œOkay, a message,” I said.
    â€œMaybe, maybe the wind blew it there. Maybe it wasn’t even his, though the hair looked like Dylan’s. It was just a Tarheels cap. Eventually, we sent it to SBI, and the DNA was a match