“I don’t understand.”
“Neither do I, but I’m heading out there. Got the place cordoned off. Kayan and Watershed are already on the scene.”
“She’s an experienced driver,” Pescoli said, thinking aloud. “Even if she slid off the road, why wouldn’t she call in?”
“Exactly.” His gaze collided with hers and she saw the worry in his eyes, the muscle working near his temple.
“You think there’s foul play?”
“Don’t know.” His lips became thin as razors. “But I aim to find out.”
“I’ll drive up there.”
“Somebody better call Alvarez, since she’s involved in this. Helena PD is already hunting down the parents.”
“I’ve already left her a message and a text, neither of which she answered,” Pescoli said, “but I’ll get hold of her.”
“I’m on my way to the scene now,” he said, whistling to his dog. “I don’t like this. At all.”
“Neither do I.” She grabbed her sidearm and was reaching for her jacket when her phone jangled. She didn’t recognize the number on caller ID and it didn’t identify who was on the other end of the phone. She nearly didn’t answer because there was a chance that her ex had passed out her private cell number again.
“Pescoli,” she answered, reminding herself that it had turned out to be a good thing that Carl Anderson had called and alerted the department to the fact that Johnna Phillips had gone missing.
“Dylan O’Keefe. I’m looking for Detective Alvarez.”
“I thought she was with you. She left the station, what?” Pescoli glanced at the clock. “Twenty, maybe thirty minutes ago.”
“That fits,” he said, then told her about spying Alvarez drive into the lot and out. “I thought maybe she got called away, but I can’t get hold of her. She’s not answering her phone.”
“I know,” Pescoli said, and the worry that had been with her intensified. “Did you try the house?”
“There’s no electricity there; at least, there wasn’t earlier and I can’t get hold of the maintenance guy that Alvarez uses, don’t
know his number, not that it would help. The complex is out.”
Something clicked in Pescoli’s brain. “Her maintenance guy? You remember his name?”
“Jon something ... I think.”
That was right. She’d mentioned him to Pescoli before. “Jon Oestergard?”
“I don’t think I ever heard his last name.”
But Pescoli had.
“I’ll call you if I hear from her,” she said, then hung up.
She fell into her desk chair and clicked through some pages until she found the file of parishioners for the Presbyterian church. There, right in the middle of the telephone and prayer directory, were Jon and Dorie Oestergard.
And there was a note that Jon was the builder of the new church ... This couldn’t be ... Or could it? She pulled up Oestergard’s driver’s license and searched for other pictures of him, all of which showed him wearing shaded glasses.
Could it be?
She did a quick history, looking for priors, and in recent years he’d kept his nose clean, but there was an incident, years ago, a woman who’d been caring for him, an aunt, who had died from knife wounds, the result of an attack by “a group of men in ski masks,” according to her young charge ... Jon Oestergard, who had sustained his share of injuries at the time.
Could he have been so traumatized from the event to have turned into a killer?
Or could he have killed his aunt himself and no one believed a fourteen-year-old boy capable of such a hideous crime? A crime that had cost him part of the vision in his right eye. “God all mighty,” she whispered. The man was married. No children. Had worked different jobs and inherited a farm, learned to build from his grandfather, or so she gleaned from a few articles about him that had been written as the builder for the new church was being decided upon.