The crime techs went to work, and Shane trudged through the snow toward the house. He was wired. Anxious. Felt that time was slipping away and with it, Jenna’s chances of survival.
What did he know about this guy?
Lived in the area.
Obsessed with Jenna Hughes.
Considered himself some kind of poet.
A hunter, someone strong.
Someone who was connected to Hollywood and worked with alginate to make masks.
Someone who knew the layout of the grounds, understood Jenna’s routine. Knew about Cassie’s trysts with her boyfriend. About the logging road.
Someone close…
Someone who called himself Steven White, after a character in Resurrection.
By the time Carter returned to the house, Lieutenant Sparks and another officer from the OSP had arrived. Sparks was standing near the fire in the den, talking on the phone. Rinda, Allie, and the dog were hunkered on the couch, a quilt tossed over them, and another technician from the Oregon State Police was searching the place. “Haven’t heard on the GPS chips,” Sparks said after hanging up, “and Brennan, Settler, Falletti, and Dvorak are all accounted for. I had officers check.”
“Can we leave now?” Rinda asked. “Allie can come with me. I’ll take care of her. But I’ve got to find Scott.”
“He’s missing?” Carter asked and remembered that Rinda’s son could recite lines from Jenna’s movies, that he was near the top of the list for rental/purchase of every piece of film she’d made.
“He went into Portland, and Jesus, Carter, don’t give me that look. Scott’s not a part of this. Just like Wes wasn’t.” When he didn’t respond, she threw the cover off. “Oh, for Christ’s sake, Shane, get a grip. You’re grasping at straws!”
“Hey!” the technician shouted from the stairs. “Up here!”
“Stay with her,” Carter ordered Rinda as he and Sparks headed up the steps, passing the landing with its window. The tech was standing in the doorway; he led them into Jenna’s closet and a pull-down ladder that opened to an attic space above. Within the attic, beneath a thick layer of insulation, he pointed to a wire with a small, bulbous end. “A camera,” he said, “not part of the normal wiring, back here.” He showed them more of the same, hidden deep beneath the batting and run along a beam, barely noticeable, threading through the upper floor. “This is a professional job. Pretty high-tech, and he would have had to have time to do it. My guess, whoever wired this place did it before she moved in…like an inspector or someone hired to do work to bring it up to code. This insulation is pretty new, certainly added long after the house was built, probably before Ms. Hughes bought the place. So our guy, he does the legitimate electrical stuff, has the place inspected, then adds his own special little devices.”
Shane thought about Scott Dalinsky. Yeah, the kid had some of the know-how, but not the opportunity. Wes Allen? Or someone else. Seth Whitaker came quickly to mind. And he was a transplant, wasn’t he?
Shane whipped out his cell phone and called BJ. “Get to someone at city hall, find out who did the remodel work on Jenna Hughes’s place, and where the hell Seth Whitaker lives…Isn’t it up past Juniper?”
“I know that one. I’ve been checking,” BJ said. “He bought the Farris property about two and a half years back. Before Jenna Hughes plunked down her money.”
“But she might have already been looking. Where’s Whitaker’s place?”
“Remember the private ski resort project that was abandoned? That’s the spot.”
Carter felt that sense of awareness, the prickle of knowledge, a quick rush that accompanies cracking a particularly troublesome puzzle.
The acres surrounding the abandoned ski lodge overlooked this ranch. Located high upon a cliff, the very spot where Pious Falls started its furious descent, the acres set deep into the forest. The fact that some Arizona developer had actually thought about building a ski lodge up there had been considered folly by most of the locals. The access was nearly impossible, the permits unlikely, that side of the mountain ravaged by winter winds screaming down the gorge. The entire idea had fizzled before it had ever taken off. The man who’d dreamed up the crazy plan had died after some initial construction had been bogged down in red tape and red ink. His heirs had spent two or three years trying to unload the place.
Enter Seth Whitaker. The loner. A handyman. Electrician. Had he worked in L.A.? Was he connected to Jenna and her movies?
“You think Whitaker is involved?” BJ asked.
“I think he could be, yes. Check his alibis for the nights Sonja Hatchell, Roxie Olmstead, and Lynnetta Swaggert were abducted, then see if he was in Medford last year, around the time Mavis Gette was thumbing her way to Oregon. It may take some time, but there may be some credit card receipts indicating he was in Southern Oregon or Northern California. I need to know if this guy has changed his name legally, or illegally, for that matter, if he ever lived in the L.A. area, was associated with Hazzard Brothers or any other company that worked with Jenna Hughes’s films. Find out everything you can about him.”
“Tall order.”
“In a short time. I need all this ASAP.”
“I’ll do what I can, but remember, you also thought Wes Allen was our man.”
“Wishful thinking,” he joked.