Free Dead on Ice by Lauren Carr

disappearance.”
    “I’m retired.” Harry said.
    “You were the first lead investigator in the case,” Joshua said. “You were there at the beginning. That makes this case your baby.”
    “Don’t tell me that baby doesn’t wake you up at night,” she added. “Disappearance of a young girl in her prime. Years later, she’s found dumped in the river.”
    A slow grin crossed his tanned face. “Follow me.”
    He led them through the house’s back door into a country kitchen where his wife was baking cookies from scratch. He offered them both seats at the table, in the middle of which he had a case file tied together with a string.
    “Angie Sullivan was only eighteen years old,” Harry told them. “She had graduated from South Side High school in Hookstown a couple of weeks before she disappeared, June 3, 1978.”
    “1978?” Cameron stared at the picture resting on top of the police reports in the case file. It was Angie Sullivan’s senior class picture. With her long silky, strawberry-blond hair and blue eyes, she looked like every mother’s ideal for a daughter. Wholesome and sweet.
    Too sweet to die so young.
    “Angie disappeared hours after being in a fight with Cheryl Smith, and Cheryl’s last words to her were that she wasn’t through with her yet. The prosecutor tried to keep her in the area, but her scumbag lawyer got the judge to say she could go.”
    “That scumbag was my cousin,” Joshua said.
    Harry apologized. “But you have to understand where I’m coming from.”
    “I understand,” Joshua said. “But with no direct evidence to prove she had anything to do with Angie’s disappearance—”
    “She was threatening the victim only hours before her disappearance.”
    “That’s circumstantial,” the lawyer argued. “Truth is you had nothing, and you can’t indefinitely confine a suspect to a town without any real evidence to prove they had anything to do with it. It’s been over forty years since Angie Sullivan disappeared and the case is still open. What was Cheryl Smith supposed to do? Put her whole life on hold until you find enough evidence to either arrest her or clear her? That’s unfair persecution without—”
    Not wanting to waste their time in a debate about law and order, Cameron interjected, “The fact is that after going off to Hollywood to make it big in porn, your prime suspect came back here and ended up dead in a freezer.”
    “Porn star?” Harry asked.
    Joshua said, “Cheryl Smith ended up going to Hollywood, changing her name, and becoming a star in porn movies.”
    “Sounds like Cheryl Smith,” the retired detective said.
    Cameron said, “According to the ME’s report, she had breast implants and a nose job. Between that and her name change, she was able to keep off the radar in this investigation.”
    Harry’s wife didn’t have to offer twice when she set a plate of warm chocolate chip cookies in the center of the table for them to eat.
    “You’re right,” Harry grumbled to Joshua. “We had nothing. Cheryl had a dozen witnesses saying that they were drinking and partying at the First Street Chester Bridge overlook until way into the middle of the night. She even had a boy saying that they were having intercourse in the back of his van.”
    She asked, “First Street? In Chester?”
    Joshua spoke around a bite of a cookie. “The police are chasing kids out of there all the time. They’ve torn apart the monument and destroyed it with graffiti.”
    She was doubtful. “I imagine all of these witnesses that vouched for Cheryl were boy scouts.”
    “You know how it is,” Harry told her. “Since we couldn’t disprove their alibis, and with no evidence that anything had happened to Angie, we couldn’t keep her. The prosecutor tried, but Gordon fought for them to let her go. Less than two weeks after Angie Sullivan disappeared, Cheryl Smith was gone. The case went cold until the drought in 1984 made the water level in the river drop to show her car