“Okay,” Andrea relented, though she had no idea whether she would comply. “I need to go, Mom. I think I see a western meadowlark.”
“Oh, send me a pic—”
Andrea ended the call. She watched a sandpiper float along the breeze, doing that weird thing where it was moving forward but looked like it was treading air.
She closed her eyes for a moment and let out a long breath, hoping to release her exhaustion. She felt her body yearning to go to sleep, but if her previous attempts at rest had proven anything, it was that her mind was perfectly willing to race between trying to figure out her uncle’s true motives, wondering if her father would find out what she was doing and try to blow everything up, and rehashing her conversation with Mike to see which felt better: telling him she had made a terrible mistake or telling him to fuck off.
Andrea couldn’t play that same game for another two hours. At least not in the back of an Uber that smelled of Armor All and mountain pine air freshener. To keep herself from spiraling, she reached into her backpack and pulled out the Emily Vaughn file.
Her eye caught the worn, typewritten label. She wondered how Jasper had gotten copies of the police investigation. As a United States senator, she assumed he had a lot of access to all kinds of information. Also, he was shitifyingly wealthy, so anywhere his power didn’t work, a large briefcase full of cash certainly would.
Not that any of Jasper’s machinations mattered. Andrea’s alternate investigation had only one purpose, and it wasn’t to ingratiate herself with her rich uncle. She really, really wanted to keep her father locked up—not only for Laura’s safety, but because a man who was capable of turning a handful of vulnerable people into a cult bent on destruction should not be out of prison. If that meant solving a forty-year-old murder, then Andrea would somehow have to solve a forty-year-old murder. And if she couldn’t prove her father did it, or if she proved that someone else did … She would fall off that cliff when she got to it.
Andrea took another breath and hushed it out before opening the folder.
The photo of Emily Rose Vaughn was what got to her the most. It was clearly her senior picture. The not-quite-eighteen-year-old had been beautiful, even with her perm and heavily lined eyes. Andrea flipped over the photo and looked at the date. Emily was probably starting to show when she’d stood in line with the other seniors for her turn in front of the camera. Maybe she’d worn a girdle or control-top pantyhose or some other eighties-style female torture to try to hide the truth.
Andrea studied Emily’s face again. She tried to remember what it felt like to be that close to graduation. Excited about college. Eager to get away from home. Ready to be an adult, or at least a version of an adult that was still wholly subsidized by her parents.
Emily Vaughn had served as a human incubator during the last seven weeks of her life. As far as Andrea could tell from the police report, Jasper was right when he’d said that the father had never been identified. 1982 was thirteen years before the OJ Simpson trial had made the general public and the court systems more accepting of DNA evidence. Back then, there had only been Emily’s word to go on, and she had apparently taken her secret to the grave.
The question was, had Clayton Morrow been a suspect because he was a credible suspect, or had the crimes of Nick Harp made him seem guilty after the fact?
Andrea had done the expected googling and found very little publicly available information about the attack on Emily Vaughn. No true crime podcaster or TV producer had done a deep dive on the case, probably because there was no new thread to pick at. No new witnesses. No new suspects. What little trace evidence that had been collected from the various scenes had either been lost to time or washed away by the inland flooding caused by Hurricane Isabel in 2003.
Judge Esther Vaughn’s wiki linked to twenty-one forty-year-old newspaper articles about the circumstances surrounding Emily’s death. Sixteen were from the Longbill Beacon, an alternative paper that had folded eight years ago and left nothing but a 404 when Andrea clicked through. The national stories were behind paywalls that she wasn’t going to access because she didn’t want to leave a credit card trail and, also, she wasn’t sure her credit card would go through. The USMS database wasn’t an option because it was a violation of policy—and federal law—to run background checks on people without legitimate investigative authority.
Which meant Andrea’s internet sleuthing had hit a post-wiki dead end. The death of Emily Vaughn had left almost no digital footprint. In the multiple opinion pieces that Esther Vaughn had penned over the years, there were no details beyond her “tragic personal loss” that she twisted to justify exactly the kinds of things about criminal justice that you would expect a Reagan appointee to justify. As for the judge’s husband, Andrea had found a press release dated one year ago from Loyola University, Maryland, a private Jesuit liberal arts school, announcing that Dr. Franklin Vaughn was retiring as professor emeritus from the Sellinger School of Business Management in order to spend more time with his family.
Likewise, details about said family were not provided.
Also likewise, Dr. Vaughn’s many pontifications on economics and social justice seemed light on solutions that did not involve the yanking up of your own bootstraps, never mind whether or not you could afford to buy boots in the first place.
Most jarringly, the internet didn’t seem to know the name of Emily’s daughter.
Andrea was unsure how much to read into this omission. There were a handful of explanations for the woman’s lack of an internet footprint. She was an elder millennial, seven years Andrea’s senior, so social media was probably not her natural habitat. It was easy to keep your name offline if you stayed offline, and Facebook sucked as much as Instagram as much as TikTok as much as Twitter. Or Emily’s daughter could’ve legally changed her name or taken a spouse’s last name or cut off contact with her grandparents or, more likely, she stayed away because her mother had been brutally murdered, probably by her megalomaniacal father, and her grandmother was a federal judge and as bad as people were forty years ago, they were absolute monsters now that they had the internet.
So all Andrea could do was wonder. Was Emily’s daughter still in Longbill Beach or had she gotten out? Was she divorced? Jasper had said that she had a child of her own, a teenage girl who was a handful, but was she close to her grandparents? Had she been told the truth about Emily’s death? What did she do for a living? What did she look like? Did she have Nick Harp’s icy blue eyes, sharp cheekbones and slightly cleft chin, or her mother’s more rounded, heart-shaped face?
Andrea’s hand went to her own face. She had none of Jasper and Laura’s patrician features, though Jasper was probably right about Andrea’s aspect reminding him of Laura’s. Her eyes were a light brown, not icy blue. Her face was narrow, though not triangular, with an almost imperceptible cleft at the chin that she assumed came from her father. Her nose was a genetic mystery—turned up at the tip like Piglet smelling a tulip.
She clipped Emily’s photo back on the first page. She thumbed through the reports, though she had read them all countless times at the airport gate, on the plane, in the back of taxis, in her motel, on the train. Smudged fingerprints offered evidence of the orange peanut butter crackers she’d snarfed down for breakfast.
Andrea should be better at this.
All prospective agents at the Glynco FLETC went through criminal investigation school for an intensive, mind-bending ten weeks. Andrea had sat alongside an alphabet of future federal law enforcement as they were drilled in the finer arts of investigation—DEA, ATF, IRS, CBP, HHS. And then the wannabe Marshals had peeled off for ten more weeks of specialized instruction alongside the Sisyphean physical requirements that set the service apart.
The instructors had created intricately detailed dummy cases—a fugitive on the run, a child kidnapping, a series of escalating threats to a supreme court justice. Andrea’s team had combed through faked CCTV from businesses and ATM machines and residential doorbells. They had gone online and pulled up building plans and maps, then run credit checks and public records searches looking for family members, friends and acquaintances with varying degrees of separation. There were social media accounts to scan, license plate readers to ping, photographs to run through facial recognition, cell phone carriers to subpoena, emails and texts to read.
In 1982, there was only your mouth and ears. You asked questions. You got answers. You put them all together and you tried to get to a resolution.
Andrea wouldn’t say the Longbill police chief had done a stellar job, especially considering the killer had never been charged, but he’d put in the yeoman’s work. There were line drawings with measurements of the Dumpster behind Skeeter’s Grill where Emily had been found. A rough stick figure with ‘X’s documented the violence on her body. The alley where blood consistent with Emily’s type was located had been measured off and processed for trace evidence. A possible murder weapon—a piece of wood from a splintered shipping pallet in the alleyway—was found discarded along the main road. A clump of black threads was found on the pallet back in the alley, but was returned by the FBI as too common to be conclusive. From the multiple witness statements alone, Andrea was able to generate a timeline that traced the last steps Emily Vaughn had taken before her life was cut short.
The most poignant part, the part Andrea couldn’t get past, was a word that normally would’ve been deleted on a computer screen, a ghost lost to technology.
Andrea had found the word in the handwritten transcript of a 911 call that was generated when a kitchen worker at the fast-food restaurant had lifted the lid of the Dumpster and found the naked, very pregnant body of Emily Vaughn laid across broken bags of garbage. The operator’s handwriting was shaky, probably because the Longbill Beach police mostly dealt with complaints about unruly tourists and aggressive seagulls. The first line probably encapsulated the first thing the caller had said.
Body of a woman found in trash behind Skeeter’s Grill.