The Prettiest One: A Thriller (22 page)

All of which, for the moment, left Hunnsaker with the results of the tip hotline. She scanned the blue- and yellow-highlighted text on her copy of the report. It looked like they’d be visiting three apartment buildings, a pharmacy, a local gym, a hospital, and—after they opened—five eating establishments and six bars or nightclubs. If they won the lottery today, someone at one of these places would turn out
not
to be a crackpot and would actually have useful information about their victim or the redhead. As frustrated as Hunnsaker was becoming, as much as she disliked having to rely for the moment on tips—most of them anonymous—she couldn’t help but feel uncharacteristically optimistic that one of these leads would pan out. And if none did, more tips would trickle in throughout the day. Someone out there knew what Hunnsaker needed to know. All she had to do was find that person. And she would. Because Vic Warehouse’s refusal to be identified was starting to make her angry. And she was even more pissed off at the redhead, who also refused to be identified but who didn’t have the excuse of being dead. Without realizing that she had moved her eyes from the report, Hunnsaker found herself looking at the sketch on her desk of the mystery redhead.

“I’ll give it five hours,” she said quietly to the computer drawing, “ten at the most, before you and I are face-to-face. And if you saw who shot my buddy Vic, you’re gonna tell me who it was. And if it was you, you’re gonna tell me that, too. I promise you.”

“Who the hell are you talking to?” Padilla called to her.

“The redhead.”

After a moment, Padilla said, “You’re crazy.”

“Look at that sewage you’re drinking,” Hunnsaker said, “and you call
me
crazy?”

“Fair enough. I’m almost ready to go.”

“I need ten minutes. Then we hit the streets, find out who the hell Vic is, and locate our pretty friend here.”

“Sounds like a solid plan.”

“I spent all morning working it out.”

Despite the lightness of their banter, she intended to implement that plan and see it succeed. She was going to keep her promise to their mystery redhead.

“Okay, I think I have something here,” Josh said.

He looked down at the news article open on the Internet browser of his tablet. He had already read it through three times, then searched with marginal success for more like it. He found only two related articles. The first, more than two decades old and only a column long, was from the online archives of the
Smithfield Beacon
, a midsize newspaper that was much smaller than the
Globe
or the
Boston Herald
.

“You going to fill in the rest of us,” Bix asked, “or are you just gonna keep reading it to yourself over and over?”

Bix was behind the wheel, and they had been driving aimlessly through town while Josh had done a little Internet research from his usual place in the backseat. They hadn’t decided where to go next, but they hadn’t wanted to remain parked in front of Commando’s in case Martha was less than true to her word and called the cops the second the three of them walked out of the place.

“Sorry,” Josh said. “Just wanted to be sure.” He looked at Bix. “It started with Caitlin’s name in Martha’s notebook at the pub. Her list of employees.”

Caitlin stepped in. “At first, I was just looking for Jane Stillwood’s name and number, but when I skimmed the other names, I saw my own, which had been crossed out. But it wasn’t really my own. It was close, but not quite right.”

“Meaning?” Bix said.

“Meaning it was spelled wrong. My first name was spelled right, or at least it was spelled the way I spelled it when I was going by Katherine, but my last name wasn’t listed as Southard. It was Southern.”

“So?” Bix said. “Martha probably wrote it down wrong. I’m guessing there are all sorts of errors in her books, both intentional and unintentional.”

Caitlin shook her head. “No, the handwriting was mine. All the names and numbers were in different handwriting. I guess Martha had people write their own contact information in the book.”

Bix looked confused again. “Why would you spell your own name wrong?”

“Because it’s not her real name, remember?” Josh asked.

“We’re hoping it means something,” Caitlin said.

“And I think it does,” Josh said. “Are you ready, hon?”

She frowned. “Why wouldn’t I be ready?”

“It . . . it’s not very pleasant.”

After a moment, she nodded.

He took a breath and began. “Okay, so I had already searched the Internet for Katherine Southard, the name Caitlin was using around here, the one on her car registration and fake driver’s license. I had started by focusing my search on this town, then broadened it to include all of Massachusetts, and finally the Northeast. I got nothing that seemed to work. Next I tried changing the spelling of ‘Katherine,’ using every possible spelling I could think of. I even shortened it to Kathy with a
K
, Cathy with a
C
, and Katie. Still nothing. But after seeing the name in Martha’s address book, I tried the same geographical searches with the name Katherine
Southern
. Again, I started locally and then widened my search.”

“And?” Caitlin said.

“And still nothing.”

“Impressive,” Bix said. “You’re definitely onto something, Sherlock.”

Josh ignored that and continued. “But then I tried the same alternate spellings of Katherine but with the last name Southern. And that’s how I found it.”

“Found what?” Caitlin asked.

“Using the name Kathryn Southern,” he said, spelling the first name for them, “and combining it with ‘Massachusetts,’ I found an online article from the
Boston Beacon
from twenty-two years ago. About a suspected pedophile who lived two towns over. It’s also about two little girls—one missing and one . . . ‘damaged from the experience’ is how they say it in the article.”

Josh watched Caitlin carefully to see how she was handling this. “Let me guess,” she said. “Kathryn Southern is one of those little girls.”

Josh nodded. “The missing one.”

“So was that you, then?” Bix asked. “The missing girl? Kathryn Southern?”

“No,” Caitlin said. “That was never my name back then. The police and the media wouldn’t have called me that.”

“So why did you take that name now?”

Caitlin shook her head. “I have no idea, but there’s just no reason for me to have been identified by that name, especially not by the authorities who presumably would check their facts before releasing the name of a missing girl.” She turned to Josh. “What’s the name of the . . . what did you call her? The ‘damaged’ little girl?”

“The article doesn’t say. I guess because she survived her ordeal, they kept her name out of the papers to protect her identity.”

“Am I mentioned in the article?”

“Not by name, no.”

Caitlin was quiet a moment. “So, theoretically, that abused girl could be me?”

“Well . . .” Josh began, “theoretically, I suppose.”

Caitlin nodded. “Did they ever find the girl who was missing?”

Josh had read two more articles that appeared over the two years following the suspect’s arrest, the only related articles he could find. One was about the suspect’s conviction, and one was about his sentencing. Josh shook his head. “She hadn’t been found by the time the pedophile was convicted a year and a half later. I Googled her and didn’t find anything saying she’d ever turned up, either alive or . . . not. It doesn’t mean she never did, of course, just that I didn’t find it on the Internet.”

“Do you remember anything like that happening when you were a kid, Katie?” Bix asked.

Bix hadn’t spoken for so long that, for a few moments, Josh had been able to forget that he was even there. Unfortunately, those moments were over.

Caitlin shook her head. “No, nothing like that at all.”

“So maybe this story has nothing to do with you,” Bix said.

“Well . . .” Josh began, but he didn’t need to continue because Caitlin stepped in.

“Maybe I just forgot, Bix,” she said. “It certainly wouldn’t be out of the question for me, as we all know. Think about it. Why else would I be here? If I wasn’t involved in any of that, why would I just happen to take on the name of a little girl who went missing all those years ago? Why would I travel from New Hampshire all the way to Massachusetts, to this particular area? That crime took place two decades ago. I was five years old at the time. How would I have known about any of this?”

Bix shrugged. “Maybe you heard your parents talking about it as a kid, back when it happened.”

Caitlin shook her head. “I doubt it. I’m not sure exactly where I was at the time, what home I was in.” Bix looked confused. “I was raised in foster homes, Bix. I never knew my biological parents. I’d had two homes by the time I was five or so, then my next foster parents formally adopted me. But I don’t remember any of the people I lived with talking about this crime.”

“I didn’t find many articles on it, Bix,” Josh said. “Just a few. It doesn’t seem to have been a big story back then, so I’m not sure how likely it is that many people were talking about it at the time.”

“But if Katie’s the other girl in that story,” Bix said, “the one who . . . didn’t go missing, wouldn’t she remember something about it? I mean, I have memories from when I was five.”

“I’m not sure,” Josh said. He wanted to be delicate here for Caitlin’s sake. “If people go through traumatic things, they can block them out. You hear about kids blocking out stuff like that all the time. And remember why we’re here in the first place right now.”

“My memory loss,” Caitlin said. “My ‘dissociative fugue,’ which Josh’s research says can be triggered by traumatic events.”

Bix said nothing more for the moment, for which Josh was grateful. Caitlin fell silent, too. Josh kept his eyes on her. She seemed to be thinking hard. To Josh’s relief, though—and to Caitlin’s credit—she didn’t seem to be allowing herself to become overly upset about all of this. Rather, she seemed merely to be processing what she had heard so far and trying hard to remember if she’d ever experienced anything like what Josh had described. She was tougher than he’d thought, he realized.

“So,” she finally said, “you find out anything else?”

Approximately thirty-four thousand feet above Utah—or maybe they were still over Nevada—Chops was unhappy. He hated flying. It wasn’t that he was frightened to do it; he just hated everything about it, other than the obvious convenience of stepping into a huge machine in Los Angeles and, after mere hours in the air, stepping out again in Boston. Everything else, though, was lousy. At six-five, he could never get comfortable on an airplane. And because he’d bought his ticket just that morning, the only available seat on the entire plane was a center seat, where he struggled in vain to find a position that wasn’t torture—he had already lost the feeling in his legs twice, and they’d been in the air barely more than an hour.

And in that short time, he’d grown to despise the passenger to his left. She kept adjusting her seat belt and neck pillow, and taking things out of her carry-on bag. As soon as the plane’s wheels lifted off the runway, she’d slid a white paper bag from under the seat in front of her and pulled out a Styrofoam container that, when opened, released an overpowering miasma of odor of some unidentifiable pungent, spicy foreign dish. Chops didn’t know what it was but knew it wasn’t something he ever wanted to try himself, and he certainly didn’t want to sit next to it for the next half hour while this woman took annoying little bites and smacked her lips wetly after each one. And for the record, the guy in the aisle seat to Chops’s right wasn’t much better—already asleep with his head tipped back, his mouth open and snoring. Every little snuffle or grunt irritated Chops to the point that it felt like someone was sticking him in the neck with a pin every time he heard it. Chops elbowed the guy, who woke with a nasty look that disappeared as soon as he saw and remembered who was sitting beside him. Chops hoped the guy would think twice about falling asleep again on this flight.

Chops was cranky, and he still had at least five more hours in the air before he changed planes in Baltimore. He hoped he would make it that long without killing one of his fellow passengers. The guy on his right was already snoring again. The woman on his left sucked something off one of her fingers and took another bite of her aggressively foul-smelling food.