Free Murder Mountain by Stacy Dittrich Page A

walk up to the gas station to get cigarettes.
    “She has a car. Was it unusual for her to walk up there?”
    “No, she sometimes does on nice nights. She walked out the door, said she’d be back shortly, and that was the last time I saw her.”
    “Do you remember approximately what time the phone rang? Do you have caller ID?”
    He said no to the caller ID, and that he thought the call came in at about 10:30 that night. I asked Larry who his phone company was and then jotted a reminder in my notebook to subpoena the phone records of incoming calls.
    I grabbed my bag and headed for the door, “Mr. Johnston, I need to take Lizzie’s car so it can be processed by the crime lab. I’m going to call a tow truck right now, if that’s okay.”
    “That’s fine. I wondered if anyone was gonna do that.”
    “I wasn’t aware until today that her car was here. I’m just going to briefly look through it first to see if there’s anything crucial in it. I’ll be out here for a little bit, and don’t worry, like I said before, I will find out what happened. I’ll be in touch with you as much as I can.” I headed for the door.
    Following me out the door, Larry thanked me and told me the car was unlocked. I radioed dispatch and told them to start a tow truck going from the Johnston house to the crime lab.
    As soon as I opened the door to Lizzie’s car, I almost gagged. The smell of dirty clothes and rotten food hit me right in the face. I told Larry my search of Lizzie’s vehicle would be brief, but when I said that I didn’t realize how brief it would be. I backed off, took a deep breath of fresh air and dove in, holding my breath, and quickly scanned the contents of the car.
    I immediately saw a massive amount of gas receipts stuffed in the console between the driver and passenger seat; there had to be at least fifty. I grabbed two handfuls of the receipts and carried them back to my car, along with an empty cigarette pack. I wanted to remember Lizzie’s brand in case it became useful later. I placed the receipts and the empty pack in an evidence bag, unsealed; I wouldn’t submit them until after I’d looked at each one.
    I went back to the car, sucked in my air supply, and started looking again. For what, I didn’t know. I knew I wasn’t looking in the trunk for the hidden compartment; I wanted the lab to process that for any chemical traces or prints. It was a stretch, but unless the propane tank had a slight leak, chances are there wouldn’t be anything.
    Then, I saw a map of West Virginia, haggard and crumpled, lying on the passenger seat floorboard. I grabbed that on instinct, thinking it might come in handy down the road. I couldn’t see anything else worth a shit, so I backed out of the car and stood up, closing the door. I turned around to walk to my car and ran right into Larry, who obviously had been standing right behind me. I let out a quiet yelp.
    “I’m sorry,” he said quickly. “I didn’t mean to scare you. I was just wonderin’ if you found anything in there.”
    “That’s okay. I’m fine,” I assured him, a little rattled
    I told him about the receipts, but that was all.
    “You think she’s dead, don’t you?” he asked, catching me off guard with the question.
    I hate it when people asked me questions like that, as if my opinion is the gospel truth. I admit that my opinions are usually pretty accurate, but I hate to tell someone what I think before I know for sure. At this point, I was pretty confident that Lizzie Johnston was dead, but I couldn’t bring myself to say that to Larry.
    “No, Larry, I don’t think anything right now because I just don’t know,” was what I came up with.
    He didn’t say anything else. He just turned around and went back in the house.
    This is the point where it gets hard to work cases like this one, the point when the emotions start getting involved. I felt Larry’s pain, not to the extent he did, of course, but I deeply sympathized with what he