Page 49 of Blood Moon

He propped his elbow on the edge of his desk and cupped his hand over his mouth. He stared at the words on his monitor, which he didn’t remember typing and could make no sense of now. He watched the cursor blink.

But his focus on it didn’t prevent him from hearing Beth’s impassioned voice.“… the individual who took Crissy… still out there… waiting for Thursday night…”

“Shhhhhit!”

Before he could talk himself out of it, he discreetly reached beneath his desk and into his boot, where he’d had a thin pocket sewn into the shaft. He slid a thumb drive from it.

After Barker was appointed head of the CAP unit, John had surreptitiously transferred the entire Mellin case file onto two thumb drives. He kept one in his boot. In the event that a cold case investigation into Mellin ever ensued and, coincidentally, John and the file were to suddenly disappear from the department, Mitch had the second thumb drive.

He inserted his into a port and began searching for a name and a telephone number in Galveston. It took him a frustrating twenty minutes to find that information; then he placed the call from one of his burner phones.

“Detective Morris, please,” he said to the person who answered. When asked to identify himself, he did. “I’m working a case here, and I believe Morris might be able to provide me with some background on a suspect.” He was asked to hold.

Moments later, a female voice said, “Gayle Morris.”

As John introduced himself, he realized that his palmswere damp, his mouth dry. “I’m calling about a missing person case you had in May of 2022. Larissa Whitmore.”

He heard her sigh. “You don’t forget those.”

“No, you don’t. Were her remains ever recovered?”

“Negative. Not a trace.”

“What’s Patrick Dobbs’s status?”

“He was convicted of statutory rape, now serving his sentence. He’s filed an appeal.”

“On what grounds?”

“He claims that the whole time he and Larissa were together, she used a fake ID that put her age at twenty-one. It fooled bartenders as well as him. He didn’t know she was a minor.”

“That argument didn’t come out at his trial?”

“It did, and it was supported by several witnesses. But the prosecutor shot it down. He and Larissa were stoned, all over each other, sex was a sure thing. Therefore, the prosecutor argued, it would have been in the accused’s best interestnotto question her age. The jury thought so, too.”

John fiddled with a stray paperclip as he pondered the blowback that might come from taking this conversation further. To hell with it. “Detective, please don’t think I’m a loony tune.”

She chuckled. “Can’t promise.”

John liked her. “Did you or anyone working on that case consider a tie-in with the blood moon that night?”

“Of course. Dobbs took Larissa out in his boat to look at it.”

“We had a young woman over here named Crissy Mellin. She disappeared on the night of the next blood moon, which was in November.”

“Yes, I know. When we learned about it, I assigned somebody to see if there was any correlation between your case and Larissa Whitmore, and also to two previous cases.”

“In 2018? Jackson, Mississippi, and Shreveport?”

“Yes. But nothing came of our inquiries. Dobbs wasn’t near either of those cities on the nights of the 2018 abductions. In fact, when one of them occurred, he was in Croatia on a humanitarian mission, teaching English to schoolkids.”

“So you never found any link?”

“None. What about your case? If I recall, your suspect hanged himself while in custody.”

“That’s right. Billy Oliver.”

“Didn’t he confess?”