Page 29 of Blood Moon

Beth picked up there. “Dobbs came from a venerable Galveston family with money and privilege. Larissa’s parents typified him as a spoiled rich kid with a sense of entitlement. They were convinced that Larissa had denied him a sexual favor, that he threw a tantrum, turned violent, and their daughter ended up in the Gulf.”

“That’s what they alleged,” John said, “but there was no forensic evidence to support any allegation of violence. Dobbs didn’t have a scratch or bruise on him. The boat was a mess, but it looked like the scene of an orgy, not an assault or homicide. There were used condoms to support his claims that he’d practiced safe sex.”

“With an underage girl.”

“Yeah. That definitely didn’t help him. While the search was still on for her body, he was held on charges of kidnapping, statutory rape, and a laundry list of other crimes associated with her being a minor.”

“Her body was never found.”

“No. They searched the Gulf for weeks. If there’s an update on that, I haven’t heard about it. Anyway, as it related to the Mellin case, Dobbs was ruled out. He’d been denied bail and was in jail when Crissy Mellin went missing. No connection whatsoever between that case and ours.”

Beth appeared to stop breathing for a moment, then said quietly, “Except that on the night of May fifteenth and sixteenth when Larissa Whitmore went missing, there was a blood moon.”

It took every ounce of willpower John possessed not torecoil. That single tidbit of information had the effect of a wrecking ball. It hit him much harder than Mitch’s slug had yesterday. He’d been braced for that retaliating punch. He hadn’t been prepared for this at all.

Beth was watching him closely with an earnest, almost sympathetic expression, while he was trying his damnedest not to give her any indication of the tumult going on inside him.

Speaking softly, she said, “Earlier, when we were discussing the two blood moons that had occurred in 2022, it didn’t ring a bell that the first one was in May, coinciding with the Whitmore girl’s disappearance?”

“I, uh… I remembered that she’d been abducted sometime that spring. I had no cause to remember the exact date. So, no. It didn’t ring a bell.”

She inched forward in her chair until she was virtually perched on the edge of the seat. “In the article I read about Larissa’s disappearance, it was speculated that the eclipse was one of the lures Dobbs used to get her to go out on the water with him.

“The article writer digressed to explain to his readers what a blood moon was and, as a footnote, said that the next one would occur over the seventh and eighth of November. When I read that, a chill went down my spine, because I knew from working on the Mellin episode that that was the night Crissy had disappeared. That’s when my obsession began, John.

“My immediate thought was in regards to the show.Why hadn’t we mentioned the blood moon in our episode? It would have had terrific production value. We could have edited in graphics that would have made great visuals, set the mood, added drama and eeriness.

“Then I realized that we hadn’t included it because no one involved had ever referred to the moon on that night, not in any of the interviews, nowhere. If someone had, I wouldn’t have missed it.”

“Wasn’t Crissy’s fate eerie enough for production value without the goddamn moon?”

She was about to speak, but his testiness must have changed her mind. She let the conversation die there and reached down to scratch Mutt beneath his chin. After a few seconds of that, he rolled onto his back. She scratched his belly. His dog had become completely addlepated over her.

He said, “Thanks a lot.”

She looked over at him. “For what?”

“From now on, he’s going to expect me to do that.”

She smiled, gave Mutt one last pat, then sat up straight. After a hesitation, she asked, “What do you think?”

“I think I’ll never start scratching his belly.”

She frowned. “You know what I meant.”

He sighed. “I know what you meant, but there’s no correlation there, Beth. Dobbs couldn’t have taken Crissy. The moon thing is a bizarre coincidence.”

She looked at him with annoyance. “When you’re investigating a crime, and you come across a link to a similar crime, no matter how bizarre that link seems, don’t tell me that you dismiss it out of hand as a coincidence. I know you don’t.”

“Okay, no, I don’t. So let’s say the orange moon was a lure, that Larissa and Dobbs screwed beneath it on the deck of his boat. But bloody or otherwise, the moon had nothing to do with Crissy’s disappearance.”

“How do you know?” she said in a raised voice. “Youdidn’t even realize there had been a blood moon. You told me that no one was paying attention to it, that no one could even see it. You said—”

“I know what I fucking said!”

Then he drew a breath and tried to stop the rapid unraveling of his conviction that she was wrong. He wanted desperately for her to be wrong. Even as he tried to convince himself, he tried to convince her.

“Look, Beth, you work for a TV show that’s all about drama. You look for elements in a story that have production value. You make edits that add oomph. It’s what you do, and obviously you’re good at it. But now you’ve cooked up this… this…” Failing to find the word he sought, he raked his fingers through his hair. “Shit!”