Stolen Daughters by Carolyn Arnold (top novels TXT) 📗

want to be shown up, and by a detective from another department no less. But shouldn’t justice trump ego? “You heard what I just said?”

He stopped outside a door marked Interview 2. “You go in there and get comfortable. I’ll be back in a minute.”

“Ah, sure? Where are you—”

He was already down the hall. For a big man, he moved quickly and stealthily.

“Okay then,” she said to Trent. Either Robbins was too proud to accept help from a fellow detective and/or he was having a bad day before they’d shown up.

Amanda and Trent sat at a table that would normally be used for questioning perps. Chester really wanted to remind them they were on his turf. Personally, she didn’t have any interest in getting into a battle over jurisdiction. She just wanted a killer to go away.

A few minutes later, Chester returned with a laptop under his arm. He proceeded to put it on the table, then sat across from her and Trent. “Talk to me.”

“The body of a young woman was pulled from a house fire in Dumfries, but her cause of death was strangulation.”

“You’re sure it was Lynch?”

Amanda pulled the computer-rendered photo of Lynch up on her phone and showed it to Chester.

Chester didn’t give the screen much attention. “I don’t remember what she looked like.”

Amanda tucked her phone away and pointed to his laptop. “We’ll wait if you want to bring her picture up. Keep in mind that she would have been three years younger at the time she went missing.”

Chester seemed to debate whether he was going to do as Amanda suggested. He flipped the lid on the laptop open, clicked some keys, grunted. He was slower at typing than she was at texting—and that said a lot. “Could be her, I suppose.”

“Do you remember much about the case?”

“What would you like to know?” He crossed his arms on the table, his body language closed off and rigid—defensive.

Maybe it wasn’t so much that Chester didn’t want to be shown up, but rather that he was feeling guilty about possibly missing something that led to the girl’s death. “To start with, did a man by the name of Samuel Booth surface in your investigation?” He could have been the man to lure her away from home—and then been the one to take her out. She wasn’t dismissing any possibilities at this point, though she also wasn’t trying to convict him yet either—something she needed to keep reminding herself.

“Name doesn’t sound familiar.”

She pulled up a photo of Booth on her phone. “Look familiar?” She put her screen in front of him.

“Nope.”

She put her phone back in her pocket. “We read that Ashley may have been groomed through social media.”

“Is there a question in there?”

“Were there messages to support this?”

“Yes.”

“And…?” she prompted.

“Lynch was communicating with a male—or perceived male—online. More specifically through social media, in the month proceeding her running away.”

“A month?” That surprised her. Shouldn’t her parents have noticed? But maybe they were much like the Fosters and only orbiting in the same vicinity of their child, not really a part of her life. Then there was the breaks and fractures. “What were the Lynches like?”

“Don’t like to jump to conclusions about people, but I didn’t like the dad. Pretty sure he was abusing the wife and daughter. I found out that she broke her arm when she was about nine. They said she fell, but I wasn’t buying it.”

Amanda and Trent met each other’s gaze.

“Take it that means something to you?”

Amanda nodded. “The ME found a healed break like that in our victim.” She was gaining more confidence that their Jane Doe was Ashley Lynch. “What was the name of the person contacting her?”

“Riley Sawyer. Definitely an alias. Most likely a pedophile. Sawyer approached Lynch and told her that he was a senior at Woodrow Wilson High School. She’d just started there that fall. He told her she was the most beautiful girl he’d ever seen.”

Amanda hated to admit how easily flattery worked on most teenage girls—her younger self included.

Chester went on. “This guy filled her head with a bunch of nonsense. He also said she deserved a boyfriend who treated her right.”

Whoever this Riley Sawyer really was, he would have had to know about her love life for the ruse to work. That could indicate someone within Ashley’s circle, but it might also suggest that people in the sex-trafficking network were staking out the school. “This person was aware of her personal life to say that,” Amanda concluded. “It also sounds like this guy she may have been seeing was abusive.”

“You’re not the only detective in the room,” Chester said. “And we spoke with some of her friends at the high school. Even spoke to the boy she had been seeing. He was a senior and had already moved on with another girl.”

Heartbreak alone could have explained a change in behavior, especially for an emotionally charged teenager. Amanda remembered sulking for months after she and her first boyfriend broke up. She’d only been sixteen, but it might as well have been the end of her life. After all, she’d thought she was going to marry the guy. Her father told her being in the house at the time had made him feel like he was in the elevator business—up and down.

“I take it you had no luck tracking this Sawyer guy down?” Trent asked.

“Dead end. Obviously, I got Cyber Crimes involved.”

“We’re sure you did all you could at the time. What came of questioning Ashley’s friends and family?” Amanda asked.

Chester’s posture softened at the flattery. “There was one uncle on the mother’s side. A Ralph Field. He was one of those oddballs. A loner. Stuck to himself. He was forty-seven, never been married. And let’s just say his looks and level of intelligence came from the shallow end of the gene pool.”

“Was he involved in Ashley’s life?” she volleyed back.

“Just during the holidays. The mother felt sorry for her brother and had him over that Easter—that