Chapter 5

LEAVENWORTH, KANSAS

Poppy arrives home from Day One of her new job around 10:00 p.m. She’s tired, hungry. She spent the last twelve hours at Suncatcher Lake, helping set up tall screens shielding the area from news and iPhone cameras as the submerged car was pulled from the water by a tow truck. Poppy’s feet are wet from slogging around the vehicle, hanging a tarp over it to ensure no one could see what was inside. She didn’t want to look herself but couldn’t miss the grisly tableau: the remains of two people—by their clothes, they appear to both be male—in the front seat. She couldn’t see in the back, but Cold Case Company’s third YouTube video—the company doled them out one by one to build suspense—reported finding a woman’s handbag. But no Alison Lane.

Despite his professed concern for the families, the bearded guy posted the video before anyone could locate Alison’s father. According to the town rumor mill, the father had been devastated by her disappearance and dropped out of public life shortly after she was taken.

Poppy looks in the refrigerator, sighs. She retrieves a meal from the freezer and pulls it from the cardboard sleeve, punctures the plastic with a fork, and tosses it in the microwave.

She hears the television and heads into the living room. Her father has fallen asleep in his frayed lounge chair, fast-food wrappers on the TV tray in front of him. That’s what she gets for asking Dash to handle dinner duty. She clicks off ESPN and helps Dad up. He’s half-asleep as he zombie-walks to his bedroom.

Back in the kitchen, she eats the rubbery fettuccine Alfredo, then heads to her room. It’s been an eventful first day. Better than boring, she supposes. She takes off her uniform. Her socks smell like the lake. She thinks again about the human remains strapped into the front of the BMW.

Who were the two men? One set of bones wore a business suit, the other a leather jacket. Did they abduct Alison? Were they working with the Missouri River Killer? Or did they end up with Alison’s car—and dead in it—for some other reason? And where is Alison?

Alison was in the same class as Dash, two years ahead of Poppy. Leavenworth High cut across all socioeconomic divides. The town, known mostly for its notorious federal prison, definitely has two sides of the tracks. Alison lived on the side with large houses and luxury sedans. Poppy didn’t exactly inhabit the other side, though. Her family straddled the middle. Dad made a solid living as a corrections officer at the penitentiary. Dash and Poppy never wanted for anything. She remembers Alison being one of the popular kids. Pretty and smart and from means. But she wasn’t like the other girls who cultivated fake glamorous lives on social media. She had a down-to-earth quality.

Did Alison know the men in the car? If so, how? Poppy tries to remember Alison’s friends from school. Alison spent most of her time with Ryan Richardson. Whatever happened to that guy? Dash should know, they played on the same team. Both stars: Dash and Dodge. It was only five years ago but feels like longer.

Poppy remembers that shortly before Alison’s abduction, a video of her went viral. Poppy reaches for her laptop on the nightstand. She flips it open and googles Alison’s name. The first ten results all reference the Missouri River Killer: MRK’s Victims—Where Are the Bodies? Was This MRK’s First Victim? All the Missing Girls.

She filters the search for images. The top hits are all the same grainy photo of Alison, a screen-grab from the viral video. Poppy finds the recording and clicks PLAY.

It’s a jostling phone video. Poppy recognizes the setting: the patch of grass adjacent to the high school’s main building. There’s a large group of kids formed in a loose circle. The person taking the video pushes through the crowd. At the center of the circle are three kids—one of them a foot shorter than the others. The larger boys are playing keep-away with the smaller kid’s backpack, throwing it over his head to each other. Poppy’s mind returns to high school—what were the bigger kids’ names? They were brothers, menaces, she remembers. Ben and Zach Something.

In the video, they’re taunting the smaller kid, with a growing crowd of classmates surrounding them.

At last, the smaller kid—what was his name?—shoves Zach. Poppy watched this video several times back in the day but never closely examined it. Now she focuses on the smaller boy’s face. His expression is part terror, part I’ve had enough. This wasn’t the first time Ben and Zach messed with him. What bravery it took for the small boy to fight back… Poppy flashes to her CO’s face when she punched him square in the nose after the months of inappropriate comments, unwanted advances, and the last straw when he grabbed her ass. The Army gave her an honorable discharge, if only to avoid the inquiry about the harassment. But it was devastating.

The video is approaching the part that went viral. Zach clearly doesn’t like being pushed. He shoves the smaller boy hard, and the kid stumbles into Ben. They heave the kid back and forth until he hits the ground hard.

Ben kicks him and he’s crying and it’s heartbreaking. Then from off-screen, a voice: “What’s—? Why isn’t anyone—?”

A streak of dark hair pushes through the crowd. The girl’s back is to the camera, but you can see her confronting Ben and Zach. In response, Ben dumps the smaller kid’s backpack on the grass. He and his brother laugh.

The crowd is buzzing, excited at the drama unfolding.

And then Alison Lane, the pretty, somewhat petitely elegant girl, proceeds to beat the shit out of Ben and Zach. It starts with a knife hand to Ben’s throat, which immediately disables him. Then a knee to Zach’s groin, followed by a hard stomp to his foot.

She then helps the smaller boy off the ground while some of the other kids—finding their courage from hers—gather his belongings and put them back in his bag. There’s no applause, like there would be in the movies. But the scene is as heroic as anything Poppy has ever witnessed. Through the entire episode, Alison’s face is shown clearly in only one frame, where she’s helping the boy through the crowd and she smacks the cell phone out of the hand of whoever’s been filming.

Poppy stops the video. She never appreciated Alison Lane, really. Until she was abducted, the video served mostly as entertainment. There was something exhilarating about watching a young woman kick some bully ass. But now Poppy sees that there was more to Alison than a pretty face and popularity.

The thought is interrupted by the sound of movement. She swings her legs off the bed to go check on her father. In the hallway, she realizes the noise isn’t coming from her dad’s bedroom. It’s from Dash’s old room. The one their father turned into a storage closet after Dash moved out. The light is on.

She peeks in the crack and Dash is sitting at his old desk, which is cluttered with her father’s junk. He’s rummaging through a shoebox.

“I didn’t know you were home,” she says.

He startles, doesn’t turn around right away. He’s wiping his face with his shirt.

“Shit, you scared me,” he says, finally. When he turns around, she notices his eyes are red, like he’s been crying.

“Everything okay?” she asks.

Dash has bouts of depression, but she thought his mental health had improved. That’s what her father told her, anyway.

“I’m fine,” he says, too cheerful. “I was trying to find some old pictures. A group is getting together for our five-year reunion.”

“Already living for your glory days only five years out,” she teases playfully. She spies into the box, and it appears to be full of old photos and other mementos.

Dash shakes his head and puts the lid back on the Air Jordans box, tucks it on the shelf.

“You gonna ride the sidecar to the reunion?” Poppy says, eyeing his old helmet. Dash and Dad restored one of those weird motorcycles that has a one-wheeled device attached to the side. Poppy rode in the contraption once, and it was enough.

“Hey, that thing was sweet.”

“If you say so.”

“How was your first day?” he asks, standing, shepherding her out of the bedroom.

“You heard about Alison Lane’s car?”

“Yeah. My phone blew up today. It’s crazy. Who are the dead guys in the car?”

Poppy shouldn’t be surprised that everyone’s talking about it. News travels fast in a small town. And Ryan and Ali were royalty in Dash’s graduating class, literally, homecoming king and queen, though by the time Poppy graduated they’d changed the name to homecoming “royalty” in an effort to be more inclusive. The five-year reunion will be abuzz.

“I can’t talk about an active investigation.”

“Oh, ‘you can’t talk about an active investigation,’” Dash says in a mocking cop voice.

Poppy sighs. “We have no clue who they are.”